The problem: strategy not translating into action
A new CEO sat down with us this week. She had taken over a media group built through acquisition, inheriting a portfolio of well-known titles and a strategy that, on paper, made commercial sense.
“The strategy isn’t the problem,” she said. “I believe in it. The board believes in it. but nothing’s actually moving.”
What she described was familiar. Editorial teams behaving like independent businesses. Commercial teams competing internally rather than selling across the portfolio. A leadership group polite in meetings and partisan outside them. Loyalty to legacy brands ran deeper than loyalty to the group.
Her strategy was sound. Her structure was inherited. Her culture, in her words, was “six cultures in a trench coat.”
This is The Disconnect.
Why all three have to move together
Strategy says where the business is going. Structure decides who is accountable for getting it there. Culture determines whether people actually work the way the strategy requires. When one is out of step, the organisation does not stop, but it grinds. Energy goes into friction rather than progress.
Most leaders assume a good strategy will eventually pull structure and culture into line. It rarely does. Structure has its own gravity, shaped by reporting lines and P&L ownership. Culture has its own memory, shaped by who got rewarded and who got tolerated. Neither updates itself.
In her business, the symptoms were textbook. Exec decisions got relitigated two layers down. Cross-title initiatives stalled at the budget conversation. Senior editors said “my title” with possessive emphasis. Pipeline conversion was slipping. Time to decision was lengthening. The best people were taking calls from recruiters.
Not a strategy problem. A system problem.
Where to start to gain traction
Our advice was to sequence the work, not attempt everything at once.
Start with the strategy as the fixed point. Translate it into a small number of commercial outcomes the business has to deliver in the next twelve to eighteen months. Everything else gets tested against this.
Then revisit structure through accountability. Personal development plans and performance frameworks for the senior layer are the lever. Each leader’s objectives map directly to the commercial outcomes. Where two leaders share an outcome, the structure makes collaboration unavoidable rather than optional. This is also the point at which honest decisions get made about who can deliver the new mandate and who cannot. Some people develop. Some redeploy. Some leave.
Use culture as the amplifier. Culture is downstream of what gets rewarded, tolerated, and celebrated. Once strategy is clear and structure supports it, leadership has to be explicit about the behaviours that get the business where it wants to go. Collaboration becomes recognised, not heroic. Hoarding gets discussed, not tolerated. Excellence in pursuit of the new agenda is rewarded visibly.
The sequence matters. Shifting culture before structure supports it produces cynicism. Restructuring before strategy is translated into outcomes produces noise. Doing all three at once produces exhaustion.
The pragmatic reality of change
She listened, agreed with the logic, and then offered the truth most leaders carry quietly into these conversations.
“People will leave. Some of them I want to keep. Others will stay and try to undermine the whole thing from inside. And I cannot wait two years for the strategy to prove itself. I need wins in the next six months.”
She was right on every count.
People do leave during transitions like this, and not always the ones a leader would choose. Some will quietly resist, often the most senior figures with the most to lose. And the credibility window for a new strategy is shorter than most leaders assume. Without visible commercial progress in the first two quarters, the organisation begins to hedge, and hedging is corrosive.
The answer is not to slow the structural and cultural work, but to run a parallel track of deliberate quick wins. Not vanity projects. Carefully chosen commercial moves that prove the strategy is real and give the people who want to believe a reason to commit. A cross-title proposition that closes a deal no single title could have won. A consolidated client conversation that lifts the average deal size. Each win becomes evidence, and evidence is what shifts the people sitting on the fence.
The approach in outline
The work typically runs in four connected stages.
Translation
The existing strategy becomes a small set of explicit commercial outcomes with measurable indicators. The document everything else is tested against.
Alignment
Senior structure, roles, accountabilities, and performance frameworks are rebuilt around those outcomes. Honest decisions get made about the team.
Amplification
The behaviours that will deliver the strategy are named explicitly. Rewards and recognition are recalibrated. The behaviours that no longer serve the business are addressed without ambiguity.
Proof
A deliberate sequence of commercial quick wins is identified, resourced, and delivered visibly. The strategy made tangible.
None of this is fast. None of it is mysterious. It requires a leader willing to make decisions about people, a clear line of sight from strategy to behaviour, and the discipline to keep the four stages connected.
What to watch for
The signs worth paying attention to:
- Decisions taken at the top get reopened or quietly diluted one layer down
- Cross-functional initiatives stall at the resourcing conversation
- Senior leaders speak in possessives about their patch
- Meetings produce alignment in the room and divergence afterwards
- The same problems appear in different forms quarter after quarter
- Pipeline conversion slips without an obvious external cause
- Time to decision lengthens
- Customer feedback flags inconsistency across the business
- Pricing or proposition discipline varies depending on who is in the room
- High performers ask searching questions about direction and accountability
- Mid-tier talent becomes harder to retain
- Recruiters report your people are taking their calls
None of these are fatal on their own. Together, they are the early warning that strategy, structure, and culture have come apart. The work to reconnect them is demanding, but it is the work that separates the businesses that scale through their next phase from the ones that plateau and wonder why.
If any of this sounds familiar, it usually is. And it is usually fixable.
