The Aligned Action Framework
2025.01.10
What is aligned action?
Aligned action means your decisions, choices, and behaviors are in congruence with your inner wisdom, level of vitality, responsibilities as a leader, and desires as a human.
You spend your worktime strategically, in service to your greater mission without sacrificing your personal well-being.
You have the bandwidth to devote to the impactful leadership and managerial activities that are commensurate with your post and your ambition.
Because your life outside of work is infused with the same care and intention you bring you your leadership craft, you find that you enjoy it more, can cultivate deeper relationships, and are experiencing something truly special.
You’re able to maintain a symbiotic relationship between work and life – each makes the other better.
The Aligned Action Framework
There are four necessary elements for consistently taking aligned action. The Aligned Action Framework synthesizes them into a practical touchstone.
1. Rely on Your Inner Compass
Your inner compass is the true foundation for everything you do at work and in life.
It underpins your thoughts and behaviors and guides you to the choices you make day in and day out.
With a little practice, it becomes second nature for you to intentionally access it, allowing you to weave its wisdom into your decision making – including at work on a daily basis.
But here’s a note of caution – when it’s out of whack, it’ll steer you off course. And if any of the elements within it – values, needs, motivations, purpose, intuition – are misaligned, it results in a subtle-but-constant drain on your energy which over time puts you on the path to burning out.
In addition to understanding the composition of your inner compass, it’s critical for you to know how to refine it over time and to be able to tune into its wisdom on demand – clearly and without static.
2. Leverage the Lead-Manage-Do Context Trifecta
To be both influential and effective, leaders need a deep understanding of the three distinct-but-overlapping contexts they face on a daily basis: leading, managing, and doing.
Basically, this is about knowing which “hat” you are wearing in any given moment, checking that you are wearing the right one for the situation, and then using that context’s tools appropriately.
It matters whether you are allocating your time correctly across leading, managing, and doing activities. It also matters that you know exactly which context you are sitting in when you go to solve a problem.
If you spend more time in the weeds than you’d like or spend your day hopping from one “urgent” matter to the next without time to focus on what you said was your priority, you’re likely out of alignment here. The tools in this area of the framework can help you delegate better and to use your mental bandwidth for the true responsibilities of leadership.
In addition to leveraging the lead-manage-do perspectives throughout your workday, this trifecta can help guide your acquisition and refinement of skills, mindsets, and behaviors over the course of your career, and to forge your legacy as a leader.
And here’s a bonus, you can apply this same lens to your activities outside of work and see what a difference it makes.
3. Take a Portfolio Approach to Your Work-Life Management
The secret to maintaining relaxed control during your workweek and in life is to take a step back and set an overarching strategy for managing both, using the same tools. An incredibly useful approach to employ is that of a portfolio.
Each area of responsibility in work and life is a distinct aspect within your total portfolio, as are other pursuits, endeavors, or areas of interest (e.g., relationships, hobbies, personal growth, travel). Contrast this with thinking about your work and life realms separately, as most people naturally do.
Using a portfolio approach helps you relax knowing nothing is falling through the cracks. It facilitates easy reprioritization, accommodates the unexpected, helps you proactively address the future, and works in alignment with your preferences and style.
4. Proactively Tend to Your Personal Energy
Research demonstrates that a leader’s vitality (or lack their of) impacts their team and the organization. Your well-being also matters for everything else you have to and want to do in life. So, the final element in the Aligned Action Framework is to proactively tend to your personal energy.
Four energy domains are equally important when it comes to your vitality – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Often when you are drained but can’t figure out why it is because you’re neglecting one or more of them.
Each has its own fundamentals of fueling, resting, and healing/recovering as well as idiosyncratic elements that are unique to you.
All day long, each domain is sending you messages about its current state. When you pick up on the messages sooner, you can make small adjustments. When you tune out the messages, they get louder and louder until they can’t be ignored.
When you come to understand your personal energy and proactively tend to it, it’s like a new level of presence and flow is unlocked for you.
Applying the Aligned Action Framework
As a recap, aligned action means your decisions, choices, and behaviors are in congruence with your inner wisdom, level of vitality, responsibilities as a leader, and desires as a human.
And though that may seem like a lofty ideal, when broken down into the concrete tactics of relying on an inner compass, leveraging the lead-manage-do context trifecta, employing a portfolio approach to work-life management, and proactively tending to personal energy – it becomes not only possible but attainable.
Deep Dive into the Aligned Action Framework
For a deep dive into the framework and its practical applications for leaders, you can book a workshop.
Questions for Reflection
Here are some questions you can use to start applying the Aligned Action Framework at work and in life, today.
What’s one thing you could do today to deepen your connection to your inner wisdom?
Do you think you spend your time optimally when it comes to leading, managing, and doing? If not, what adjustment might you make?
To what extent is your current approach to managing your work and life working for you? Are there any tweaks to be made?
Of the four energy domains – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual – which do you neglect the most and what is one thing you might do about that?
What’s one thing you could do this week to be more aligned across your inner wisdom, level of vitality, responsibilities as a leader, and desires as a human?
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