I don’t know a single dealer executive who isn’t working hard. 

Leadership teams are stretched thin. Calendars are full. Days are long. Most leaders feel like they’re carrying more than their fair share, and in many cases, they are. The problem isn’t effort. 

The problem is that effort has become the proxy for effectiveness. 

In the heavy equipment business, busyness is often mistaken for productivity. Leaders are rewarded for being responsive, available, and deeply involved. And yet, many dealerships feel stuck—running faster without gaining traction. Growth initiatives stall. Strategic priorities blur. The same issues resurface quarter after quarter. 

That’s what misalignment looks like in practice. 

The Effort Trap 

Effort is visible. Results are delayed. 

A busy leadership team feels productive because work is constant and problems are being solved in real time. Phones ring. Emails get answered. Meetings fill the calendar. Decisions get made quickly—often by the same few people. 

But effort without alignment creates motion, not momentum. 

Aligned leadership teams don’t necessarily work fewer hours. What’s different is where their energy goes. Instead of absorbing work from the organization, they focus on shaping it. Instead of reacting to symptoms, they work on the underlying systems that create those symptoms in the first place. 

This is the difference between working in the business and working on the business—and most leaders spend far more time doing the former than they realize. 

Working In vs. Working On the Business 

When executives are working in the business, they are indispensable, and that’s precisely the problem. 

They are pulled into operational decisions that should sit lower in the organization. They solve problems quickly, but at the cost of developing others. They attend meetings to keep things moving, rather than redesigning the conditions that cause work to stall in the first place. 

Working on the business is less urgent, less visible, and often uncomfortable. It requires leaders to step back, clarify priorities, make trade-offs explicit, and resist the temptation to rescue. It means designing systems that allow the organization to function without constant executive intervention. 

Most leadership teams say they want this. Few build the discipline required to sustain it. 

Tool #1: PIC Ratings. Making Capacity Visible 

One of the root causes of misalignment is that leadership teams dramatically underestimate the true cost of initiatives. 

Every new project sounds reasonable in isolation. The problem is cumulative load. 

That’s why we use PIC ratings to force clarity around what each initiative will actually demand from the organization. 

PIC stands for People, Impact, and Complexity. Each dimension is rated on a 1–3–9 scale, where 1 is low, 3 is moderate, and 9 is high. The intent isn’t precision; it’s honesty. 

When leadership teams rate initiatives together, several things happen. First, assumptions get challenged. A project someone views as “simple” often turns out to be highly complex once downstream effects are discussed. Second, trade-offs become unavoidable. When the board is full of high-impact, high-complexity initiatives, it becomes obvious that not everything can be a priority. 

PIC ratings shift the conversation from optimism to realism. They move leaders from “Can we do this?” to “What will we stop doing if we commit to this?” That’s where alignment starts. 

Tool #2: Top 5 / Top 3 — Turning Alignment into Execution 

Even when leaders agree on priorities, execution often breaks down at the individual level. That’s where 
Top 5 / Top 3 comes in. The concept is simple, but the discipline is not. Each leader defines their five most important priorities for the quarter. For each priority, they commit to three concrete actions they will personally take to move it forward. 

What makes this powerful isn’t the list; it’s the constraint. 

Five priorities force focus. Three actions force specificity. And reviewing them regularly forces accountability. 

When leadership teams use Top 5 / Top 3 together, misalignment surfaces quickly. If one leader’s top priorities don’t clearly support the enterprise priorities, the gap becomes visible. If someone is carrying ten “top” priorities, the issue isn’t motivation—it’s overcommitment. 

Over time, this method retrains leaders to measure productivity not by activity, but by progress. 

Tool #3: What a Leadership Roundtable Really Is—and Why Most Miss the Mark 

When dealer principals tell me their leadership team isn’t aligned, the first place I look is the leadership meeting. 

Most dealerships have something called a “leadership team,” but far fewer have a true leadership roundtable. The difference is subtle, but it matters. 

A leadership roundtable is not an information exchange. It is not a reporting forum. And it is not a place to solve operational problems for others. Its purpose is singular: to create shared clarity and collective ownership for enterprise-level outcomes. 

Who Belongs at the Table 

A properly designed roundtable is small by design. It includes leaders who have enterprise accountability, not just functional responsibility. Typically, that means the dealer principal or GM, along with the heads of sales, service, parts, and any other function that materially influences customer experience, profitability, or capacity. 

Titles matter less than scope. If someone cannot materially affect priorities, resources, or cross-functional decisions, they don’t belong at this table. That doesn’t diminish their importance—it preserves the roundtable’s effectiveness. 

When too many people are included, the meeting shifts from alignment to accommodation. 

How a Leadership Roundtable Should Function 

The tone of a strong roundtable is disciplined, candid, and forward-looking. 

Instead of starting with updates, it starts with priorities. Leaders ground the conversation in what matters most right now, not everything that’s happening. Discussion centers on progress against shared goals, emerging constraints, and decisions that require cross-functional alignment. 

Importantly, leaders don’t speak for their departments; they speak for the enterprise. That shift alone changes behavior. The question stops being “What’s best for my function?” and becomes “What’s best for the dealership as a whole?” 

Conflict is not avoided—but it is productive. Disagreement is surfaced early, before it hardens into friction at the middle-management level. Decisions are made clearly, trade-offs are acknowledged, and ownership is explicit. 

A Simple Example in Practice 

Imagine a leadership roundtable discussing a push to improve service throughput. 

In a typical meeting, service reports capacity issues, sales pushes for more bookings, parts flags availability concerns, and the discussion ends with vague agreement and no real change. 

In a well-functioning roundtable, the conversation goes deeper. Leaders step back and look at the system. They examine whether current priorities are realistic given staffing, training levels, and process stability. They debate trade-offs openly—perhaps deciding to slow sales commitments temporarily while service capability is strengthened, rather than forcing the issue downstream. 

The outcome isn’t a longer to-do list. It’s a shared decision, understood and supported by every leader at the table, that the organization can now execute consistently. 

Why This Matters 

When leadership roundtables work, alignment compounds. Middle managers receive clearer signals. Fewer initiatives collide. Leaders stop rescuing and start reinforcing. The organization feels calmer—not because there’s less work, but because there’s less confusion. 

That is what alignment looks like in practice. 

And it almost always starts in the room where leaders decide how they lead together. 

Alignment Is a Leadership Choice 

Alignment doesn’t happen through better communication or more meetings. It happens when leaders are willing to slow down, make hard choices, and hold the line on focus. 

This requires a shift in identity for many executives. Being indispensable feels good. Being needed feels productive. But organizations don’t scale on heroics. They scale on clarity and consistency. 

The leadership teams that make this shift stop measuring their value by how busy they are. They measure it by whether the organization is moving in the same direction, at the same pace, toward the same outcomes. 

Final Thought 

Your leadership team isn’t struggling because it lacks effort. 

It’s struggling because effort is scattered. 

Alignment turns effort into results. It converts motion into momentum. And it allows leaders to work on the business without losing control of it. 

Busy keeps things running. 
Aligned determines where they’re going. 

And that difference shows up in every result that matters.