When Alignment Turns Effort into Flow

There’s a simple truth most leaders eventually feel in their bones: some work feels heavier than it should. People are capable. Effort is high. Intent is good. And yet progress is slow, tense, and exhausting.

That heaviness isn’t a lack of discipline or talent.

It’s friction.

And friction is the lived experience of misalignment.

Misalignment happens when purpose, priorities, and investment pull in different directions. Energy is consumed not in building, but in negotiating, compensating, justifying, and defending. People work hard, but the system resists them. Alignment, by contrast, creates flow. When direction is shared and decisions reinforce one another, effort compounds instead of cancels out. Even hard work feels lighter not because it’s easy, but because energy isn’t leaking.

The difference is not effort.

It’s coherence.

Misaligned systems consume energy just to stay in place.

Aligned systems convert energy into movement.

I didn’t always understand this intellectually. I learned it viscerally.

Years ago, searching for an example of alignment to model from, I dug all the way back into my childhood. My father ran a single-truck transportation business McMillan Haulage. My mother was the bookkeeper. It was small, simple, and from the outside, it looked like a classic family business. I wondered if there was wisdom there.

But as I peeled back the layers, it became clear that even this humble operation was deeply misaligned.

Sunday afternoons in our house were filled with the sound of my mother punching numbers into an adding machine, sighing heavily as she tried to stretch a small monthly stipend across an entire household budget. Mortgage, groceries, utilities, insurance everything came out of that single allocation. If someone got sick or the house needed repairs, it was her job to make it work. I remember her saving $1 and $2 coins for months to buy a dishwasher and a microwave. My mother had extraordinary grit.

My father, meanwhile, was invested in something else entirely: his professional legacy. He had been an advocate for drivers in a heavily regulated industry and took pride in being seen as a leader. That reputation, in his mind, needed to be reinforced by a big, beautiful truck. There were upgrades sometimes practical, often aesthetic and just when we thought one truck was finished, another would appear.

Money for a dishwasher.

Money for chrome accessories.

That was the fault line.

Piggy bank with $1 and $2 coins

My mother felt betrayed. My father was genuinely confused. He believed he was investing in the business’s success. She believed she was advancing the family’s wellbeing. Neither was wrong but they were pulling in different directions.

The truth, visible only in hindsight, was that neither of them was truly aligned around the business itself. The core asset wasn’t the truck at all it was the long-term relationships with fruit farmers who trusted the business to get their produce to market. If the business had been run with that purpose at the centre, priorities might have aligned. Investment decisions might have made sense. Growth might have been possible.

Instead, they argued endlessly about lifestyle versus legacy. The business stayed small. The friction never resolved. And eventually, the marriage didn’t survive either.

As a child, I didn’t have language for this. As an adult, with business acumen, it was painfully clear: misalignment doesn’t just slow progress it erodes trust, drains energy, and breaks relationships.

Alignment works like working with the grain of timber.

When you work with the grain, tools glide, effort is efficient, and strength is preserved.

When you work against it, everything resists. Tools snag. Surfaces splinter. Energy is lost to friction.

Nothing is broken.

You’re simply pushing in the wrong direction.

This is what alignment really offers leaders. Not ease, but flow. Not the absence of effort, but the removal of unnecessary resistance. When purpose is shared and priorities are clear, fewer things compete. Decisions become simpler. Trade-offs make sense. Progress feels honest.

Alignment doesn’t change how hard people work.

It changes how work feels.

And that matters because over time, leaders don’t burn out from effort. They burn out from friction.

Where in your leadership or organisation does effort feel heavier than it should and what misalignment might be creating that friction?