Why don’t employees understand your strategy?

Why don’t employees understand company strategy?

Because it gets shorter and vaguer at every layer it passes through. By the time it reaches the people doing the work, the choices and the reasons have gone, and what’s left is a list of tasks with no sense of which one comes first.

This isn’t a hunch. Writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder report that “only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three” of their company’s strategic priorities. Their data comes from 4,012 respondents across 124 companies. These are the people whose job is to carry the strategy, not the newest joiner on the front line.

A London Business School survey of more than 11,000 executives, leaders and managers, designed by Donald Sull and Rebecca Homkes, found something similar: “Only a third of senior managers can correctly identify their firms' top three priorities.”

So if your team can’t explain the strategy, you’re in large company. The useful question isn’t whose fault it is. It’s where in the chain it gets lost, and what you can do about your own link.

Where does strategy get lost between the top and the team?

Mostly in the middle. The top team usually broadly agrees. The drop comes when they hand it to the next layer, and again when that layer hands it on.

The MIT Sloan piece puts it bluntly: strategic agreement “drops off a cliff” between the top team, at 51%, and the senior executives who report to them, at 22%. That’s one hand-off. Most strategies go through two or three before they reach the people who do the work.

Each hand-off loses something specific:

• The choice. “Grow profitably” survives. “We will turn down new contracts below a certain margin” doesn’t.
• The reason. People hear what to do but not why, so they can’t judge the cases nobody mentioned.
• The trade-off. Everything sounds equally important, so everything gets a bit of effort and nothing gets enough.

If you lead managers, you are a translator whether you mean to be or not. Your managers will pass on their version of your version. The question is whether yours is clear enough to survive that. This is one of the biggest shifts in managing managers: your words now travel further than you can follow them.

In our experience, the translation comes down to four habits. You can be strong at one and weak at another, and most leaders are.

Can you say the strategy in one sentence?

If you can’t, your managers will each write their own sentence, and they won’t match. A one-sentence version is the first thing that has to survive the trip, so it has to be short enough to survive.

A good one-sentence strategy names a choice, not a hope. “Be the best in our market” is a hope. “Win by keeping the customers we already have, even if that slows new sales” is a choice, because it tells people what loses when the two collide.

Costas Markides at London Business School argues that good strategy communication covers the key choices an organisation has made and “the alternatives it considered and rejected.” That second part is the one most leaders skip. Saying what you’re not doing is what makes the sentence useful on a busy Tuesday.

A quick test for your sentence:

1. Could a competitor say the same thing? If yes, it’s too generic.
2. Does it tell someone what to drop when time runs short? If not, it isn’t a choice yet.
3. Could your newest manager repeat it after hearing it once? If not, it’s too long.

How do you link team goals to the strategy?

Write each team goal so it names the part of the strategy it serves, and what it pushes down the list. A goal that can’t point back to the strategy is either missing a link or shouldn’t be a goal.

This is what people usually mean by cascading strategy. The trap is treating it as copying: the company has five priorities, so every team gets the same five. That isn’t translation. Your teams need to know what the strategy means for their work, in their words, with their numbers.

A simple shape for each team goal:

• The goal: what this team will deliver this quarter.
• The link: which part of the one-sentence strategy it serves.
• The trade: what this team will do less of to make room.

Doing this with your managers, not for them, matters. When they write the link themselves, you find out straight away whether they understood the strategy. When you write it for them, you only find out you misunderstood each other three months later.

How often should you repeat the strategy?

More often than feels comfortable. By the time you’re bored of saying it, your team has probably heard it properly once.

You’ve lived with the strategy for weeks before anyone else hears it. To you, saying it again feels like nagging. To someone three layers away, it’s competing with every other message in their week, and the first time they heard it was a single slide in a long meeting.

Repetition doesn’t mean another town hall. The MIT Sloan authors note that executives’ first instinct is to schedule more town halls or send another email, and they suggest leaders focus on their direct reports instead. Their most striking finding is about consistency: across the items in their survey, “the single best predictor of strategic alignment” was how consistently managers explained their team’s priorities in terms of their unit and the whole company.

So the repetition that counts is small and constant:

• Open your managers’ meeting by linking one decision to the strategy.
• When you say yes or no to a request, say which part of the strategy decided it.
• In one-on-ones, ask your managers how they explained the priorities to their teams this week.

