Law & Crime

Ceara Lane MZ is an Executive Vice President of Operations & People at Law & Crime, where she leads organizational effectiveness and people strategy. She focuses on strengthening leadership alignment, improving cross-functional execution, and helping organizations navigate transformation.

The Role of Alignment in Successful Integration

A few months ago, our company acquired Court TV. Like most acquisitions, there was plenty of discussion about growth opportunities, operational integration, and the strategic potential of bringing two organizations together. But once the deal closed and the work began, a different challenge quickly emerged. Complexity increased overnight.

As a digital-first media company integrating a legacy television brand, we suddenly found ourselves navigating new systems, new relationships, new priorities, and new ways of working. At the same time, the existing business didn’t slow down. We still had goals to hit, shows and products to launch, teams to support, and audiences to serve. What became clear very quickly was that the acquisition itself wasn’t the biggest challenge. The bigger challenge was alignment.

One lesson I’ve learned throughout my career is that alignment does not mean agreement. In fact, expecting complete agreement across every leader, function, and perspective is unrealistic. Healthy leadership teams should challenge ideas, debate tradeoffs, and bring different viewpoints to the table. The goal isn’t consensus. The goal is clarity.

People need to understand where the organization is headed, what matters most right now, and how decisions will be made. Without that clarity, organizations begin paying for misalignment in ways that aren’t always obvious. Decisions slow down. Teams duplicate effort. Priorities compete for attention. Work gets revisited and reworked. What initially looks like a communication problem often becomes an execution problem.

As our organization grew and the complexity of integration increased, we realized we needed to be much more intentional about creating alignment across the leadership team.

Shared Values Create Clarity for Better Decisions

About two months into the integration process, we brought together leaders from across the organization for a two-day leadership summit. The objective wasn’t simply to talk about the acquisition. It was to create clarity around who we are, how we operate, and where we’re going next.

Alignment is not a meeting, an offsite, or a presentation. It’s an operating discipline.

One of the topics we discussed was a set of company values that had been developed through leadership input and feedback over time. Initially, the purpose was straightforward: define the behaviors and principles that reflect who we are as an organization and who we aspire to become as we continue to grow.

As we worked through real business scenarios and leadership discussions, however, something else became apparent. The values weren’t just describing our culture. They were helping us make decisions.

As organizations scale, leaders make hundreds of judgment calls every week without executive involvement. They face tradeoffs between speed and thoughtfulness, innovation and consistency, short-term opportunities and long-term priorities. There is rarely a perfect answer.

What we found was that a shared set of values provided a common framework for navigating those decisions. Even when leaders approached a problem from different perspectives, they had a common reference point for determining the best path forward.

Turning Priorities into Focus

The second area we focused on was prioritization. Most organizations don’t have an ideas problem. They have a focus problem. During the summit, we spent time discussing current priorities, future opportunities, and bold ideas for growth. The conversation generated dozens of possibilities. But the most valuable part of the exercise wasn’t creating more ideas. It was narrowing them.

Transformation creates a tendency to chase everything at once. New opportunities emerge, urgency increases, and every initiative can feel important. The reality is that if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Together, we identified a small number of initiatives that we believed would create the greatest impact for the business through the remainder of the year. That process wasn’t always easy, but it created something invaluable: clarity.

Making Alignment an Operating Discipline

Finally, we recognized that alignment cannot be a onetime event. A leadership summit can create momentum, but momentum fades quickly without structure behind it. To ensure progress continued, we assigned ownership, established working groups, and built regular updates into our leadership operating rhythm. The goal wasn’t additional bureaucracy. It was accountability, visibility, and the ability to make decisions quickly as new information emerged.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far is that alignment is not a meeting, an offsite, or a presentation. It’s an operating discipline. As organizations grow, leaders can’t eliminate complexity. They can’t prevent competing priorities from emerging. What they can do is create enough clarity that people can make independent decisions without pulling the organization in different directions.

Transformation will always test an organization’s ability to execute. In my experience, the organizations that navigate it most successfully aren’t necessarily the ones with the most resources or the best strategy. They’re the ones that remain aligned while executing it.