CEO of Aligned| Leadership Development | Team Building | Corporate Training | Change Management | Public Speaking | Strategic Planning | Management Consultant | Enterprise Alignment | Performance & Purpose Alignment |
The Cost of Polite Dysfunction
Most executive teams are exceptional at hiding their own fractures. They sit in expensive chairs, review quarterly targets, and politely ignore the friction in their own ranks. When engagement drops or turnover spikes, they hire consultants to fix the managers below them. Laurie Battaglia walks into those boardrooms and stops the charade. She knows the problem rarely starts in the middle. It starts at the top, and it only ends when the people in charge finally admit what is broken.
The Architect of Radical Alignment
Laurie Battaglia is the CEO of Aligned at Work, an organizational development firm that rescues high-revenue companies from their own internal chaos. She does not deal in superficial corporate retreats or temporary morale boosts. Instead, she dismantles toxic hierarchies and forces leaders to confront the uncomfortable realities standing between them and actual high performance.
Thirty Years Inside the Machine
The authority she brings to a boardroom was not learned in a vacuum. She spent three decades building enterprise leadership programs inside Fortune 500 financial institutions. At Vanguard and Wells Fargo, she watched major industry consolidations and rapid growth expose the deep flaws in traditional corporate structures. She saw high-potential talent burn out while senior leaders remained completely detached from the human cost of their decisions.
She scaled programs for massive business units and designed cross-functional training systems that actually kept employees from walking out the door. But she also saw the limitations of the corporate machine. The higher she climbed, eventually reaching the vice president level, the more she recognized that traditional training was just a temporary fix. It was a polite bandage over a deep organizational wound.
The turning point was deeply personal. She realized that changing a corporate culture required more than just new processes. It required individuals to understand their own internal wiring. This was not a realization she reached by reading management books. It came from doing the hard, introspective work on herself.
“The work of great leadership starts right there, with the awareness that the first years of our lives form who we are and what we believe,” she says. This realization pushed her toward therapy and the study of Internal Family Systems. It was a profound shift that forced her to examine her own past before asking others to do the same.
“It’s made me a far better leader than I was in my earlier years,” she admits. That vulnerability became her ultimate professional weapon. She stopped playing by the traditional corporate rules and started encouraging radical self-awareness from the people she trained. She left the corporate banking machine to build a practice on her own terms.
The Six Days That Changed a Company
Today, her firm works with organizations generating nine to twelve figures in revenue, stepping in when growth outpaces alignment. The stakes are immense. A disconnected executive team can cost a company millions in lost talent and stalled initiatives. When the leaders at the top cannot agree on a direction, the managers below them spend their days fighting invisible wars.
Her approach is direct by design. When she is called in to assess a struggling department, the diagnostic often points to issues originating with the C-suite. The executives bring her company in to fix the managers, often blind to the reality that they are the architects of the chaos.
“We often get hired to address an issue at a different level in the organization, but as we do our discovery work, we quickly uncover that the problem starts at the executive level,” she explains. That diagnosis is rarely what the senior leaders want to hear. With her guidance, executives face the fact that their own lack of alignment is bleeding into the ranks. Sometimes, she has to tell an executive team that one of their own simply needs to leave.
The results of this directness are undeniable. When a family-owned construction company faced a critical CEO transition, she designed a comprehensive leadership program for their frontline managers. But the eight senior executives did something entirely unexpected. They opted to complete the intense six-day curriculum themselves.
“They emerged from the experience changed,” she says. The executives did not just review the material. They lived it, eventually standing up in front of their peers to declare their own core beliefs in what she calls a Leadership Stance. That single intervention fundamentally altered the culture, and produced a 113 percent return on investment and a unified leadership front. The executives became ambassadors for the program, and are frequent observers in every class. They honor the people and it’s returned tenfold.
She replicated this success with a Fortune 50 financial institution. A senior leader was tasked with rebuilding a high-touch customer service division from scratch after a major relocation. The pressure was intense, with new processes and strict service level agreements against tight timelines.
“Rather than a one-and-done strategy day, we scheduled them over time and worked through a proven method that we’d used with other teams,” she notes. By pulling the team together for deep, recurring alignment sessions, they secured a 31 percent increase in team engagement and a 10 percent increase in their already committed leadership team. The numbers proved that her methods worked, but the real victory was the human connection forged in those rooms.
The End of Hiding
Executive teams can only hide behind quarterly earnings reports for so long. Eventually, the polite dysfunction catches up, and the fractures become too large to ignore. Laurie Battaglia does not offer these leaders a comfortable escape route. She offers them a mirror. By allowing the most powerful people in a company to finally tell each other the truth, she gives them the one thing a spreadsheet never could. Trust and alignment.
Laurie Battaglia is the CEO of Aligned at Work® based in Scottsdale, Arizona. She rebuilds disconnected executive teams into unified, high-performing units for growing organizations. To connect with Laurie or learn more, visit alignedatwork.com.
