By Sam Rioux, Managing Director, Consulting Solutions Business Acceleration

Why strategy feels hard and how leaders make it real

If your team can’t answer “What is our strategy?” with one voice, what does that cost you?

Most leadership teams have plans, budgets, and a slate of initiatives. Yet when asked, “What is our strategy?” the answers often vary. That’s not failure, it’s a signal that clarity is missing. And clarity is what unlocks bold choices and effective collaboration. When senior teams operate with candor and clarity, decision-making accelerates, engagement rises, and execution improves.

Organizations don’t drift into strategy; they design it together. The work is less about perfect spreadsheets and more about creating the conditions for healthy conflict, shared views of the market, clear priorities, and continuous learning.

A common misunderstanding: Plans and KPIs aren’t strategy

Plans and KPIs provide structure and predictability. They help leaders manage the business and hold teams accountable. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Even organizations poised for growth can stall when planning happens in silos, priorities compete, and resources become a battleground.

Consider a sales team measured on quarterly top‑line revenue. To hit quota, they sell highly customized engagements. Operations, meanwhile, is building standardized, scalable processes. The result? Deals close, but each one breaks the model, as delivery costs rise, cycle times slow, margins erode, and the strategy to scale stalls. When KPIs reward booking revenue over building scalable value, the organization optimizes for the wrong outcome.

Strategy is different. Strategy is a set of shared choices about where to play and how to win—and the commitments required to make those choices real. It names tradeoffs, reallocates resources, and clarifies what we will not pursue, even when the ideas are good.

When everything is labeled “strategic,” priorities compete. When strategy is clear, priorities align, and execution accelerates.

The human side of strategy

Strategy is not technical exercise; it’s a human one. The toughest moments aren’t building models; they’re building trust, embracing conflict, and making sacrifices in service to the whole.

The leadership behaviors that make strategy possible are:

• Vulnerability: Admit what you don’t know. Invite colleagues to challenge assumptions and expand the field of view.
• Trust: Create psychological safety where candid debate is expected, not risky. Trust turns dissent into discovery.
• Healthy conflict: Debate real tradeoffs. The best idea wins when you face difficult facts together.
• Sacrifice: Say "no" to good ideas to fund great ones. This is organizational and personal; the most successful leaders play for championships, not MVPs.
• Commitment: Align your voices and your resources, even if the path isn't your original preference.
• Curiosity: Question the logic built on past success. Durable strategies learn, they don't calcify

While these behaviors may differ from traditional strategy buzz words like growth, margin, expansion, and acquisition, they are the foundation of strategy.

From insight to practice: Senior leadership team alignment (SLTA)

If plans aren’t strategy, how do leaders build one? Not by declaring answers, but by hosting the right conversations and running a repeatable rhythm that keeps choices clear and shared. Our SLTA process guides that work:

1. Build the team and set ground rules: Start with connection before content. Use intentional exercises to build trust, candor, and a shared baseline. Set explicit ground rules or behavioral norms. These are specific expectations of yourself and others that grant permission for feedback, accountability, and ultimately create the space that your team needs to engage in real dialogue and constructive conflict. This work is never complete. It is a foundation you reinforce throughout the process.
2. Assess market realities: Hold a robust dialogue on customer trends, competitor moves, partner/supplier innovations, and the macro environment. Agree on where things stand today and forge a shared view of where they’re moving in 2-3 years and what matters most to your business.
3. Make aspirations explicit: Name the stakeholders you serve—Shareholders, Customers, Employees, Community. Define what success looks like for each group and how you will measure it.
4. Set clear priorities: Invite the team into a strategic dialogue. Based on the market realities and stakeholder outcomes, identify your strategic imperatives—the few choices that will guide plans, investments, and trade‑offs.
5. Align strategies and actions to priorities: Translate imperatives into short‑, medium‑, and long‑term actions. Show how capabilities, go‑to‑market motions, and resource shifts line up to exploit or mitigate the trends you identified.
6. Get feedback: Bring the next layer of leaders into the conversation. They see the work, the signals, and the gaps—and they will execute. Use this step to build understanding, create buy‑in, and improve the plan.
7. Iterate (teach the why behind the what): Strategy is durable, not static. Cascade, test, and refine. Evaluate new ideas together and integrate the best. Great leaders are also teachers: they open the doors to the deliberations, explain why some ideas were adopted and others were not, and build strategic capacity across the organization.
8. Make it a rhythm: Set a cadence for your team to track progress, revisit assumptions, challenge and validate your strategy. Make strategy a regular practice—not a once‑a‑year event.

Why this works

• It aligns priorities by making real trade‑offs explicit and shared.
• It accelerates execution because teams know what matters most—and what does not.
• It adapts as conditions change because the rhythm builds learning into the strategy itself

Most importantly, it respects the truth that people build and sustain strategy. When leaders model vulnerability, trust, and curiosity, teams bring their best judgment to the table—and better strategy follows.

The role of the leader

Your role is to create the conditions for strategy to emerge and endure:

• Step out of day‑to‑day urgency to host the right conversations.
• Invite challenge and dissent; treat disagreement as a resource.
• Create a culture of accountability not just for results, but for behaviors that build trust and candor.
• Fund the few choices that matter most; let go of good initiatives that dilute focus.
• Commit publicly to the shared narrative, and protect it from drift.     

When leaders do this well, strategy becomes a shared language, not a stale document.

Maybe your strategy isn’t stalled or failing; it’s waiting for leaders to make space, for teams to engage deeply, and for organizations to set bold priorities and commitments with courage.

Call to action

If your priorities compete or results lag, don’t wait. Host the conversation. Make explicit choices. Install the rhythm. Strategy isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing what matters most, together.

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