Lead With Alignment And Balance with Nancy Nouaimeh

Results don’t slip because your strategy is fuzzy. They slip because daily behavior doesn’t match what the strategy demands. We kick off 2026 by drawing a hard line between intent and action and by showing how to design systems that make the right behaviors obvious, repeatable, and resilient under pressure. The heart of the conversation is True North—five non‑negotiable outcomes tied to clear principles—and the practical work of turning that clarity into coherent execution.

We share a field story from a mid‑sized manufacturer where leaders were stuck in firefighting despite a clean strategy and a PMO. Instead of more KPIs, we mapped systems to behaviors, made expectations visible through Key Behavioral Indicators, and anchored leader standard work and tiered huddles. The results: 40% fewer escalations in 12 weeks, faster decisions, and leaders with time to manage the system rather than react to it. The lesson is simple and repeatable: systems should shape behavior, and behavior should drive outcomes.

You’ll also hear a deep dive into the Aligned and Balance leadership model, influenced by the Shingo approach. Alignment reduces noise with ambition, explicit leadership expectations, integrated systems, governance for flow, and visible principles. Balance reduces fatigue with steady behavioral rhythms, accountability without blame, learning loops, adaptive capacity, normalized improvement, capacity and energy stewardship, and real engagement. Then we outline a simple 2026 operating model: start with strategy, design systems, define behaviors, measure outcomes, and close the loop with learning. If you’re carrying too many initiatives and seeing too little impact, this is your roadmap to focus, flow, and sustained performance.

If this sparked reflection, subscribe, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a review with your top five outcomes for 2026. Your input shapes where we go next.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And The Core Question
• 0:52 Strategy Isn’t The Problem
• 2:27 Defining True North Clearly
• 3:40 Field Story: From Firefighting To Flow
• 5:24 Results From Behavioral Systems
• 6:08 The Aligned And Balance Model
• 7:35 Deep Dive: ALIGN Elements
• 9:29 Deep Dive: BALANCE Elements
• 12:31 A Simple 2026 Operating Model
• 14:17 Five Practical Starting Steps