The last one does double duty. It’s repetition and a check at the same time. If your one-on-ones have drifted into status updates, our post on why one-on-ones feel like a waste of time has a few ways to bring them back.

How do you check the strategy actually landed?

Ask people to say it back in their own words, one and two layers down. If the answers broadly match, it landed. If they don’t, you’ve found exactly where the translation slipped.

Most leaders skip this step because it feels like testing their team. It isn’t. It’s testing your translation. Nodding in a meeting tells you people heard something. Only a playback tells you what they heard.

A few ways to check without making it a quiz:

• The two-question check. Ask “What matters most this quarter?” and “Why?” Write down the answers word for word.
• The trade-off check. Ask “If you had to drop one thing this week, what would it be?” If the answer clashes with the strategy, the trade-off didn’t travel.
• The skip-level check. Ask the same questions of people who report to your managers. A Skip-Level Pulse gives you a structured way to hear from that layer.

When answers differ, resist the urge to correct the person in front of you. Go back to the manager whose team gave the answer, and look at your shared version together. The gap is usually in the hand-off, not the person. And if you’re not sure your team would tell you the honest answer, start with how to find out what your team really thinks of you.

What does translating a strategy look like in practice?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A head of operations at a mid-sized logistics company leads three managers: one for the warehouse, one for transport and one for customer service. The company strategy arrives as a slide with four headings: grow profitably, delight customers, become digital first, invest in our people.

Every heading is reasonable. None of them tells anyone what to do on a Tuesday. So she starts by asking the managing director one question: when two of these collide, which wins? The answer is that keeping existing customers matters more this year than winning new ones, because too many have left after late deliveries.

Her one-sentence version: “This year we win by keeping our customers, so on-time delivery comes before new routes.”

She then sits down with each manager and they write their goal together, with the link and the trade:

• Warehouse: cut late dispatches by a clear, agreed amount this quarter. Link: on-time delivery. Trade: the shelving redesign waits until next quarter.
• Transport: fix the reliability of the five routes with the most late deliveries before opening any new route. Link: on-time delivery comes before new routes. Trade: two route proposals are paused.
• Customer service: call every customer who had a late delivery within a day, and log the cause. Link: keeping our customers. Trade: the new help centre content slips by a month.

Notice what happened to “become digital first” and “invest in our people.” They didn’t vanish. They just stopped competing for first place. Each manager knows what to protect when the week gets tight.

For the next month she opens every managers’ meeting with one recent decision and the part of the sentence that made it. Then she asks two people on each team, privately, what matters most this quarter. Warehouse and transport give near identical answers. Customer service says “the new help centre.” That isn’t a failure. It tells her exactly which conversation to have next.

Is it ever fine for people not to know the strategy?

Sometimes. Not everyone needs every slide, and some details are rightly kept close. But almost everyone needs the one sentence and what it means for their own choices.

There are real trade-offs here. Spelling out priorities in detail can feel controlling to experienced managers, and some like to translate the strategy for their teams in their own way. That’s healthy, as long as their version still points the same way as yours. A tighter, more repeated message also costs you time, and in a period of fast change you may genuinely not know the one sentence yet. If so, say that. “We’re still deciding, and here’s what won’t change while we do” is clearer than a vague slide.

What isn’t fine is assuming it landed because nobody asked a question. Silence after a strategy presentation usually means people are being polite, not that they understood.

How clear is your strategy once it leaves your desk?

Most leaders are stronger at one or two of the four habits and weaker at the others. Knowing which is weakest tells you where to start, so you don’t try to fix all four at once.

Strategy Translator is a free test built for this. It takes about 4 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. For now you rate yourself on 12 questions covering the four habits: saying the strategy in one sentence, linking team goals to it, repeating it, and checking it landed. You get a clarity score out of 100 and the two areas where the strategy gets lost most, each with one thing to try. Team mode, where your team answers anonymously, is coming. A lower score isn’t a diagnosis. Sometimes leaving room for your managers to translate is the right trade-off. The score shows you where that trade is costing clarity.

For a wider read on how you lead, including whether your team could tell you what you expect from them this month, try The 42 Test. You’ll find the other tests and posts for this career moment on the managers of managers page.

Strategy doesn’t fail in one big moment. It fades in a hundred small hand-offs, and you control a few of them. Make your one sentence clear enough to survive the trip, then go and check that it did.