Over the past decade, the language of work has changed considerably. Roles that were once described in terms of delivery, operations, coordination or management are now routinely framed as strategic. Position descriptions have become broader, titles have become more ambitious, and organisations increasingly expect people at almost every level to demonstrate that they can think beyond the immediate task in front of them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, good organisations should want employees to understand context, exercise judgement and connect their work to broader commercial objectives. Strategic thinking should not be reserved exclusively for the executive team, and businesses benefit when people can see how their contribution connects to the direction of the organisation. The problem begins when strategic stops being treated as a capability and starts becoming a status, or when the language of strategy begins to replace clarity around who is actually responsible for delivering an outcome.
When everyone is positioned as strategic, organisations can gradually lose sight of a much more fundamental question: who is accountable for turning intent into output? A business can have more strategic roles, more transformation programs, more leadership forums and more conversations about priorities than ever before, while simultaneously becoming less clear about who owns the work required to make those priorities happen. This is often where a gap develops between what the organisation says it is doing and what is actually being delivered. It is not necessarily a lack of effort. Frequently, the opposite is true. People are extremely busy, calendars are full and a significant amount of time is being invested in planning, discussion and alignment. Yet important initiatives move slowly because too many people are contributing to the thinking and too few people are unmistakably accountable for the doing.
When strategy becomes a status symbol
In many organisations, being considered strategic has become closely associated with seniority, influence and career progression. Employees understandably want to demonstrate that they can operate at a higher level, while businesses often use strategic language to make roles appear broader, more sophisticated or more attractive. Over time, however, this can distort the way different forms of work are valued. Planning can begin to carry more status than execution. Advising can appear more senior than owning delivery. Contributing to a steering committee can become more visible than resolving the operational issues preventing the initiative from succeeding. None of these activities are inherently problematic, but when the balance moves too far, an organisation can become increasingly skilled at discussing what should happen without becoming equally effective at ensuring that it does.
There is a useful piece of research that illustrates how significant that disconnect can become. Research discussed by MIT Sloan examined 124 organisations and found that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for strategy execution could list three of their organisation’s strategic priorities. The significance of that finding is not that these leaders were incapable of strategic thinking. Many were specifically responsible for turning strategy into action. The problem was more fundamental: the priorities had not translated into sufficient organisational clarity. That should give leaders reason to think. We may be creating more roles that are described as strategic without necessarily creating organisations that are better aligned around strategy.
That distinction matters because strategy is only useful when it helps people make better decisions. If leaders and managers cannot clearly identify the organisation’s priorities, it becomes difficult to decide where resources should be allocated, which initiatives should take precedence, what trade-offs should be made and, just as importantly, what work should stop. Without that clarity, new priorities are often layered on top of existing commitments rather than replacing them. Teams become busier, but not necessarily more focused. Meetings multiply because uncertainty needs to be managed somewhere, and escalation increases because people are unclear about what they are empowered to decide. The issue may initially appear to be one of communication, but it quickly becomes an execution problem.
Strategy only becomes valuable when it survives contact with reality
A strategy becomes valuable when someone translates it into decisions, processes, behaviours, systems and measurable outcomes. That translation requires a different kind of work from developing the original strategic intent. Someone has to determine the sequence, understand the dependencies, allocate resources, resolve constraints, monitor progress and intervene when delivery begins to drift. Much of this work is far less visible than the strategy itself, but it is often what determines whether an initiative generates value or remains permanently described as being “in progress.”
This is why strong organisations do not treat execution as something that sits beneath strategy. Execution is part of strategy. Some of the most important strategic decisions are made after the plan has already been approved. What happens when there is insufficient capacity? Which objective takes priority when two initiatives compete for the same resources? What happens when customer behaviour does not match the assumptions on which the strategy was built? Which activities should be discontinued to create space for a new priority? When should the organisation persist, and when should it change direction? These are not simply operational questions. They are strategic choices being made in the context of reality.
The strongest leaders understand this and are capable of moving between both worlds. They can maintain sight of the longer-term objective while still asking practical questions about capacity, timing, ownership, resources and risk. They do not need to perform every operational task themselves, but they remain close enough to execution to understand whether the strategy can actually work. A strategic priority without an owner, a delivery mechanism, sufficient resources and clear decisions about what happens next is not yet a business plan. It is an intention.
The missing layer between leadership and delivery
One of the most common organisational weaknesses is not necessarily a lack of strategic thinking at the top or capable employees at the frontline. It is the connection between the two. Senior leaders may establish the direction and operational teams may ultimately perform the work, but between those levels sits a critical layer of management, planning and coordination responsible for converting one into the other. When this layer works well, priorities become clearer as they move through the organisation. Competing demands are resolved, teams understand what matters most, leaders make decisions at the appropriate level and employees are given enough context and authority to move without continually escalating upwards.
