It is assuring that your organizational structure, systems and operational processes all contribute toward achieving your mission and vision of meeting customer and other stakeholder needs. They re only there for one purpose to contribute to it. Far and away the greatest leverage of this principle of alignment comes when your people are in alignment with your mission, vision, and strategy. I have watched upper management organize and reorganize but when they aligned us something clicked. My behavior became consistent with the vision and I was aiming at the same target as everyone else.
Bottom line is effective alignment gets people moving down the path.
This leads to empowerment in a way that organizing rarely does. The last role of leadership is empowerment or enabling others to act. It is empowering organizational members to take responsibility and ownership. People have enormous talent, ingenuity, intelligence, creativity. Most of it lies dormant.