Boutique change-and-alignment consulting for the leadership teams of mid-market firms in the Mid-Atlantic and beyond.
Most senior teams do not break loudly. They drift. A merger closes and the combined leadership team is, in name, one team - in the meetings, it is still two. A new CEO comes in and the room is polite for six months, then quietly stops bringing the real issues to the table. A restructure changes the org chart but the calendar, the decision rights and the working habits stay where they were. The strategy is fine. The people are good. The team, as a team, has stopped functioning.
That is the moment Alignment Group was built for. The practice exists because it is the wrong moment for either side of the existing market. Strategy consultants want to redo the plan; the plan is rarely the problem. Executive coaches work one at a time; the team, as a unit, has the problem. The work that needs doing sits between the two, and almost no one does it well.
The frame we hold is that the leadership team is the operating system of the company. When change arrives, that operating system needs more than a patch - reporting lines, decision rights, meeting cadence, and the conversations the team is willing to have. Calling the work “change management” would imply the issue is the rest of the organization. It usually is not. Calling it “coaching” would imply the issue is the individuals. It usually is not. Alignment names the actual unit of work: the team, as it operates together.
Three things shape every engagement we take on.
Engagements are senior-led from start to finish. The person who scopes the work delivers the work. We do not run a leverage model with junior associates - the room only opens up when the people in it trust the person facilitating, and that trust is not transferable. A typical alignment engagement runs ninety days, includes two off-sites, and is held together by weekly working sessions with the CEO and chief of staff.
We work in person whenever the calendar allows. The deeper structural work - the redesign of meeting cadence and decision rights, the listening that surfaces what isn’t being said - is meaningfully better in a room together. For clients further afield we work remotely with periodic in-person off-sites, which is genuinely effective when the cadence is held honestly.
The practice is based in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, about ninety minutes west of Washington DC. Most of our Mid-Atlantic clients are within a comfortable drive; for engagements further afield we travel. The base matters less than the discipline of being on the ground when the team needs us in person, and out of the way when it does not.
We are not the right practice for organizations that need a strategy authored, a large-scale transformation programme run, or a leadership team built from scratch. We work best with senior teams that are largely the right people, in roughly the right shape, who have hit a moment where the existing pattern is no longer enough. If that is not your situation, we will say so in the first conversation.