Leaders are often too quick to blame the strategy when a business is not making progress. It is an understandable instinct because strategy is visible, discussable and relatively easy to revisit. Execution is harder to interrogate because it forces a more uncomfortable question: did we actually do what we said we were going to do?
A business can spend months changing direction when the original plan was never properly executed, which is exactly what I found with John, not his real name, who had been running his business for 15 years. Growth had been steady, but slower than he believed it should have been, and he was convinced the strategy was wrong.
Once we unpacked it, however, the strategy itself proved to be sound. The issue was that the team knew what needed to be done but was not executing consistently enough, which meant the problem was not one of direction but of follow-through.
In practical terms, the difference is fairly simple: are you unsure what to do, or do you know what to do and it simply is not happening?
A strategy problem exists at the level of direction. The goal may be unclear, or there may be several possible paths towards it and the business struggles to decide which should take priority. The team can work hard and still make limited progress because, although the effort is there, it is being aimed at the wrong target.
Good strategy requires research, trade-offs and judgement calls, often under real uncertainty about how things will play out. Leaders have to decide where they want the business to compete, what deserves attention and which opportunities they are prepared to leave alone.
An execution problem looks different. The direction is understood and the team is aligned on what needs to be done, what the deadline is and what ‘complete’ should look like, yet the business still underdelivers. Deadlines are missed, accountability is inconsistent, there is not enough bandwidth or skill, or the plan for getting the work done is simply not robust enough.
This is where misdiagnosis becomes expensive. If the underlying problem is execution but the leadership team responds by changing the strategy, the business can spend a great deal of time and money revisiting decisions that were not necessarily wrong in the first place.
One of the reasons this happens is that strategy is often the part people enjoy. Setting strategy is interesting, creative and intellectually stimulating. Leadership teams get to step away from the day-to-day running of the business, challenge assumptions, explore opportunities and think about where the company should go next. There is a certain appeal to the process.
Execution is usually far less appealing because it happens over weeks and months, alongside everything else people are expected to do. It requires teams to keep returning to the same priorities, follow through on commitments and have difficult conversations when things start slipping.
For owners and leaders, it can therefore be easier to decide that the business needs a new direction than to look cold-heartedly at what was agreed and acknowledge that the team simply did not do what it said it would do.
That does not automatically mean people are lazy or incapable. More often, the disciplines required for strong execution are not embedded properly in the business. There may be too many competing priorities, weak accountability, insufficient capacity or no consistent way of measuring whether meaningful progress is actually being made.
The cost of poor execution can also be easy to underestimate because it does not always appear as a hard expense on an income statement.
A product that does not get to market when planned, a quality assurance system rolled out six months late, or a sales strategy that is agreed but never properly implemented all have a cost. Time and resources may already have been invested, but the value those initiatives were intended to create is delayed or, in some cases, never realised.
When this happens across several strategic priorities, quarter after quarter, the opportunity cost can become substantial. Yet because there is no single invoice attached to it, leaders do not always see the full impact.
This is why I spend a considerable amount of time working with clients on execution. In my experience, businesses that become good at it tend to make consistent progress because they learn how to turn decisions into action and strategic priorities into completed work.
The disciplines behind good execution have been written about extensively, but in practice I find that a few principles come up repeatedly.
The first is prioritisation. CEOs and leaders almost always have a long list of strategic priorities they want the business to pursue, but resources are not unlimited and the people expected to deliver those priorities still have operational responsibilities.
When urgent operational work and important strategic work compete for the same person’s time, urgent work will usually win. Prioritisation therefore requires leaders to make real choices about what the organisation will focus on now, rather than treating every worthwhile idea as an immediate priority.
The second discipline is accountability. People are busy, and organisations need mechanisms that keep strategic commitments visible rather than assuming everyone will simply hold themselves accountable while balancing multiple demands.
A regular accountability rhythm helps teams return to priorities that might otherwise disappear beneath the day-to-day workload. That may mean reviewing progress every two weeks and asking what has moved, what has stalled and what needs to happen next.
The third principle is keeping score. If something is genuinely a strategic priority, the business should be able to see whether progress is being made against it.
Tracking agreed measures keeps priorities visible and makes it harder for projects to drift into an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ space. There is a reason every sport has some form of scoreboard: when people can see how they are performing, it affects how they respond. The same principle applies in business.
The ability of a CEO or business leader to develop a good strategy remains vital, but even a sound strategy delivers little value if it stays trapped in plans, presentations and unfinished projects.
In most cases, if I can help an organisation achieve 80 to 90 per cent of its most important strategic goals quarter after quarter, I can be confident that the business will make good progress even if the strategy itself is not perfect.
Before leaders decide to revisit the strategy, they need to understand what is actually preventing progress. Sometimes the direction does need to change because the market has moved, assumptions have proved wrong or the original choices were poor. In other cases, the business already knows what it needs to do and needs to become much better at actually doing it.
By James Hughes (Business Coach, Grow)
James Hughes* is a business coach, thinking partner to CEOs and business owners, and Grow’s thought leader on execution. He has 25 years’ experience helping leaders and businesses grow, including 12 years in management consulting and the past 13 years in business coaching. James has worked with numerous CEOs and leadership teams to navigate the challenges of growth, helping them build stronger businesses, improve performance and, in several cases, grow their companies to successful exits. As a coach at Grow, James combines strategic thinking with practical business experience, helping leaders gain clarity, make better decisions and, crucially, turn those decisions into consistent action and results. He has worked with hundreds of business leaders across a range of industries, with a particular focus on helping leaders translate strategy into execution, build accountability and create the disciplines needed to achieve sustained growth.*
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