DAC (Direction-Alignment-Commitment)
Direction-Alignment-Commitment treats good leadership as an outcome to check for, not a person or a style - a group has it when it agrees where it's going, coordinates how it gets there, and is actually willing to do the work.
Three circles overlap - direction, alignment and commitment - and leadership shows up only where all three meet.
Reach for this when…
- Everyone can recite the strategy and the work still isn't coordinating between teams.
- People say they're committed and keep quietly deprioritising the thing they agreed to.
- A leadership offsite produced agreement in the room that didn't survive contact with next week.
How to run it
- Introduce the three outcomes: Direction (agreement on where and why), Alignment (coordination of knowledge and action across the group), Commitment (genuine willingness to do what the work requires).
- Diagnose which of the three is actually weakest, not which is easiest to talk about.
- Map the current state across all three, specifically, not in general terms.
- Identify one concrete action that addresses the weakest one.
- Check back at a fixed point, roughly 90 days out, and reassess.
A worked example
Situation. Elina Korhonen runs operations for Pohjolan Rahti, a freight company across three regions, based in Tampere, Finland, where shipments kept getting mis-routed between regions despite every regional manager saying they backed the same growth plan.
Applied. Diagnosing against the three outcomes showed Direction was solid - everyone could state the growth target the same way - but Alignment was the actual gap: no one had agreed how routing decisions got coordinated once a shipment crossed a regional line.
Result. The fix was one weekly coordination call and a shared routing rule, not a new strategy off-site. Mis-routes dropped within the first month because the missing outcome, not a missing plan, had been named.
The catch
It's easy to mistake enthusiastic agreement in a room for real Direction or Commitment, when it's actually just politeness under pressure to nod along. The framework also names what's missing without saying how to fix it - the fix still has to be designed for the specific group.
If people agree fast and specifics still fall through the cracks, you have Direction without Alignment - don't mistake one for both.
Origin: Center for Creative Leadership (Drath, McGuire, Van Velsor)