Be Aligned to Go Your Own Way.
Fifty years ago, Fleetwood Mac was recording what would become one of the top ten best-selling albums of all time.
But behind the music, the band was unraveling.
Mick Fleetwood's wife had left him for his best friend. John and Christine McVie had divorced after eight years of marriage. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were in the middle of a painful breakup.
Several songs on the album were literally written about their drama. They were wounds set to melody.
By every conventional measure of organizational health, this dysfunction was a recipe for failure. No one would have predicted what would emerge from that studio in Sausalito.
Rumours. More than 40 million copies sold. One of the top ten best-selling albums in history. Still selling fifty years later.
What's remarkable isn't so much the success itself but the success in the face of complicated and challenging circumstances.
Fleetwood Mac lacked personal alignment. But they maintained professional (leadership) alignment. That distinction matters more than most businesses realize.
Many organizations assume alignment means everyone agrees, gets along, and enjoys working together. That's certainly ideal, but it's not always realistic.
And as Fleetwood Mac proved, it's not always required.
Relational alignment asks: do we like and get along with one another?
Functional alignment asks: do we agree on what we're building, what defines greatness, and how we'll align to get there?
Leadership alignment asks: do we trust one another and agree with the growth strategy ahead of us?
Fleetwood Mac had little of the first and a remarkable amount of the other two.
Their standards, accountability, and commitment were aligned with their outcome: produce exceptional music. When a track needed another take, they took it. If a lyric wasn't right, they rewrote it. A song wasn't ready until it was ready.
And perhaps most remarkably (and ironically), the only song on the album credited to all five members was The Chain. It certainly didn't describe their relational alignment but it did symbolically represent their functional and leadership commitment to success.
In business, teams often confuse harmony with alignment. Some organizations have very little conflict because no one challenges anything.
That's not healthy. That's stagnation.
Others experience tension because talented people care deeply about the result. They don't avoid conflict. They channel it productively and continue executing through it.
They ensure sales, marketing, brand, and culture remain committed to the same objective, even when opinions differ.
Rumours succeeded because, despite the relational dysfunction, the underlying functional and leadership structure remained strong enough to sustain elite performance.
That's what durable Quality of Growth (QofG) looks like.
The Breakout Score measures the strength of sales, marketing, brand, culture, and both functional and leadership alignment to identify what you need to produce durable QofG.
In the end, relational disagreement wasn't Fleetwood Mac's enemy.
But functional and leadership misalignment would have been.
Businesses who learn this lesson will succeed.
Those who don't?
They'll likely go their own way. But it may not be the right direction.
10 Minute Growth Note: It took Stevie Nicks just over 10 minutes to write the hit song Dreams. She wrote it on a bed in a spare studio room.
What are you doing for your organizational culture that inspires greatness in 10 minutes?
Are your shared standards, direction, and definition of what defines success strong enough to stand up to any issues of relational harmony?
