Cheri & Eric Plantenberg on Why Most Leadership Teams Confuse Alignment With Agreement
Episode notes
"Alignment doesn't mean we agree. It means we're all supporting the decision that actually got made."
Most leadership teams think they're aligned because nobody's arguing in the room. Eric and Cheri Plantenberg would tell you that's not alignment — that's just people who've learned it isn't safe to disagree out loud.
Cheri built a following of 40M+ views reinventing herself as a writer, psilocybin facilitator, and couples coach after losing her first husband to brain cancer. Eric founded a personal development company that's transformed tens of thousands of lives, later built one of the largest kombucha companies in the world, summited Everest, and served a year in federal prison for a tax misdemeanor. They met as prison pen pals. Now married, they run a couples coaching practice — and in this episode, they make the case that the skills missing from most boardrooms are the same ones missing from most marriages.
What you'll walk away with:
- Why treating every mistake as either a breakdown or a growth moment changes team psychological safety more than any HR policy will
- The real reason your best hires hit a wall in year one or two — and what onboarding should borrow from pre-marriage counseling
- Why hiring for cultural fit over skill set outperformed resume-matching when Eric scaled a company from 8 to 100+ employees
- The alignment mistake most leadership teams make: confusing agreement with genuine buy-in
- A five-part framework — values, trust, communication, alignment, repair — you can steal for onboarding and 1:1s this week
#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships
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You can connect with Cheri and Eric here:
You can connect with Karl Pontau here:
www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1
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