Bringing Leadership Together: The Programme Manager’s Real Job

No business succeeds without effective leadership and no programme succeeds without leadership alignment.  When leaders pull in different directions, delivery stops being execution and starts becoming negotiation: and the recogniseable spiral of slowed momentum begins. However, when you invest in bringing the leadership team into alignment, you successfully turn complexity into simple, efficient, momentum. With AI assisting many tasks and documents for programme managers, what it can’t do is align people and ensure leadership works as a cohesive team. 

For a Programme Manager, particularly in complex HR transformations, bringing an HR Leadership Team (LT) together is not a nice-to-have soft skill. I believe it is a fundamental part of the job.

In my career on large-scale transformation programmes, a disproportionate amount of impact comes from aligning the people who ultimately own the plan. When leaders share a clear honest view of progress, risks, and trade-offs, delivery moves faster and colleagues involved and impacted feel more engaged. When leaders don’t share this transparent collaboration, even the best made plans fall behind as soon as you start.

Alignment is an outcome, not a meeting

Many organisations assume alignment exists because they have a steering committee. In practice, the two are not the same thing. In my experience, alignment is an outcome that has to be actively engineered and continuously maintained.

Every leadership team is made up of accomplished over-achievers - each with their own incentives, pressures, and definitions of success. Without deliberate alignment, those differences surface as delays.

The Programme Manager’s role is to cut through ambiguity. Alignment starts with a single, coherent narrative that every leader can articulate. At a minimum, leaders should be able to answer three questions in the same way:

• What are we trying to achieve?

• Where are we genuinely struggling?

• What decisions or actions are needed now?

Regardless of how green the RAG status looks, if the answers vary by executive, alignment does not exist.

So how do we achieve alignment? Here are some top tips (some are how Veran can help, some are just all-round good advice).

Create the Right Foundations for the Programme

A shocking 94% of executives are disappointed with ERP programme outcomes. Disappointment is the gap between expectation and reality (the whole reason Veran was set up – to close that gap). During Phase Zero (the preparation stage we guide organisations through to get ready for implementation / transformation), we include a Transformation roadmap in the business case. This aligns leadership to tangible outcomes that will be delivered over time and an acceptance that benefits will be realised over a 3 – 5 year period and not all on Day 1. From the outset this means expectations are realistic and consistent between leaders. 

We have also perfected a highly iterative and engaging process for creating and finalizing the business case – a tool we use to align leadership around the most fundamentally important parts of the programme: what's our scope, how much are we willing to spend, how long do we want it to take? Evolved over a decade and with more than 50 clients, Veran’s Phase Zero is designed to create leadership clarity before mobilisation, aligning on ambition, scope, governance, and decision making, so delivery begins with momentum, not friction. It's a vital piece to launch a programme, as alignment starts at launch, not just at Go Live. (for upcoming events on ‘Preparing for Transformation’, check out our events page).

Things I’d happily never hear again: ‘Let’s take that offline’

Effective Leadership Team engagement does not happen by accident. It needs discipline and intent. Too many leadership forums try to do everything at once: update, assure, decide, escalate, align. The result is our (least) favourite bit of corporate jargon - "Let's take that offline".

Strong Programme Managers are ruthless about purpose. You own the pace and tone of briefings. You should separate information flow from decision-making. I have a tried and tested adage in my approach that there should be no new information for anyone in the room. If that means 1:1 briefings before the main event then prioritise it. It'll mean less time with confused execs trying to understand a concept they're being asked to make a decision on. That LT is your ticket to success and you need to engage them on those terms. 

Make the invisible visible

Leadership teams struggle most when trade-offs are hidden. Time, cost, scope, risk, and capacity are continuously in tension and if you're like me, you're spending all your time trying to balance them. Pretending otherwise just pushes the conflict downstream. One of the Programme Manager’s most valuable contributions is making those trade-offs explicit and unavoidable in a way leaders can engage with quickly and honestly.

Making risks and challenges visible and showing their tangible impact on costs and benefits  (whether its capacity challenges, dependencies running late, decision fatigue or any number of things that can go wrong) changes the conversation. Consistency matters here.

Influence with trust if you don’t have authority

I am being asked a lot how to choose which consultancy to work with when everyone wants a slice of the AI pie and I talk a lot about trust - trust that your partner doesn’t have a hidden agenda, trust that we’re not commercially incentivised to sell certain software products, trust that we’re not trying to make you reliant on us for a juicy long term support contract!

Alignment never stays fixed 

Leadership alignment is not something you tick from the to do list and move on from. It degrades under pressure. The Programme Manager’s job is to spot early signs of drift and intervene before misalignment hardens. I do this by continuously temperature checking with individual LT members. It’s useful to identify your ‘bellwethers’ – those individuals that are most forthcoming with concerns and discomforts. They will be essential in playing back the mood of the overall group.

Hopefully these tips and anecdotes help you align your leadership team and run a successful programme that delivers outcomes for your organisation, not just a new piece of tech. However, if the transformation still feels heavy even with those pieces in place, perhaps the Veran Phase Zero is the missing piece and now might be a great time to the conversation about designing your Phase Zero.

If you are starting a transformation project or need programme management support on existing initiatives, we’d love to talk – just email Becky@Veranperformance.com