The Alignment Audit: What Integrity Looks Like in Real Time

Organizations often pride themselves on having strong values. But values aren’t what you print in annual reports. They’re what you choose when no one’s watching.

This is where most systems collapse: not in public scandal, but in quiet drift; in processes that inch away from purpose until no one can remember what the original mission was.

That’s why high-integrity organizations don’t just set values once. They recalibrate consistently.

A legacy-first redesign starts with an Alignment Audit: a process that tests whether your daily operations, culture, and incentives actually reflect your stated commitments.

Here are five ways to conduct one that matters:

1. Budget Like Your Mission Depends On It Budgets are moral documents. If your values aren’t reflected in how you allocate resources, they aren’t real. Start with your largest line items. Are they reinforcing your priorities or undermining them?

Example: Seattle's Office of Sustainability embedded a participatory budgeting process to redirect climate funding.

• They invited underrepresented communities into resource allocation discussions.

• Community priorities shifted funding from corporate offsets to urban green space.

• The process produced transparent documentation on what was funded and why.

• Over time, the initiative built community trust and cross-agency accountability.

• The effort became a model for replicating equity-centered budgeting across other departments.

2. Reengineer Incentives, Not Just Policies If your culture rewards output over ethics, that’s what will get repeated. Integrity must be the default setting, not an afterthought.

Example: The City of Austin restructured performance reviews to weight integrity metrics alongside productivity.

• Managers rated team leads on ethical decision-making, not just completion speed.

• Staff were encouraged to pause and flag ambiguous directives without retaliation.

• HR tracked patterns and rewarded departments with highest compliance.

• One department saw a 47% drop in procedural complaints within a year.

• It shifted how promotions were handled, prioritizing trustworthiness as a leadership trait.

3. Rearchitect Feedback Loops Most feedback systems reinforce hierarchy, not truth.

An alignment audit should ask: Who gets to speak? And who actually gets heard?

Example: Richmond, Virginia implemented cross-functional “speak-up panels” for staff to review top-down decisions.

• Each panel included employees from different departments and roles.

• Panels reviewed recent leadership decisions and provided anonymous ratings.

• Leadership was required to formally respond to each panel’s review.

• Staff engagement increased and resignations due to culture misalignment decreased.

• This helped identify and resolve long-simmering cultural fractures before they deepened.

4. Measure Impact at the Margin What’s working for your most vulnerable stakeholders? If you only measure average outcomes, you’ll miss where the harm is happening.

Example: San Francisco's Department of Public Health embedded disparity dashboards across programs.

• Dashboards tracked outcome gaps across racial and economic lines.

• One program identified lower follow-up care for immigrant communities.

• The agency hired community liaisons to bridge language and trust barriers.

• Six months later, follow-up rates in the flagged communities rose 38%.

• The tool is now used in annual planning to preempt inequity.

5. Document the Delta Transparency isn’t just external Documenting gaps between promise and practice helps internal stakeholders understand where the work is incomplete, and where progress is happening.

Example: Mecklenburg County launched a public-facing dashboard showing annual goals vs. current performance.

• The dashboard disaggregated goals by department and tracked delays.

• Residents could click into each metric and see corrective action plans.

• Internally, departments conducted quarterly alignment reviews to course-correct.

• It became a living integrity tracker, less polished than PR, but more powerful.

• The initiative improved morale by aligning transparency with improvement, not punishment.

Together, these agencies didn’t just realign their structures, they rebuilt trust from the inside out, proving that accountability and effectiveness aren’t competing values, but co-pilots of lasting change.

Legacy-first leadership isn’t about appearances. It’s about accountability in real time. When you audit alignment consistently, trust stops being a talking point. It becomes the way you do business.