Alignment is a Verb Where values meet behavior — and where they don't.

THE HEARTWRIGHT  ·  ISSUE  NO. 03

Published Tuesday, May 26, 2026  ·  Bi-weekly  · www.heartledleadership.org

EDITOR'S NOTE

Issue No. 02 closed with the Environment audit — the system is asking the person to absorb a structural cost someone, somewhere, designed in. We are moving from E to A. From the environment that produces behavior, to the alignment between what we say a system is for and what it actually does.

Two other things in this issue. The promise from the very first issue lands here — a short clip from the AI Innovation & Future of Work Summit keynote, paired with a companion piece on what AI is doing to the alignment layer. And a quick recap of two weeks I keep finding myself thinking about: a Women in Tech keynote, a CLE faculty session on California Privacy and AI, and a live workshop that was a gift that delivered far more than I could have ever imagined.

— Lauren

THE LEAD  ·  ALIGNMENT IS A VERB

Most alignment work in organizations is alignment theater.

The offsite that produces the deck. The values poster. The kickoff doc with the strategic priorities listed in priority order. The quarterly all-hands where leadership re-states the mission. All of it is alignment as a noun — a state we declare we are in, then defend the declaration of.

Alignment is not a state. Alignment is a verb. It is what an organization is doing, again and again, every week, in the gap between what it says it values and what it structurally rewards. Stated values are the easy half. The verb is the hard half — and it is the half that produces every culture you have ever respected, and every culture you have ever quietly left.

If you want to know what your team is actually aligned on, do not read the values poster. Look at what gets time, what gets headcount, and what gets the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong.

Three places where alignment becomes a verb, and where misalignment is visible if you know to look:

• What gets time. Calendars are stated strategy. If the documented priority is customer trust and the calendar is mostly internal coordination, the system is aligned on internal coordination. Whatever the poster says.

• What gets the benefit of the doubt. When a deadline slips, whose explanation is taken at face value and whose is interrogated? That answer is your real values hierarchy. It is almost never the one stated on the wall.

• What gets said no to. Strategy is what an organization can say no to without flinching. If a leadership team cannot point to three things it declined this quarter that would have been on-strategy in some weaker version of the strategy, the strategy is not yet load-bearing.

Values are not the start of alignment. Values are what alignment produces, week after week, in the small structural decisions almost no one is watching. The leader's job is not to write the values. It is to make sure the system keeps reconciling them (out loud, in public, on Wednesdays) with what the calendar, the comp plan, and the meeting defaults are actually rewarding.

Alignment, in the end, is integrity in motion. Or, as I put it from the stage at Mic Drop Live last week — when your words match your values, and your values match your actions, people engage. And when people engage, performance improves.

THE PILLAR  ·  ALIGNMENT

Alignment is the third pillar in HEART, and the one most often confused with three other things: agreement, communication, and culture. It is none of them.

Agreement is everyone nodding at the same meeting. Communication is everyone hearing the same words. Culture is what the system produces over time. Alignment is the load-bearing connection between what the organization says it values and what the structure actually rewards. When that connection is strong, culture compounds. When it is loose, culture drifts — and the drift is usually called “execution” or “engagement” when it should be called what it is.

The Alignment question for this week: where in your calendar, your comp plan, or your decision rights is a stated value getting quietly outvoted by what the system rewards?

STILL HERE, STILL WORKING  ·  COMPANION CLIP

From the AI Innovation & Future of Work Summit keynote earlier this year, the line that drew the longest pause in the room:

We don't lose talent because people can't perform. We lose talent because our systems can't adapt. That's not a hiring problem. That's not an engagement problem. It's a design problem. And it's solvable.

This is an alignment line. Every company that loses someone good has a stated value — talent, retention, growing our people — sitting next to a structural condition that selects against it. The misalignment is rarely visible inside the company. It is almost always visible to the person who left.

What AI is doing to this layer is making the gap harder to hide. Tools that adapt to a person — to capacity, to context, to the way a particular human actually works — make it impossible to keep pretending the default was neutral. When one person on a team is able to work at a different cadence with a different stack, the question of whose work the system was designed for becomes legible. The legibility is the gift. What you do with it is the alignment work.

Here’s a recording of the presentation for your viewing.

FROM YOUR REPLIES  ·  ISSUE NO. 02'S QUESTION

Replies to the Environment audit from Issue No. 02 — name one default in your team's environment that no one on the team actually chose — are still landing. The most useful are taking longer to sit with than a single paragraph can hold. A curated set will land in a coming issue, once I can do the answers justice.

In the meantime, the invitation stays open. 

Name a default in your week that you never chose. Send what you find. The threshold for inclusion here is signal, not volume — one careful reply is more useful than ten quick ones.

FIELD NOTES  ·  WHERE I'VE BEEN SHOWING UP

• Featured Speaker  ·  May 13. Women in Tech 2026 Global Conference, with a version of “Still Here, Still Working.” One observation from the room: the people really responded to how the defaults are presented at work and how AI and the HEART pillars can reframe issues related to capacity and burnout — how to surface them, how to test whether they hold without the people currently carrying them, how to redesign one system without breaking three. That is the right question.

• CLE faculty  ·  May 11. TRT CLE — “California Privacy & AI: From Constitutional Right to Algorithmic Fight.” The throughline I keep returning to: California's constitutional right to privacy was written in 1972, when the threat model was a paper file and a clerk. The algorithmic decision era has the same throughline, but an entirely different operating context. Reconciling the two is the alignment work of the next decade. You can catch that CLE here.

• Mic Drop Live  ·  May 13. A two-day immersive for women building paid speaking careers — real tools, real connection, real momentum. I spoke on leadership and on the refusal to edit yourself to fit someone else's definition of it. Two lines from the talk are still in my head: “You can be right, and be in the wrong room. Not every room deserves your leadership.” And: “When your words match your values, when your values match your actions, people engage. And when people engage, performance improves.” That second line is the through-line of this entire issue. You can catch a recording here and here.

  

• Privacy Picture Book  ·  GarWu Publications. We’re getting manuscript edits back from our Publisher, Transcend Studio, and we couldn’t be more excited! We’re still on track to publish in Late Winter/Early Spring 2027.

• Leadership Book  ·  Content edits are going strong. My writing coach thinks I’ve made a lot of strong edits and changes. I can’t wait to see what she thinks of the new version I just sent over to her. We’re still on track to publish in Late Fall/Early Winter 2026.

ONE QUESTION

This week, pick one stated value in your team's charter, deck, or job descriptions. Then find one place in the calendar, the comp plan, feedback loop, or the way the team allocates time where that value is currently being outvoted by what the system rewards. Reply with what you find — the most useful answers will show up, anonymized, in a future issue.

The Heartwright

Editorial on sustainable leadership. Each issue: one structural insight, a HEART pillar in practice, & field notes.