During recent coaching sessions, it has become clear to me that many people do not understand that creating a strategy, and having a strategy is not the same as executing a strategy. In particular, I think many leaders need to remember that creating a strategy based on a shared understanding and commitment to that strategy is mission critical to executing the strategy.
However, once this shared understanding and commitment is in place, I am reminded of something that Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan in their book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Crown Business, 2002), pointed out: “Execution is not just tactics to be delegated; it is a discipline and a system.” And when problems arise, what is missing is the system, not just the discipline. Therefore, in order to translate execution into an on-going reality, four things need to be in place.
First, you need to build and maintain a healthy senior leadership team. When you read these two books by Patrick Lencioni, namely The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (Jossey-Bass, 2000), and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002), it becomes abundantly clear that a healthy senior team that is based on trust and clarity will make a major difference in how things get done, not just what gets done.
But, from my vantage point, I think leaders who want to improve execution should also read the following book: Wageman, Ruth, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss and J. Richard Hackman. Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes To Make Them Great (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). This resource helped me to grasp why certain senior teams were more effective than other teams. As the author explains, there are four senior leadership team tasks, namely information sharing, consultation, coordination, and decision making. What I realized upon reflection was that when I encountered a senior team that was doing a good job of executing their strategy, all involved knew when they were engaged in one of these four tasks. For example, during a team meeting when an agenda item was being discussed, all involved knew if the team was engaged in coordination or decision-making. No one wondered what the focus was during the meeting.
Now, as a side bar, many senior leaders do not get to build their own leadership team. Instead, they inherit them when they accept the job. For these individuals, I suggest you read the following article: “Leading the Team You Inherit” by Michael Watkins in the June 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review.
Second, you need to build and maintain a healthy, two way social network that is larger than just the senior team. In the beginning of my work as a consultant and executive coach, I did not grasp the importance of this network. Later, in my career, I realized that it was very important to success, because I realized that two way communication was vital to maintaining perspective.
One of the things senior leaders need to understand is that most people only share good news with them, or only the news that they think the senior leader wants to hear. Therefore, during the execution of strategy, many senior leaders and many senior teams think everyone loves each other, and they love the strategy. Furthermore, they think that everything is going just fine. This happens, because everyone is telling them so.
However, in reality, this is rarely the case. The problem is that no one wants to speak up. Many times, the senior team may trust each other, but the middle managers actually don’t trust some, or all of the senior team. This often happens because people learn that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” which actually translates into the complaining person gets fired or demoted for complaining.
In order to prevent this from happening, the best leaders I know cultivate a wide diversity of relationships through out the company in order to get a more complete picture of what is going on. One senior leader told me he needed to hear more of the “unvarnished truth” rather than the “political truth” he was often told. In short, two way communication from a strong social network makes a major difference.
Third, you need to build and maintain a regular coaching system. When things get busy or complicated, coaching often gets abandoned along the highway of strategic execution. Over the years, I have listened to so many leaders tell me that they do not have time for coaching. And they have shared with me that they find coaching useless in getting things done. When I hear this, I realize that they do not grasp the significance of coaching when it comes to executing strategy. They also have never experienced good coaching when they were moving up through the ranks into the senior team.
What all involved need to understand is that poor coaching experiences and poor coaching can cripple the execution of strategy. For when we create routine coaching opportunities, we help our people get better at what they are doing. In essence, we build capacity at the operational level and at the strategic level. And with improved capacity, those being coached can communicate better, solve problems better, and help teams execute better. When all three of these things happen over time, trust is built, clarity is maintained, and discipline becomes systematic. And, best of all, strategic execution improves.
Fourth, you need to build and maintain a regular time for contemplation and reflection. This is the other element that routinely gets by-passed as people and teams rush to get things done. However, effective execution of strategy requires senior leaders and senior teams to stop and ask two important questions. First, is our strategy still working? Second, is it still the right strategy moving forward? We do this, because during the creation of strategy, we make certain assumptions about the company and the market place. But, over time, these assumptions in combination with the rise of unforeseen variables may make the current strategy obsolete or ineffective. Without a regular time for contemplation and reflection, i.e. a strategic review, we may miss the mark and end up caught in a untenable or dangerous situation.
For in the end, having a strategy and executing a strategy are not the same thing. As Bossidy and Charan note in the aforementioned book, “the leader who executes assembles an architecture of execution.” The above four elements are the foundation for the architecture of execution. It just takes clarity, commitment, and discipline to make it a reality.
© Geery Howe 2026