Transcript

Nancy Nouaimeh: 0:18

Happy New Year, leaders and change makers, and welcome back to the Excellence Foresight, the podcast where we explore what it really takes to build organizations that endure, adapt, and excel. I'm Nancy Nouaimeh, and as we step into 2026, I want to start with a question I hear far more often than I should. Our strategy is clear, so why don't our results reflect it? If that question sounds familiar, this episode about leading with alignment and balance is for you. So why strategy isn't the problem? Here's the hard truth from the field. From the many experiences I've had in consulting business, organizations rarely struggle because they lack ambition or direction. They struggle because their systems do not reinforce the behaviors their strategy depends on. Peter Drucker said plans are only good intentions, unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. I would add, into systematic, repeatable behavior too. In 2026, complexity is not slowing down, as we all know. Leaders are managing more initiatives, more stakeholders, and more pressure than ever before. So here's a data point that should give us a pause and think. In 2025, 68% of organizations reported running more than 15 active initiatives simultaneously. Yet only 22 could clearly link those initiatives to the behaviors they expected from leaders and teams. So there was a big gap. That's a gap between intent and behavior, and this is where execution breaks down. So how can you keep the forces and the focus on your intent, align execution, and ensure that teams exhibit the required behavior for your success? This episode, leading with alignment and balance, is about the true north, which is more than just a vision statement. True North, the word that we use often, is often misunderstood. It's not a poster on the wall or a paragraph in a strategy deck. If I want to define true north, it's a small number of non-negotiate negotiable outcomes, and the principles and behaviors that guide decisions when trade-offs are required. It's having a principle-based approach to achieve organizational excellence. Without the true norse, what we observe is that systems drift, leaders spend their time firefighting, governance become bureaucratic rather than enabling, and improvement efforts lose their credibility. So let me pause here a moment and reflect. If you are sitting here, a year from now, what are the five outcomes that would make you say, yes, 2026 was a successful year for us? Give it a thought. Not 10, not 20, just five. Write them down because clarity is the first step towards systems that actually behave. And let me tell you a little bit of a story from the field from my experience. I work with a mid-sized manufacturing organization that had many, or what many would could consider a solid setup, a clear strategy, a central PMO, an experienced team of leaders, and yet day-to-day life felt like constant firefighting for this company. Projects were delivered, but operational results lacked. Escalations were very frequent, leaders were busy and not focusing on improving the system. What we did with them, we didn't start with more KPIs or new tools. We started by clarifying what was the true norms for them. Those five outcomes that I spoke about, explicitly linking them to principles. And from there, we started mapping their systems. We identified their KPIs that we linked to KPIs. KPIs are the key behavioral indicators that this company should have. We introduced something we call leader standard work, which is a system to support leaders perform their work in a consistent manner and focusing on the right things. With this, we made the expected behaviors visible to everyone, especially leaders. We aligned it with the principles such as respect every individual and leaders with humility, those we use in the shingle model. And what are the results we got? Escalation dropped by 40% in 12 weeks in this company. Decision-making speed improved. Leaders reclaimed time to work on the system and just in the system. So they focused their time on managing the system. Nothing magical in this, just system finally reinforced the right behaviors. So we started from identifying the right behavior that we needed to see in this company, and then we build the systems around that. Now, before I share a simple operating model for 2026 that you could follow to do that, I want to introduce a leadership model that sits at the heart of the thinking and which is aligned with the Shingo model, one that I've developed through years of working with leaders across different sectors, and I called it the aligned and balance model for leadership. It emerged from a pattern I kept seeing in my work. Some organizations were aligned but constantly changing direction, others were energized by fragmented, and what was missing was the ability to hold alignment and balance at the same time. How can an organization remain aligned and really manage all this tension and all these conflicts that arise from different initiatives and projects? At the core of this model is one simple truth. Misalignment creates noise and imbalance creates fatigue. And this is what we've all experienced, and I've seen it in many, many discussions and in many experiences that I've been working on with clients. And sustainable performance requires really both alignment and balance. So let me dig deeper a little bit into these two concepts. Align is really creating direction and coherence. Align focuses on ensuring the organization moves together, deliberately and coherently, where we really reduce the misalignment and the noise. Let's reflect a little bit on every letter of this align. Ambition. A. Ambition. A clear true north expressed as a small number of meaningful outcomes. These are the five outcomes that I spoke about. We need to be ambitious, we need to have stretch goals, and we need to have some outcomes that are really meaningful for the organization. We just limit the number of those outcomes to be able to keep the focus on. The L. Leadership Int. Leadership is key. Explicit expectations about how leaders make decisions and role model behavior is key to create alignment. The I, integrated systems, strategy, governance, PMO, operations, working all together as one system, one whole, not in silos. The G, governance for flow, decision rights and escalation patterns that enable speed rather than bureaucracy. Make sure governance is really fit for the organization. And the end isn't the those non-negotiation negotiable principles, the values that are made visible through everyday observable behavior in the organization, what we called in the Shingo terminology ideal behavior. So align is really key, and that's something that every leader should focus on. What about balance? Balance is really sustaining performance over time, but making sure that tensions are really dealt with and we're not creating conflicts within the organization because alignment alone is not enough. Balance is also required. And balance ensures the system remains healthy, resilient, and human. Now let me also break down these letters for you. B, the behavioral rhythms, leader standard work, tiered huddles, and routines that stabilize performance. It's very important to keep those behaviors on check. A, the accountability without blame, and we've all been preaching for this in years. Problems surfaced early and treated as signals from the system and not really pointing out people and what the people are doing. So really going back and understanding the gaps in the system and what needs to be fixed in the system to support people do their work better. Learning loops, the L in balance, regular reflection, connecting behaviors to outcomes. How do we learn from what's going on in the organization? How to keep that learning loop moving on, how to teach people to really focus on learning from failure, learning from mistakes, learning also from the good stuff that's happening to make them repeated in the company. The A in balance, adaptive capacity, responding to change without constant firefighting. Change needs to be really tackled in a structured way. And we teach this in the change management course we have. So how do we really make people adaptive to change and keeping the capacity of the work and the capabilities of and keep increasing the capabilities of people? The end in balance is normalized improvement, continuous improvement as part of the daily work, not as a separate initiative. In the Shingo model, we focus on building the continuous improvement process in the organization. We build a strong system so that everyone in the organization can contribute to that improvement. So it becomes really part of the daily activities. The C and balance, capacity and energy, respecting, focus, prioritization, and cognitive load. Make sure that we give the people the right platform to have the right energy, to exhibit the right energy, to perform the work, motivate them, engage them. So it's really about keeping their capacity and that energy moving. The engagement, the E, the engagement, people feel ownership because the system makes sense to them. Engaging people through meaningful work. So balance is very important. If we focus on all these elements, we definitely work better together and we make sure we remove the tension. When align and balance work together, leaders stop compensating for poor system design and the organization begins to behave as intended. So we intentionally build a system that works for the people and for the organization. And this is really very important for leaders. And the model, the simple model that we suggest for 2026, is really something very simple, focusing on five elements, but making sure that every element is well understood. Start with a strategy, well-designed strategy that meets the purpose of the organization. Go to systems, behavior, then outcomes, then feedback and learning. Most organizations drop as strategy and outcomes. They build the strategy, they decide what outcomes they want to have for each of the strategic themes they build. They forget about the systems and the behaviors. The real leverage is really in the middle between strategy and outcomes, the systems and behaviors. Research and practice consistently show that organizations that deliberately embed routine set as leader standard work and tiered huddles achieve a 25% improvement in decision-making speed and 15% reduction in operational waste within 90 days. Why? Because they make expectations explicit. Problems become visible, and learning routines become what they practice. So it is very important when we set a strategy for 2026 is to make sure that we work on the systems and behaviors, to make sure that those are really fit to deliver the strategy and make it successful. So where to start really practically? If you're wondering where to begin, keep it simple. Clarify your true north, those five outcomes, and link them to clear principles and decide on what is the behavior you want to have. Check your system design. Are decision rights clear? Does governance enable flow or create friction? So we start with clarifying the true north, we focus then on the system design. As a third step, make behaviors observable. For example, how can we make surfacing problems really a reality without blame? Which system we need to put in place, which system we need to fix maybe for this. And then number four is anchor the routines. Look at tools like leader standard work, tiered huddles, visual management. Make them as strong systems in the organization. Today they give to the results you need to make sure that behavior becomes really observable. And number five is close the loop, monthly learning reviews that connect behaviors to outcome. Review what you've done, make sure that you've done it right. I do believe in the PDCA cycle that we teach on quality. Plan, do, check, act. Always check and act. Make sure that your plans were correct and the execution was correct too. And as Dr. Deming said, a system must be managed, otherwise it will not manage itself. Now it will manage itself. 2026 for me is really about focusing on principles, making them viable and adaptive. And for you, your true north is what you say in calm condition. It's how your system behaves under pressure. Make sure that you really work on designing your systems, look at your true north, align the systems of your true north, and make sure you have the right behaviors in place. If this episode sparked of reflection, I'd love to hear it. Share your thoughts with me on LinkedIn or share your comments in the in the episode. And if you want to go deeper into designing systems that behave, keep an eye out. I'll be sharing details soon about a new leadership experience designed to bring these ideas to life. Until next time, keep leading with clarity, courage, and excellence. We wish you all the best for 2026.