The strategy problem that wasn’t

The CEO of a multinational financial services firm came to me convinced he had a strategy problem.

His leadership team had agreed a strategy two years earlier, and execution had been uneven ever since. For eighteen months he’d been pushing on execution discipline. More tracking, more follow-up, more pressure. None of it produced the consistency he wanted.

When we did the diagnostic work, the strategy turned out to be fine. The team was the problem.

It had set into roles that were defined two CEOs earlier. Two senior executives had become the dominant voices, and the rest had quietly stopped disagreeing out loud. The CFO and the COO didn’t trust each other and had been working against each other for over a year, through side channels he’d never been part of. And one executive who had been excellent at the company’s previous stage wasn’t operating at the level the new strategy needed, and nobody had told him.

He’d been pushing on the wrong thing for a year and a half.

I’ve led senior and executive teams myself, and I’ve worked with a lot of them since. When a team is quietly stuck, it’s almost always some mix of the same four things. - Roles that have set and stopped moving. - One or two voices everyone else defers to. - Factions that are civil in the meeting and work against each other outside it. - And people who were right for the last stage of the company and aren’t right for this one.

None of that shows up as a crisis. The meetings happen. The work gets done. It just gets done slower, good people start leaving for jobs that aren’t obviously better, and the CEO ends up doing more of it himself.

And the CEO’s first explanation is almost never the real one. It’s usually strategy, or execution, or communication. Those are the symptoms. The cause is sitting around the table with him every Monday. /Ulrika Details changed to protect my client’s confidentiality.