You have said the priorities in every meeting. They are on the slides. They are in the plan. Ask your leadership team whether the strategy is clear, and every head nods.

Now ask the people one level below them to write down the top three priorities. Alone. No notes.

That is where many strategies quietly stop. Not in the boardroom. At the first handoff.

What I Saw From Inside a Turnaround

In January 2008, Howard Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks. In February, more than 7,000 U.S. stores closed so that about 135,000 baristas could retrain on espresso. In March, he presented a seven-move Transformation Agenda to 200 senior leaders.

Then, in October, with fourth-quarter profit down 97 percent, the company brought about 10,000 store and field leaders to New Orleans. The cost was about $30 million, and the board was reluctant.

What stays with me is what came after the big moments. From where I sat in Canadian food service, the turnaround moved through a rhythm of meetings, weekly to monthly, at every level. There was a weekly leadership meeting with our Vice President of Licensed Stores and Food Service for Canada. There were regular meetings with Canada's senior leadership team. And the president of Starbucks Canada met with the leadership of International and the U.S.

The agenda was set at the top. Then it was carried down, level by level, and kept alive by that rhythm.

In fiscal 2010, Starbucks reported record revenue of $10.7 billion. According to the company's results filing, net income reached $945.6 million, up from $390.8 million the year before. I will not pretend one conference or one meeting rhythm produced those numbers. But I watched what it took to keep a strategy moving through a company that size, and none of it was a single announcement.

John Maxwell calls it the Law of Buy-In: people buy into the leader, then the vision. A leader's return gives people someone to believe in. The vision still has to travel to the people who will carry it, and it has to keep travelling.

Strategy rarely dies from lack of effort. It dies when it only flows one way.

Saying It Is Not the Same as Being Understood

Most leaders believe they have communicated the strategy. The research says their people often cannot say it back.

In a study of 7,600 managers in 262 companies, published in Harvard Business Review in 2015, Sull, Homkes and Sull reported that only 55 percent of middle managers could name even one of their company's top five priorities. A London Business School survey of more than 11,000 senior managers in over 400 companies found that about a third could name their top three. Only about half of the senior managers who helped set those objectives could identify them.

The steepest drop comes one level down. In a 2018 study of 124 organizations, published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull, Sull and Yoder found that agreement on the priorities fell from 51 percent in the top team to 22 percent among their direct reports.

That is the first handoff. That is where strategy starts to die.

The fix is not simply more talking. The researchers reported that in one company, 97 percent of senior leaders said they understood the priorities, yet only about a quarter could list three. Homkes has observed that leaders overcomplicate the message with dozens of slides, while those who succeed repeat one short message at every level. Volume is not understanding. Fewer words, repeated, beat more words, delivered once.

There is a sideways break, too. In the 2015 HBR research, 84 percent of managers said they could rely on their boss and their direct reports all or most of the time. Only 9 percent said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time. A strategy can travel down every line and still fail between departments.

It has to flow up, too

I have learned this one the hard way.

I have led teams where I laid out an aggressive timetable to meet the objectives in our strategic plan. My leadership team knew it was unrealistic. Nobody pushed back. Everyone nodded and took notes. And I believed I had buy-in.

Then the meeting ended, the door closed, and the real conversation started in the hallway. Private messages started flying. Leaders gathered by the coffee machine to explain why the plan could not work. The doubt that should have been spoken in the room went underground, and it came back as slow execution and quiet resentment.

The cost can be far higher than a missed timetable. Researchers Vuori and Huy, in a 2016 study in Administrative Science Quarterly based on 76 interviews, found that at Nokia, fear stopped middle managers from sharing bad news. Top managers were left overly optimistic about where the company stood.

Where this idea breaks

To be fair, not every strong company shares its strategy widely. Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, author of Inside Apple, reported in 2012 that Apple ran on need-to-know secrecy. It worked because people needed only their own piece, the priorities were few, and the top was tightly aligned.

So the lesson is not "tell everyone everything." It is this: whoever must act on the strategy has to understand their part of it, and the leader has to hear back from them. If your priorities are many and your top team is not aligned, secrecy will not save you.

The Two-Way Loop

I wrote about the strategy and execution gap last year in The Silent Collapse. What I have come to learn since is where the gap opens, and what closes it.

In 2002, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan wrote a whole book on what they called the discipline of execution. Here is how I put it.

Strategy is DOA without DOE: the discipline of execution.

That discipline runs as a loop, not a launch. Here it is through EDAR: Explore, Design, Act, Reflect.

1. Explore: listen up. Before you decide, ask the people who will execute. Then make it safe to disagree in the room, not in the hallway. When someone brings an uncomfortable answer, act on it where others can see.

2. Design: decide at the top. Choose three to five priorities. Write them in plain words, and use those same words every time.

3. Act: communicate down, starting one level below you. Brief your direct reports in person before any all-hands or town hall. They are the first handoff, and the research says that is where the message breaks.

4. Reflect: keep communicating and adjusting. Set a rhythm, weekly to monthly, that carries the priorities through every level. Then look sideways: can your managers rely on their peers in other functions?

Ask yourself as you go:

• If I asked my direct reports for our top three priorities today, would their lists match mine?
• When did someone last tell me, in the room, that a plan would not work?
• Where does our strategy cross from one function to another, and who owns that crossing?

The Three-Priority Test

This week, before your next all-hands, ask each of your direct reports to write down the company's top three priorities. Alone, on paper, with no notes.

Then compare the lists together. Do not correct anyone in the moment. Listen first. The gaps between the lists are your execution plan.

Your Turn

When you last checked, how close were your team's priorities to yours, and what did the gap teach you?

If running this test raises more questions than it answers, let's talk it through together.

Book A Clarity Call

Love be with you. Lead on with purpose, grace, and limitless potential.

©️Tito Kang 2026

Sources

1. Sull, D., Homkes, R. and Sull, C., "Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It," Harvard Business Review, March 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it
2. Sull, D., Sull, C. and Yoder, J., "No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders," MIT Sloan Management Review, February 2018. https://shop.sloanreview.mit.edu/no-one-knows-your-strategy--not-even-your-top-leaders
3. Fortune, "Your Boss Probably Has No Clue What Your Company's Top Priorities Are," 8 December 2015. https://fortune.com/2015/12/08/company-priorities-communication-strategy
4. London Business School, "Why senior managers can't name their firms' top priorities." https://www.london.edu/news/two-thirds-of-senior-managers-cant-name-their-firms-top-priorities
5. Vuori, T. and Huy, Q., "Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process: How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Battle," Administrative Science Quarterly, 2016. https://academicnewsletter.sufe.edu.cn/info/366335
6. HBS Working Knowledge, "Starbucks Reinvented," 25 August 2014. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/starbucks-reinvented
7. QSR Magazine, "Schultz Returns as Starbucks CEO," January 2008. https://www.qsrmagazine.com/news/schultz-returns-starbucks-ceo/
8. Starbucks Corporation, fiscal 2010 results (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), 4 November 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000829224/000119312510248069/dex991.htm
9. Lashinsky, A., "The secrets Apple keeps," Fortune, January 2012. https://fortune.com/article/the-secrets-apple-keeps/
10. Maxwell Leadership, the Law of Buy-In. https://www.maxwellleadership.com/blog/leadership-vision/
11. Bossidy, L. and Charan, R., Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Crown Business, 2002.