Try this.
Ask each member of your executive team (separately, without warning) to give you one sentence that describes your overarching strategy. Not the slide. Not the narrative. One sentence, off the top of their head.
You will probably get as many noticeably different answers as there are people in the room.
This isn't a failure of intelligence or effort. It is a predictable consequence of how many organisations build strategy: by presenting it rather than forging it. Every executive hears the same words and filters them through the lens of their own function, their own pressures, their own version of what success looks like this quarter. The CFO hears "sustainable growth" and thinks margin protection. The CMO hears the same phrase and thinks brand investment. The COO is already adjusting the delivery roadmap. Everyone is technically aligned. But not actually pulling together.
The problem is that many organisations confuse strategic planning with strategy. Planning produces documents. Strategy produces choices – specific, uncomfortable, resource-committing choices about where to play and how to win. When those choices are not made explicit, every exec defaults to their own interpretation. Individual speed increases. Collective progress does not.
Alignment isn't a communication problem. It's a design problem.
The instinct is to fix this with better communication. A sharper strategy narrative, a more compelling all-hands, a set of talking points. These things matter, but they treat the symptom. The deeper issue is that alignment without genuine buy-in (or worse, understanding) is fragile. It has to be built through the process itself: real debate, honest disagreement surfaced early and a shared understanding of the trade-offs being made. This takes time that most leadership teams feel they don't have. But it is the only thing that works.
Rita McGrath's work on transient competitive advantage is pertinent here: in environments where advantage is temporary and conditions shift fast, the discipline that matters most isn't the quality of the plan, it's the quality of the shared mental model across the team executing it. When circumstances change, a team with a genuine shared understanding can adapt without waiting for instructions. A team that has been told what to do cannot.
Outcomes, not narratives.
There is a further failure mode that sits beneath the alignment problem: strategy that is rich in narrative and thin on outcomes. It sounds encouraging. It passes the slide test. But it does not answer the questions that actually matter: What does success look like in five years, and for whom? Which levers create value, and how do we know when they're working? Where does shareholder return come from, and what has to be true about customers, colleagues and communities for that return to be durable?
Value for shareholders, in most businesses, is a derivative of value created elsewhere first. The causal chain matters. If your leadership team cannot draw it, your strategy is a story not a plan. Purpose and ambition are essential to orient effort, but they need to be anchored to a clear and agreed set of priorities that tell each executive exactly where to direct scarce time and resource.
The honest conversation most leadership teams avoid.
None of this happens without a culture in which honesty, challenge and support coexist. The executives who are furthest behind on delivery are often the most reluctant to surface it. A CEO who wants genuine alignment has to model the behaviours that make that possible: naming the uncomfortable things, rewarding candour over confidence, evidence over conjecture but being genuinely open to being wrong.
This is not soft leadership. It is the most rigorous form of it. Teams that perform best under uncertainty are not the ones with the most talented individuals, they are the ones where team members feel safe enough to speak up. Early. Before a problem becomes a crisis.
Same direction. Real pace.
The executives running fast but not always together are not the problem. They are, in many cases, exactly the right people. The question is whether the strategy they are running towards is crisp enough, honest enough and owned enough to give that pace genuine collective momentum.
