Communicating Strategy So People Can Act on It

A strategy that lives in a slide deck is not much use to the people who have to carry it out. Every day, managers and staff make hundreds of small decisions about what to work on, what to say no to and how to spend money. Strategy communication succeeds when those everyday decisions start to point in the same direction.

That is a different goal from "everyone has seen the strategy." People can attend the all-hands meeting, read the memo and still be unable to say what the organization's priorities are, or how their own work connects to them.

This guide covers how to close that gap: agree at the top first, make the strategy concrete, explain the intent behind it, cascade it through conversations and check that it has landed.

The alignment gap is real

Research suggests most organizations overestimate how well their strategy is understood. Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2018, reported on 124 organizations and found that "only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company's strategic priorities." They also found that senior executives tend to rate alignment more favorably than the managers below them do.

In an earlier Harvard Business Review article (March 2015), Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull wrote that two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle with execution, and recommended focusing on coordination across organizational silos and on adapting to changes as they emerge on the front lines.

The lesson is not that people are careless. It is that communicating strategy takes more deliberate work than most leaders expect.

Start by aligning the top team

Before you communicate strategy to anyone else, make sure your own team agrees on it. In the same MIT Sloan Management Review study, just over half of senior executives in a typical organization converged on the same list of strategic objectives, and agreement dropped to 22% among the executives who report to the top team.

A simple test: ask each member of your leadership team to write down, independently, the organization's top priorities. Compare the lists. Differences are not a failure; they are the conversation you need to have before anything is announced.

Make the strategy specific enough to act on

People can only act on a strategy that makes real choices. Check yours against a few questions:

• Does it name the central challenge or opportunity the organization faces, in plain language?
• Are there only a handful of priorities? Google's re:Work guide on OKRs, for example, recommends three to five objectives.
• Does it say what you will stop doing or not pursue? A strategy without trade-offs reads as a wish list.
• Are priorities distinct from business as usual? "Serve customers well" is a standing expectation, not a strategic choice.
• Is it free of jargon that different people will interpret differently?

Explain the intent, not just the instruction

Plans meet reality and change. When they do, people need to understand why a priority exists so they can adapt without waiting for permission. For each priority, communicate:

• Why it matters now.
• What success looks like, including one or two measures.
• The boundaries: what people should not do in pursuit of it, such as spending limits or quality standards that must not slip.
• Who decides what, and when to escalate.

For example, imagine a hypothetical regional distributor whose priority is improving on-time delivery. If drivers and dispatchers understand that the purpose is keeping key customers from switching suppliers, they can make sensible judgment calls — like prioritizing a late order for a large account — that a bare instruction to "hit 95% on-time" would never cover.

Cascade through conversations, not just broadcasts

Town halls and memos announce a strategy; conversations make it usable. Sull, Sull and Yoder recommend that "Rather than hosting another town hall, top executives should focus first on their direct reports," making sure each understands the strategy and how their part of the organization fits into it.

Ask each leader to do the same with their team: translate company priorities into what they mean for that team, and write down how the team's goals connect. Making goals visible across the organization helps. Google's OKR guide notes that its "OKRs are public so that everyone in the organization can see what others are working on."

Expect to repeat yourself. A message that feels stale to you after the tenth telling may be new to most of the people hearing it. Use the same few words each time so priorities become easy to recall.

Check understanding, not just delivery

Measure whether the strategy has landed, not whether it was sent. A few ways:

• Ask people at different levels to explain the priorities in their own words.
• Include a question about priorities in regular pulse surveys.
• Look at where budget, hiring and time actually go. Resource decisions reveal the real strategy.
• Notice what gets escalated to you. Repeated questions on the same topic often signal an unclear priority.

Invite pushback. Frontline staff often see problems with a strategy before executives do, and they will only raise them if doing so is welcomed.

Keep strategy alive as conditions change

Review priorities on a regular rhythm, such as quarterly, and say clearly what has changed and why. Changing course in response to new information is healthy; changing without explanation looks like drift.

Be careful about tying strategic goals too tightly to individual performance ratings. Google's OKR guide says "OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations," and keeping them separate makes it easier for people to set ambitious goals and report honestly on progress.

Key takeaways

• Assume understanding is lower than you think, and measure it rather than guessing.
• Align your own leadership team on the priorities before communicating them more widely.
• Keep priorities few, make real trade-offs and explain the purpose behind each one.
• Cascade through direct reports and team conversations, and make goals visible across the organization.
• Revisit priorities on a regular rhythm and explain every change.

Sources

• Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder, MIT Sloan Management Review, No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders (February 12, 2018)
• Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Harvard Business Review, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It (March 2015)
• Google re:Work, Set goals with OKRs