Insight

Strategy alignment: another key to building high performing teams

March 31, 2025 | Articles

This image is a top-down view of a business meeting where professionals in formal attire are gathered around a modern conference table. They are engaged in discussions, taking notes, using laptops, and shaking hands, indicating collaboration or a deal being made. The image is overlaid with futuristic digital graphics, including a glowing blue world map, data charts, analytics, and technology-inspired UI elements, symbolizing a global business network and data-driven decision-making.

The most critical thing for a CEO to do when stepping into a new organisation – or when bringing a new team together – is to get clear on the Strategy/Vision/Value Creation Plan (VCP) and ensure the team is fully aligned around it.

Every executive team I work with says the same thing at the start:
“Are we heading in the right direction as an organisation?”
“Do we all agree on that direction?”
“Do we know our individual role in making it happen?”

And crucially:
“Does the whole organisation know how their work contributes to the strategy?”

This may sound obvious, but time and again it’s where things begin to unravel. Often, the strategy has been “refreshed” recently, so the assumption is that it doesn’t need revisiting. But here’s the catch: even if the strategy is solid on paper, if the team didn’t help create it, they won’t own it. And if they don’t own it, they’re far less likely to drive it with energy and conviction.

I often see this happen. A CEO has a clear vision in their mind and pulls together the slides to communicate the vision which are then shared in an executive team meeting. But if the rest of the executive team weren’t involved in shaping it – they haven’t had the tough conversations, wrestled with the trade-offs, or mapped the interdependencies – then they won’t live and breathe it in the way they need to bring that vision to life. That sense of shared purpose and mutual accountability, so crucial for a high-performing team, just isn’t there.

Yes, the process of co-creating strategy takes more time. It requires patience, especially when you feel like you already know the answer. But the payoff is worth it: when the whole executive team is involved, they become a united front. They can answer questions with clarity, rally their teams, challenge constructively, and ultimately drive better results.

There’s data to back this up

One study found that 56% of executives cite misalignment between day-to-day decisions and strategic priorities as a major barrier to effectiveness. But companies that involve their full leadership team in strategy-setting are far more likely to avoid this trap, ensuring clarity, buy-in, and better execution. (McKinsey, 2022)

Even more striking: as Kaplan and Norton noted some 20 years ago (Harvard Business Review 2005), 85% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy and those same organisations often struggle with unclear priorities, poor decision-making, and wasted resources. In my view, two decades later, that conclusion still holds true. And when leaders feel they own the strategy, they are far more likely to follow through. Research from Bain & Company found that companies where leaders are involved in crafting the vision are up to six times more likely to be top-tier financial performers. (Bain, 2018)

The message is clear: executive team alignment drives performance, and alignment comes from involvement.

But this isn’t just about performance metrics. It’s also about team dynamics. When executive teams co-create the strategy, you notice a difference: there’s more energy, more clarity, more cohesion. They stop operating as siloed experts and start acting as a truly integrated team.