The strategy session happened. The priorities were set. The presentation was made to the wider team.
Six months later, your senior managers are still making the same kinds of decisions they were making before. The priorities you thought were clear are being interpreted differently at different levels. The direction you set is visible in your team’s work but increasingly hard to find in the work of the layers below them.
You are not imagining it.
And the usual responses — more communication, more check-ins, more accountability — are addressing the wrong thing.
What actually happened in the room
When you presented the strategy, your managers listened. They understood — at the level of the content. They knew the words. They could repeat the priorities back to you if asked.
What they did not know, and what the presentation could not give them, was what any of it meant for their specific team, in their specific context, this specific quarter.
That translation — from company direction to team-level action — is the hardest and most important thing a middle manager does. And almost nobody has ever taught them how to do it.
Research from Kaplan and Norton, published in Harvard Business Review, found that only 5% of employees can accurately describe their company’s strategy. The number is striking. But the more useful question is not why employees cannot describe the strategy. It is why the 95% gap exists despite the fact that most organisations communicate their strategy repeatedly, in multiple formats, across multiple sessions.
The answer is not that people forgot. It is that receiving a strategy and knowing how to use it are two different things. One is passive. The other requires a skill most managers were never given.
The missing layer
Think of strategy as fractal. A pattern that repeats at every scale.
At the highest level, the board or the CEO sets the overall direction — where the company is going, what matters most in this period, what trade-offs have been made. That is the macro strategy. It is necessary. It is not sufficient.
For the macro strategy to produce results, it needs to exist at every level below it. The business unit head needs to know what the direction means for their unit. The department manager needs to know what it means for their team. The team lead needs to know what it means for this week’s work.
Each layer is doing the same thing at a smaller scale: setting a direction for what they are responsible for, aligned to the layer above, made concrete enough to act on. When every layer does this, the strategy is fractal — self-similar from the top of the organisation to the work being done on a Tuesday afternoon.
When the middle layers do not do this — when they receive the company strategy and hand their teams a project list — the fractal breaks. The team operates from tasks rather than direction. Every ambiguous situation gets resolved by instinct. The work gets done. The strategy gets lost somewhere between the executive floor and the actual work.
The productivity impact of this breakdown is not small. McKinsey estimates companies lose up to 10% of annual revenue to poor strategy execution — and this is the conservative figure, measuring only direct losses. The structural cost of a strategy that exists clearly at the top and diffuses into noise by the time it reaches the people doing the work runs significantly higher when you include the opportunities not captured, the decisions made without the right context, and the time consumed by the founder or CEO who ends up re-explaining the direction again and again because the layers below cannot hold it.
Why your managers are not doing this
The gap is not a motivation problem. Your managers are not choosing to ignore the strategy.
They simply do not have a usable method for converting what they received into something their team can navigate by.
Most management development programmes teach people how to manage downward — how to delegate, give feedback, run meetings, develop team members. This is valuable. It addresses one direction of leadership.
The other direction — managing upward, understanding the layer above you well enough to translate it into your layer with clarity — is almost entirely absent from corporate training. Research from a CIPD survey found that fewer than a third of managers feel confident translating organisational strategy into team-level plans. The skill exists in exceptional managers as a natural instinct. In most managers, it has to be learned. And it is almost never taught.
The result is a gap that feels, from the top, like a communication failure. More presentations. Clearer slides. Repeated messages. None of it closes the gap, because the problem is not that managers did not hear the strategy. It is that they do not know how to make it theirs.
What the gap is costing
Before naming what the gap costs, it is worth naming what it gets called.
In most organisations, the diagnosis is ownership. The managers are not taking ownership. They are waiting to be told. They are not stepping up. They lack initiative. The solution that follows from this diagnosis is almost always a character solution — different people, different hiring, better culture, stronger accountability.
That diagnosis is almost always wrong.
Ownership is not a personality trait. It is a structural condition. A person can only take ownership of something when three things are present: they understand the destination, why it was chosen, and the parameters that govern how to get there — deeply enough to navigate the unexpected without asking; they have defined authority — a specific space within which they can decide without escalating each call; and they have cover — the structural assurance that a decision made in good faith will be judged by the quality of the thinking at the time, not by what became clear afterwards.
Those three things do not come from motivation or character. They come from the strategy being translated to a level at which they can hold it.
When a manager has not been given a usable version of the company’s direction — when they received a presentation rather than a map — they cannot take ownership of moving toward it. They can execute tasks. They can manage their team through the operational week. But the decisions that require judgment, context, and alignment to the company’s direction will either stall or escalate, because the foundation for making them independently does not exist.
The gap, then, is not three separate costs. It is one condition — strategy that was never translated — producing three visible symptoms.
The first is decision quality. A manager who does not understand the strategy cannot make decisions aligned to it. They make decisions aligned to their own judgment, their own interpretation of priorities, their own sense of what matters. Which may be good. But it is not the same as the organisation moving in the same direction from multiple levels simultaneously. Fifty percent of middle managers in a Harvard Business Review survey could not name a single top strategic priority for their organisation. Every decision made without that reference point adds friction instead of momentum.
The second is escalation. When managers cannot make direction-aligned decisions independently, those decisions travel upward. To you. The strategic conversation you were trying to have with a potential partner, the investor meeting you were preparing for, the senior hire you were evaluating — interrupted by a decision that should have been made two levels below. This is the Chief Escalation Officer pattern: a job title that says CEO and a job description that says bottleneck. The manager’s incapacity to hold the direction is becoming your capacity constraint.
The third is retention. The employees who leave fastest are not the ones who were underperforming. They are the ones who stopped understanding the point of their work. When the connection between what someone does on a given day and why it matters to the organisation is not visible, engagement erodes. Gallup’s global workplace research puts the cost of active disengagement at 18% of annual salary per disengaged employee. The cause is rarely the work itself. It is the absence of a direction that makes the work meaningful.
The investment argument
There is a straightforward version of the return on building this capability in your managers.
A manager who can translate the company strategy into their team’s work produces a team that makes better decisions without escalating. Fewer decisions travel upward. The CEO’s time is freed for the work that belongs there. The team’s work compounds in the right direction rather than drifting in multiple ones. The people in the team feel the point of what they are doing, which is the foundation of the kind of engagement that stays.
The investment to produce this is not structural. It is not a reorganisation or a new reporting line or a sustained change management programme. It is a skill. A teachable, learnable, practicable skill — the ability to take a direction from above and make it real below.
One manager who learns this does not only improve their own team. They become the model for what managing upward and downward simultaneously looks like. Which is worth considerably more than the training cost.
The question to ask before the next strategy cycle
Before the next strategy presentation, one question is worth sitting with.
What will your managers do with what you tell them?
Not: will they understand it. Not: will they be aligned to it. Will they know how to take the direction you are setting and convert it into something their team can navigate by — on a Monday morning, in a decision that needs to be made without you in the room, in a moment of ambiguity where the right answer is not the obvious one?
If the answer is uncertain, that is not a reflection on your managers. It is a reflection on what they have been given.
The strategy you set is only as effective as the capability of the people who have to carry it.
This essay is the organisational argument behind Fractal Strategy: Leadership at Every Level — a half-day workshop that gives managers at every level the method for translating the company strategy into their own team’s direction. If you are preparing your managers for the next strategy cycle, the details are here.