Four Habits That Break Strategy Execution

Leadership Kung Fu, co-hosted by Sandi Verreccia, is a leadership development podcast. Episode 67 examines strategy execution and highlights Expectation Drift as the most common obstacle.

Expectation Drift occurs when a team assumes alignment on objectives, but has not clearly defined what successful outcomes look like.

Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard research puts the failure rate of strategy execution at up to 90%. Gallup’s 2024 workplace report found that only 46% of U.S. employees strongly agreed they knew what was expected of them at work, down from 56% in March 2020.

This episode outlines several habits that undermine strategy execution, along with practices to help teams address these challenges.

One of the clearest signs of drift is rework: how often does a team redo the same task? Usually, it’s because the original ask was never specific. Someone gets told to bring a rock. They bring a rock. The answer comes back: not that rock. Not a little rock, a big one. Not just any rock, a pet rock.

Repeated cycles of unclear requests erode not only time, but also trust and respect between team members.

Practice: Define what good looks like before handing off the work. If you’re asking for a rock, specify the size, shape, and purpose.

Leaders who lack firsthand experience may use vague slogans such as innovation, transformation, or “leverage AI” instead of providing clear instructions. This use of broad terms often reduces clarity rather than enhancing it.

To address this, clarify slogans before communicating them to the team. Specify what terms like “leverage AI” mean for each role, or engage team members in defining how these concepts apply to their work.

Practice: Convert strategic language into clear, actionable instructions before sharing with the team.

When new priorities are added to existing workloads, the phrase “do more with less” often emerges. In reality, capacity decreases as priorities increase, and vague language obscures the need to make specific trade-offs.

Sandi noted that she has watched this play out at the board level, too. During one major board decision, most of the room sat quietly running the numbers in their heads until one person finally asked which specific trade-offs the board was willing to make to get it done. That one question moved the discussion forward.

Practice: Clearly state trade-offs when introducing new mandates. Specify what will be stopped or deprioritized, and ask directly about the necessary adjustments.

Checking in is often mistaken for micromanagement, though they are distinct. Micromanagement involves directing every detail, while checking in simply means asking for progress updates.

Another common issue is the lack of deadlines. Discussing a task does not establish clear expectations unless timelines, milestones, and success criteria are defined. Ambiguous instructions, such as “as quickly as possible,” create uncertainty until clarified.

Practice: Assign deadlines and milestones to each request, and confirm understanding by having the recipient repeat the instructions.

Leaders and their teams will find practical strategies in this episode to help prevent miscommunication and keep strategy execution on track.