Is Your Superpower also your Kryptonite
Every organization, every team, and every person has their superpower. But weirdly, that superpower can also be kryptonite.
In my previous post, we looked at how Microsoft’s self-examination enabled them to turn what could have been their kryptonite into a superpower. Every organization feels the tension between where they are and where they want to go. Today, I’m sharing the seven foundational skills that move your organization from friction to alignment.
Perhaps your company has a strong strategy and gets great energy from coming up with new ideas, but then has little patience for the discipline of execution. Or maybe you have an amazing culture and people love working there, but you come up short on strategy, leaving the team reactive rather than proactive. While it can be "fun" to put out fires together, eventually it will burn people out.
Organizational Development is the rigorous discipline of paying attention to the three forces that drive every company: Strategy, Culture, and Execution.
As an OD practitioner, my goal is to help organizations become highly effective across all three. I developed the ALIGN framework to provide a repeatable practice for understanding and transformation:
🔹 Absorb: Listening to people and systems to understand what is actually happening.
🔹 Legitimize: Turning those insights into a roadmap that the whole team actually owns.
🔹 Integrate: Making sure new ideas show up in daily work and decisions.
🔹 Grow: Helping people find the confidence to lead through the change.
🔹 Nurture: Tending to the culture so the progress sticks over the long haul.
While the ALIGN framework is a process to follow, it is also builds and strengthens new capabilities. As teams move through the ALIGN framework, they naturally develop seven foundational skills that turn a one-time project into a repeatable way of working:
Attention and Presence: Slowing down to see the patterns before rushing to fix them.
Active Inquiry: Learning to ask the kind of questions that actually uncover the truth.
Sensemaking: Taking a variety of perspectives and find the shared "why."
Relational Trust: Making it safe for people to say the hard things without fear.
Systems Thinking: Seeing how the people, the work, and the goals all pull on each other.
Reflective Practice: Regularly pausing to ask, “What are we learning here?”
Stewardship: Caring about where the ship is going in the long run, not just hitting today's target.
Alignment is the bridge between a brilliant idea and a reality that doesn't fall apart. It’s how we make sure our superpowers are used to build what’s next, rather than just exhausted by the friction of today. As these seven skills become part of your organizational DNA, strategy, culture, and execution consistently align for work that is meaningful, sustainable, and impactful.