Leadership teams tend to experience alignment debt as friction. The people below them experience it as something quieter and more corrosive: they can no longer tell what actually matters.

When the priorities set in a meeting drift over the following weeks, the drift does not register as a strategy gap to the people executing. It registers as disconnection. The work they were told was urgent goes unmentioned. The metric they were measured against changes without explanation. Over time, they stop trying to read the signal and start protecting their energy instead.

This is where the current conversation about burnout becomes