A strategy received, but never fully translated.

More than a decade ago, while working for a global technology corporation, I experienced strategy misalignment from the receiving end. The company was making a visible push into smartphones built on a major software platform. Employees were expected to replace existing company-issued devices with the firm’s own handset. Commercial teams were also expected to speak to clients about the product line, its direction and the wider roadmap. On paper, the message looked decisive: the organisation was backing its own strategy.

At my level, however, the practical expectation remained uncertain. Were we meant simply to demonstrate belief in the product, create demand within our accounts, change the way we positioned the company, or influence a different set of buying decisions? What would good execution look like in my role, and how would it be measured? The direction reached us, but its meaning did not. We received little role-specific capability building, the surrounding processes did not materially change, and there was no sustained managerial rhythm to help us work through the new conversations. The culture around us remained largely as it had been before the announcement.

People responded as people usually do when the objective is visible but the execution logic is not: we filled in the gaps ourselves. Some complied with the internal requirements. Some improvised a client story. Others waited for greater clarity. The organisation later exited the smartphone category. I would not reduce that business outcome to one internal alignment problem; market strategies succeed or fail for many reasons. But the experience stayed with me because it revealed an early warning sign. Visible compliance can coexist with considerable uncertainty about what the strategy requires.

The first fracture often occurs before the cascade

The same problem can begin much higher in the organisation. At the end of a strategy offsite, a CEO may ask whether the leadership team is aligned. Heads nod, the debate closes and the plan is approved. Yet an executive can accept the direction while retaining serious reservations about pace, investment, sequencing or the burden placed on a particular function. Agreement establishes that the direction is acceptable. Alignment requires the team to build a shared interpretation of the choices, trade-offs, interdependencies and personal commitments needed to deliver it.

Those reservations rarely disappear. They re-emerge through delayed decisions, protected budgets and different descriptions of what matters. Each leader then takes the agreed strategy back to a function that sees the enterprise through a legitimate but partial lens. The growth leader emphasises expansion, the finance leader emphasises returns and discipline, and the technology leader emphasises architecture and modernisation. Every interpretation may be reasonable. Without a common enterprise logic, reasonable interpretations can still become competing strategies.

Language provides an early clue. When a senior leader describes a new direction as ‘the CEO’s strategy’, people hear sponsorship without full ownership. The formal strategy has not changed, but its meaning is already being qualified. By the time those differences reach middle managers, the organisation is asking people with less authority to resolve trade-offs that the executive team has left unsettled.

The separate-room test

A leadership team can test its alignment before beginning a formal cascade. Ask each executive separately to identify the organisation’s three to five strategic priorities, the trade-offs those priorities demand, what the organisation will stop or defer, and what their own function must contribute. Then compare the answers.

McKinsey documented a striking version of this exercise at a major energy company. Five executives were independently asked to list their company’s ten highest priorities. Together they produced 23 priorities. Only two appeared on every list, while 13 appeared on only one executive’s list. They had participated in the same leadership system and were working from the same formal direction, but they did not hold the same implementation logic.

If eight executives produce eight materially different priority maps, the organisation does not yet have a strategy ready for execution. A cascade will not resolve that divergence. It will transmit it.

Years later, I saw the pattern again from the adviser’s side

During my work at BTS, I worked with leadership teams and frontline populations across large global enterprises, including Fortune 100 organisations. One engagement involved a multinational industrial manufacturer competing in Asian markets against regional producers whose quoted prices were sometimes less than half of its own. The organisation could not win through price matching. Its strategy depended on selling a wider value proposition built around product consistency, technical performance, reliability, reduced lifetime risk and the quality of support.

The commercial teams had received product training. They understood specifications, applications and differentiators. But product knowledge alone did not give them what they needed to execute a value-led strategy. They needed to diagnose the customer’s business problem, quantify the economic consequences of failure, build a credible total-cost argument, respond to procurement pressure and negotiate without automatically retreating to discounting. They also needed accessible proof points, appropriate decision rights, coaching from managers and confidence that the wider organisation would support the choices the strategy demanded.

The difficulty was therefore not a lack of effort at the frontline. The organisation had asked its people to execute a sophisticated value strategy while equipping them mainly with product knowledge. The strategy, the training and the operating environment did not yet reinforce one another. People again did what seemed sensible in the moment, even when those individual choices weakened the intended position.

Research confirms the execution gap

The broader research reflects these experiences. In a PwC Strategy& survey of more than 500 senior executives, nearly two-thirds of CEOs said that execution was more difficult than strategy development, while 80 per cent felt that their overall strategy was not well understood inside their own company. McKinsey’s work on leadership teams found that only 60 per cent of respondents believed their teams were aligned on purpose, and fewer than 40 per cent reported practicing consistent communication.

The commercial implication is significant. BCG reports that transformations with aligned leadership teams have a 70 per cent higher success rate than those without such alignment. This does not mean that alignment guarantees a successful strategy. It means that unresolved divergence at the top creates predictable problems in prioritisation, resource allocation, behaviour and accountability before execution reaches the frontline.

