There's No Magic Trick for Team Alignment. There's Only This

5 hours ago

5 min read

The summer we staked everything on one DC-8, I found out the real answer — and it wasn't magic.

It was 1990, and the scheduled airline flying nonstop flights between Anchorage and Honolulu dropped that route. Just like that, the route our young business was built around was gone, and John and I had a choice: close up shop, or do something that scared us both half to death. We chartered a DC-8 with about 200 seats for several flights during one summer season. I remember running the numbers over and over, comparing the number of seats we had sold during previous summer seasons with our charter capacity the summer of 1991, because I needed to actually know the math worked before I let us take that gamble.

To make it work, we had to sell enough seats on every single flight that summer to cover the cost of the charter.

And here's the part nobody tells you about a risk that size: the hardest thing wasn't the risk itself. It was getting a small, scared team to move like one person for an entire summer, when any one of us panicking could have sunk the whole thing.

We didn't have fancy software that summer, or a dashboard, or any of the tools people reach for now. What we had was one number, the same number, that everybody working the reservations phone lines understood the same way: how many seats we still had left to sell. It wasn't my number or John's number. It was the number, and it told people what mattered before we ever had to open our mouths about it.

We didn't have to walk around reminding anyone why it mattered or what would happen if we came up short. The number already said it. People don't align around a feeling, or a pep talk, or even a shared sense of urgency. They align around something everyone can see and agree means the same thing.

People don't align around a feeling. They align around something everyone can see and agree means the same thing.

Does your team have one number like that, something everybody's looking at and agrees on what it means, or is everyone quietly keeping score by their own definition?

The urgency and adrenaline that got us through that first DC-8 summer charter worked, but it wasn't necessarily repeatable. I didn't understand until years later that those ingredients that got us through that first summer started breaking down under the weight of just... more. More reservations agents, more shifts, more passengers, more days where nobody really had eyes on the whole picture.

It took a lunch with our mentor, Robert Kiyosaki, on the Big Island, and two books he told us to read, The E-Myth and The Great Game of Business, before I understood the difference between a team that pulls together because the crisis is scary, and a team that pulls together because you built the culture that makes it happen every time, crisis or not. That's when we laid the foundation for our culture, which we ended up calling WERQ: Win-Win, Efficiency, Responsibility, and Quality. These were not just posters on the wall but actual standards everyone used as their guide for how the company operates. I told the fuller story of where that name even came from in The Story Behind WERQ.

Culture happens by accident instead of on purpose, until you decide it doesn't.

Is your team's alignment something you built, or something you're just hoping shows up again the next time it gets hard?

John loves this Ronald Reagan phrase, which I stole and never gave back: "trust but verify". It comes up most when I talk to owners about why their team fractures the second real pressure hits. People hear "trust but verify" and think it means they don't really trust anyone. Ronald Reagan didn't mean it that way, and neither do I. What actually breaks alignment under stress isn't a lack of trust; it's the absence of a built-in step to check in before things go sideways. Without it, people just push on and hope, with everything waiting for you to notice when something is awry and step in. The problem is, once things go awry, it’s often too late, and now you’re in the middle of a firestorm, desperately trying to put things back on track.

John used to talk about the snow fences used on the highways in Alaska. They are used to keep drifting snow off the road, so you can tell where it's safe to drive. That's exactly what one well-placed check-in point does for a team under pressure. It's a guardrail, not a cage, and in the middle of chaos, guardrails are the thing people actually reach for.

Trust but verify isn't a lack of faith. It's the snow fence, not the cage.

When things get tense, does your team know exactly where the checkpoints are, or are they quietly hoping you notice something before things fall apart?

It took about five years of building all this on purpose: the shared numbers, WERQ, the follow-up loop, before John and I could actually hire a COO and a CFO and step back from the day-to-day. I'll be honest, we wondered if the whole thing would hold up without either of us in the room to catch it. And it did. The team ran Hawaiian Vacations while we were literally an ocean away, through delays and slow seasons, through competition, and everything else airline life throws at you, because the alignment wasn't coming from us standing over anyone's shoulder anymore. It was built into how the team actually worked.

If you want a clear-eyed look at where your own team still depends on you being in the room to hold it together, my free Owner Diagnostic takes about three minutes and shows you exactly where that is.

I told the fuller story of what that stepping back actually looked like in How We Built a Business That Ran Even When We Were an Ocean Away.

The real test of alignment isn't how your team acts when you're watching. It's how they act when you're an ocean away.

If you disappeared for two weeks tomorrow, would your team stay just as aligned, or would it start drifting the moment you weren't there to hold it together?

This Week’s Exercise

Name the one number your whole team already looks at, the same way, every week. If you can't name it, that's step one.
Write down where your team's "trust but verify" check-in point actually lives. If you can't say it in one sentence, it doesn't exist yet.
Ask two people on your team, separately, what "we're doing fine" would look like this month. If their answers don't match, that's your alignment gap.
Pick one thing you currently hold together through sheer presence, and sketch out what would need to be true for the team to hold it without you.

Final Thoughts

I still think about that first summer with the DC-8 charter, how close we came to losing everything, and how the thing that actually saved us wasn't grit or a good pep talk. It was one number everybody understood the same way. We got lucky that first time. We built it on purpose after that.

If your team only holds together because you're standing in the room making sure it does, that's not alignment. That's just supervision with a nicer name. This week, find the one thing your team is currently aligning around because of you, and start building the version that doesn't need you standing there.

To your freedom,

Ral West

Livin’ the Dream