When that layer does not work well, the symptoms are usually familiar. Teams receive a steady stream of new priorities without a corresponding removal of old ones. Managers spend increasing amounts of time coordinating across functions because ownership is unclear. Meetings become the primary mechanism for managing uncertainty. Decisions are repeatedly escalated because people are not sure who has the authority to make them, while frontline employees absorb the consequences of unresolved complexity. Eventually, the organisation can become extraordinarily busy without becoming proportionately productive.
This is often the point at which businesses conclude that they need more people. Sometimes they do. Growth creates genuine capacity requirements, and new capability cannot always be absorbed by existing teams. But sometimes the problem is not insufficient headcount. It is insufficient clarity. Adding another position into an environment where priorities, accountabilities and decision rights are already unclear can increase activity without increasing output. The organisation gains another stakeholder, another meeting attendee and another interface through which work needs to pass, but the underlying issue remains unchanged. Before creating another strategic role, it is therefore worth asking whether the business needs more strategy or whether it needs stronger execution of the strategy it already has.
Leaders should not become detached from the work they are trying to improve
There is another trend in organisational design that deserves scrutiny: the deliberate removal of operational responsibility from senior roles so that leaders can “focus on strategy.” There are legitimate reasons for doing this. Leaders who spend every day resolving transactional issues can become trapped in the immediate demands of the business and may have insufficient capacity to think about future capability, market changes, investment or long-term direction. But separating leadership too far from execution creates a different risk. Good strategic thinking is usually informed by proximity to reality.
Leaders need to understand how work actually moves through the organisation, where decisions become stuck, which systems create friction, why customers are dissatisfied, what employees are working around and where the assumptions contained in the strategy begin to break down. Without that connection, strategy can become increasingly theoretical. The objective should therefore not be to turn senior leaders into operational coordinators, nor should it be to keep them immersed in detail that appropriately belongs elsewhere. The objective is to create enough connection between strategy and execution that each continues to inform the other. In the strongest organisations, this relationship moves both ways. Strategy shapes execution, but execution also provides information that challenges, refines and improves strategy. That feedback loop is where a significant amount of organisational intelligence resides.
Perhaps this is why the distinction between a strategic role and an operational role is often less useful than it appears. A better question is: what outcome does this role own, and what authority does the person have to deliver it? That question forces clarity. It exposes roles that have considerable influence but very little ownership, while also revealing operational positions that may be carrying significantly more responsibility than their title or authority suggests. Every organisation needs people who think, decide, coordinate and execute. In many cases, one person will perform several of those functions depending on the context. The important issue is not the label attached to the role. It is whether the organisation has deliberately designed the path from decision to delivery.
A simple test for leadership teams
One of the most useful exercises a leadership team can undertake is to select a major current business priority and follow it through the organisation from beginning to end. Who decided it? Who owns the outcome? Who determines what needs to happen next? Who allocates resources? Who is completing the work? Who monitors whether the initiative is producing the expected result? And if it does not deliver, who is ultimately accountable?
The answers are often revealing. If several people believe they own the same outcome, if no one can clearly identify the accountable person, or if every meaningful decision requires another meeting, the organisation may have developed an execution problem disguised as a strategy problem. Equally, if the same small group of operational employees are repeatedly absorbing the work created by new strategic initiatives without corresponding authority, resources or prioritisation, the structure may be pushing complexity downward rather than resolving it.
There is also a broader question here about how organisations recognise value. There is enormous capability in people who can take an ambiguous objective and turn it into a workable plan, understand the dependencies, establish a rhythm of delivery, align different stakeholders and continue driving progress after the initial enthusiasm has faded. These skills are sometimes labelled operational, as though that makes them less sophisticated. In reality, strong execution requires judgement, influence, commercial awareness, prioritisation and considerable leadership ability. The people who consistently convert complexity into outcomes may be less visible than the people presenting the strategy, but their contribution is often what determines whether the organisation realises any value from it.
The real measure of a strategic organisation
A strategic organisation is not one filled with strategic job titles. It is one where people understand what the organisation is trying to achieve, where priorities are sufficiently clear to guide decisions, where accountability is visible and where the work required to produce an outcome is respected. There will always be a need for people who look ahead, challenge assumptions and determine where the organisation should go next. But there must also be people with the authority, capability and discipline to convert those ideas into results. These should not be treated as opposing ends of an organisational hierarchy. They are different components of the same system.
That is what makes the MIT Sloan finding so relevant. If only 28% of the executives and middle managers studied could identify three of their organisation’s strategic priorities, asking more employees to “be strategic” would not, on its own, solve the problem. The more important challenge is ensuring the strategy becomes clear enough to influence what people actually do, how they prioritise and where they direct their effort.
Ultimately, organisations are not judged on the sophistication of their strategy documents, the number of transformation initiatives underway or how many people have strategic somewhere in their position description. They are judged on whether they can convert an idea into action and action into an outcome.
So perhaps the question is not, “How do we make more of our roles strategic?”
The better question is: “Have we designed an organisation that can actually execute the strategy we already have?”
