It starts with how you lead.
For CEOs and C-suite leaders whose teams are not moving together. Two diagnostics show you exactly where the gaps are. Then twelve weeks of supported action inside your own business, so the change is made by the time the cohort closes.
Eight minutes shows you the gap. A 30 minute call shows you the fit.
Research shows that 97% of leaders believe their strategy is clear. But dig a little deeper, and it turns out that only 28% of the people delivering it can name the top priorities, and the typical top team agrees on what they are in just 27% of cases.
The gap sits in what your organisation actually does day to day: the unwritten rules and daily habits nobody put in the deck. I call this dark matter, the invisible logic running underneath the visible plan.
Strategy sets the choices. Leadership, teamwork and culture do the work of turning those choices into coordinated effort. Brand is the evidence, the way the world sees whether it worked. Most CEOs have spent years mastering the first and last layers, and were never taught the three in the middle.
Fix the middle layers and strategy moves through the organisation without you repeating it in every meeting. Leave them alone and execution stalls, however good the plan is.
Source: Sull, Turconi, Sull and Yoder, "Turning Strategy into Results", MIT Sloan Management Review, 2017.
Decades of research has shown that alignment is measurable, and the gap between aligned and unaligned companies is wide.
Source: LSA Global, 3x Organizational Alignment research, 410 companies across eight industries.
The Aligned Leader is twelve weeks of doing. You open with two diagnostics that show exactly where you and your organisation stand. Each layer then pairs deep dives with actions you run inside your own business, that fortnight, while the work is live. By week twelve you have run a full quarter of alignment work, your team and organisation has felt it, and the closing assessment measures what moved.
Both run before the programme starts. Together they turn a vague sense that things are misaligned into a specific, measurable set of priorities for your quarter.
How you lead, seen from the outside. Structured feedback gathered from the people around you: your team, your peers, your board.
It surfaces the unwritten patterns in how you lead, and the gaps between how you see yourself and how others experience you. You debrief it in week one, privately and in the cohort.
You'll get a private one-to-one debrief with me to go through the results once they're in.
Where your organisation stands. A short survey your top team and wider organisation complete before week one, measuring alignment across the five layers: Strategy, Leadership, Teamwork, Culture and Brand.
It shows where the message thins out as it moves through the business, and which layer is costing you most. A free eight minute version is at areweonthesame.page.
The Alignment Assessment runs again at the close, so the change is measured, and you have the before and after to show your board.
"We’re now operating with greater unity, purpose, and collaboration. If you're looking to unlock the full potential of your leadership team, I can’t recommend James highly enough."
Steve Williamson, CEO, Global Inkjet Systems
"The strategy at the top was sound. What the CEO sensed, rightly, was that the strategy wasn't yet shared in a way that reached how people worked day to day. I tend to find this is the real work in a strong engineering business. The technical capability is rarely in doubt. The question is whether the whole leadership group is carrying the same picture of where the company is going and what that asks of each of them. That was the brief: take a clear strategic ambition and turn it into a shared, working understanding across the team."
READ THE FULL CASE STUDY →Twelve leaders per cohort, from different organisations of comparable scale, working through the same programme at the same time.
The programme opens with your two diagnostics, then moves through the five layers of On The Same Page, a fortnight each. Every fortnight pairs deep dives with actions you run inside your own business while the work is live. Week twelve reviews the quarter.
Debrief your Leadership 360 and your organisation's Alignment Assessment. One maps how you lead, the other maps where your organisation sits across the five layers. You leave week one knowing which layers are costing you most, with your quarter's alignment priorities chosen.
In the deep dive you work through both reports with the cohort: what your 360 says about how you lead, and what the assessment says about how far your strategy travels through the organisation. Between sessions you share the headline findings with your top team and choose the two or three priorities your quarter will focus on.
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The choices, and how clearly you are setting them for your team.
The deep dives cover the choices that make a strategy executable: where you play, how you win, and what you have decided to stop doing. The fortnight's actions test how far those choices have actually travelled. You ask your team to write down the top priorities, compare the answers, and close the gaps the exercise exposes.
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How you translate the strategy into effort your team can coordinate around, and the balance of safety and challenge you create in the room.
The deep dives cover the behaviours that set the standard for everyone else: how you respond to bad news, what you reward, what you let slide. The fortnight's actions come straight from your 360. You choose the finding with the biggest gap between your view and your team's, and change one visible behaviour they will notice.
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How work moves between people: the handoffs, the decisions nobody owns, and where coordination breaks down.
The deep dives cover how work actually moves through your top team: handoffs, decision rights, and the meetings where coordination lives or dies. The fortnight's actions rebuild one of them. You redesign a recurring meeting or settle one contested decision, and watch what changes around it.
The unwritten rules, and how you move your team toward the culture your strategy needs.