Later, I saw the fracture from inside the boardroom

My experience as a CHRO gave me a third vantage point: I was now part of the executive leadership team where direction was discussed, and the CEO led the strategy conversation. The pushback in those meetings was real. There were occasions when members of the C-suite were unconvinced and argued for a different interpretation or approach. But every discussion eventually reached a point at which the room had to move forward. We left saying that we agreed. Looking back, agreement did not always mean that our reservations had been resolved. Sometimes it meant that the argument had ended and each of us had taken away the responsibility of deciding what the strategy meant for our own function.

The organisation therefore continued to speak about one strategy while different functional versions began to form beneath it. Leaders made different choices about capability priorities, skill building, culture, roles and responsibilities, and rewards and recognition. Those choices were often reasonable within a function, but they did not always add up to one coherent organisational response. On the ground, we began to see uncertainty in people’s motivation and in their belief about where the organisation was headed.

The same concerns surfaced repeatedly in employee surveys. Viewed only through an HR lens, they could easily be labelled as engagement, culture, capability or communication problems. Seen in the context of the strategy, many were downstream signals of unresolved interpretation at the top. That experience changed how I understood alignment: it cannot be inferred from the absence of further debate in the boardroom. It must be visible in the consistency of the choices leaders make after they leave it.

Clarity must travel with capability, culture and systems

At Alaya, we examine individual performance through an interconnected lens. The relationship is deliberately multiplicative because a serious weakness in one element constrains the contribution of the others.

Pi = Clarity  ×  Capability ×  Culture  ×  Systems

Clarity begins with a shared understanding of direction, but it must eventually answer a role-level question: what does this require from me? Capability provides the knowledge, skills and competencies needed to act. Culture determines which behaviours are encouraged, challenged or quietly tolerated. Systems translate intent into priorities, measures, decision rights, processes and management routines. The technology-company experience lacked translation across all four. The industrial manufacturer had strategic intent and product knowledge, but not the full capability and organisational reinforcement needed to compete through value.

This is why communication alone cannot carry a strategy, and why adding another training program is often an incomplete answer. Execution improves when people receive a coherent set of signals about what matters, how to act, what support is available and how everyday decisions will be governed.

What real alignment must produce

Alignment does not require every executive to use an identical script or abandon functional expertise. It requires sufficient consistency for each leader to answer the following questions without materially contradicting colleagues:

1. Which three to five enterprise priorities outrank everything else?

2. What choices and trade-offs make those priorities real?

3. What will the organisation stop, defer or resource differently?

4. What must each function contribute, and where must it sacrifice local optimisation?

5. Which cross-functional dependencies and decision rights must be resolved?

6. What must people at each level do differently, and what capability, cultural and system support will make that possible?

Once these answers are explicit, functional translation becomes useful rather than dangerous. Each function can make the strategy relevant to its own population without changing the underlying enterprise meaning.

Align the custodians, then equip the organisation

Alaya’s work starts by making interpretation gaps visible before they are packaged into a communication cascade. We independently surface how leaders understand the direction, reconcile conflicting priorities and assumptions, and convert agreement into explicit enterprise choices. The output must go beyond a successful workshop: a common performance narrative, agreed trade-offs, functional contribution maps, cross-functional dependencies, ownership and decision rights.

Only then should the strategy move through the organisation. Translation must define what changes for each level, function and role; which behaviours become more important; which capabilities need to be built; and which processes, measures and management routines must change. Managers need a usable narrative and the space to resolve questions, rather than a slide deck they are expected to repeat.

The sequence matters. When leadership teams communicate before they have resolved their own interpretation gaps, they ask the organisation to absorb ambiguity at scale. When leaders align the enterprise logic and the organisation equips people to act on it, strategy begins to acquire operational meaning.

The first act of execution

Across my career, I have now seen this fracture from three positions: as a manager receiving a strategy, as an adviser helping enterprises translate it, and as a CHRO participating in the leadership conversation itself. The pattern changed form, but its underlying logic remained consistent. Strategy execution began to weaken wherever shared direction was not converted into shared meaning, conscious trade-offs and collective commitments, and wherever those choices were not translated into the capabilities, behaviours and organisational conditions people needed to perform.

The separate-room test is a useful place to begin. If the answers reveal materially different priorities, trade-offs and expectations, pause the cascade. The organisation does not need more confident communication of an unresolved strategy. It needs alignment at the source, followed by disciplined translation into action.

REFERENCES

[1] McKinsey & Company (2001). Teamwork at the top.

[2] PwC Strategy& (2017). Strategic performance measurement: Creating a common language to drive execution.

[3] McKinsey & Company (2020). Improve your leadership team’s effectiveness through key behaviours.

[4] Boston Consulting Group (2020). Learn from the Best in Organizational Transformation.