The deep dives cover the unwritten rules: how to surface them, which ones serve the strategy, and which quietly work against it. The fortnight's actions bring them into the open. You run the exercise with your own team and agree one rule to keep and one to retire.
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The evidence. How alignment shows up beyond the room, to your customers and your market.
The deep dives cover brand as evidence: what your customers and market experience as the output of everything underneath. The fortnight's actions test the chain end to end. You trace one customer promise back through the layers to find where it holds and where it breaks.
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Re-run the Alignment Assessment, see what moved, and present the evidence to the cohort. You close with a record of what changed, what you did to change it, and the practices you keep running.
You re-run the Alignment Assessment and put the two scores side by side. In the final deep dive you present your quarter to the cohort: what moved, what resisted, and the practices you are keeping. You leave with the written review your organisation sees.
Each week pairs a live 90 minute deep dive with an optional Q&A drop-in, plus a short piece of work you carry back into your own team between sessions.
Deep dives run on Tuesdays, 8.30 to 10.00am UK time. The Q&A drop-in runs on Thursdays at 4.00pm. Recordings are available for every deep dive.
A week inside the programme
Ninety minutes live with the cohort. The layer's thinking, the tools, and what each leader found when they acted last week.
One specific move inside your own business: a meeting run differently, a conversation had, a decision made visible. Small enough to do this week, real enough that your team notices.
An optional Q&A session. Bring what got hard, get unstuck before the week ends.
Next week's deep dive opens with what happened. The cohort sees your result, and you see eleven others.
James is a facilitator, coach and speaker, and the founder of Creative Huddle. He has spent his career getting senior teams on the same page, at organisations including Google, SEGA, HarperCollins, ITV, Bupa, Getty Images and Harrods.
The Aligned Leader is built on the five layer methodology from his forthcoming book, On The Same Page, and on a pattern he sees repeatedly inside leadership teams: strategies that thin out as they move through the organisation, for reasons the deck never mentions.
Every deep dive and every drop-in is led by James directly. There are no associate facilitators and no pre-recorded course.
£7,950
per leader, per cohort, plus VAT
£1,950
One coaching session with James after each of the five layers, to work through what the layer surfaced for you privately, and land it in your own team.
Invoiced by Creative Huddle Ltd, with purchase order references welcome. VAT is added at the standard rate.
For a conversation about sponsoring a seat, or several,.
The practices you build over the twelve weeks stay with you and your team, and the closing assessment shows the ground you gained. The business keeps moving, though. New people arrive, priorities shift, and pressure finds the gaps. Holding alignment through all of that is ongoing leadership work. Graduates are offered a place in one of my ongoing Strategy Circles, with 20% off the first year of membership: a curated group of 12 leaders, meeting for a three hour working session every month, applying the same discipline to whatever the next quarter brings.
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Fit and timing. You bring the situation, James brings the questions. If it fits, we both know by the end of the call.
Your organisation is invoiced, and both assessments go out: your Leadership 360 to the people around you, the Alignment Assessment to your organisation.
Debrief both diagnostics with the cohort, choose your quarter's alignment priorities, and start.
A single day gives you insight. Twelve weeks gives you room to test new behaviour with your own team and bring the result back to the group the following week.
The fixed commitment is a 90 minute deep dive each week. The Q&A drop-in is there when you want it. Most of the change happens in how you lead during the hours you already spend with your team.
Your Leadership 360 gathers structured feedback on how you lead, from your team, your peers and your board. The Alignment Assessment is a short survey your organisation completes before the programme, showing where it sits across the five layers. You debrief both in week one, and the Alignment Assessment runs again at the close so you can see what moved. If you want an early look, a free eight minute version is at areweonthesame.page.
Recordings are available for every live session. With only twelve leaders in the room, we ask you to protect the weekly hour wherever you can, since the group works best when everyone shows up.
Strategy Circles is ongoing peer membership: a three hour working session every month with a curated group of 10 to 12 leaders, from £650 a month, open ended. The Aligned Leader is a fixed twelve week programme with one specific outcome, built around your own diagnostics and closed to a single cohort of twelve. Graduates move into Circles with 20% off their first year.
Yes. Each cohort is a closed group of twelve. What is said in the room stays there.
Your organisation completes the Alignment Assessment before week one, a survey that takes minutes, and your 360 respondents give feedback once. Beyond that, your team joins the work through the actions you take with them during the quarter. A formal sign-up from them is unnecessary.
A measured before and after of its own alignment, a leader spending a quarter working on the business with structured support, and a written review of what changed. The output lands inside the organisation during the programme, from week two onwards.
A 30 minute call is the fastest way to know whether The Aligned Leader is right for you. No hard sell, no pressure.
Next cohort starts January 2027
A short email course on the five layers and the work of alignment, drawn from the same methodology. Read it before you decide anything.
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