What Happened
A sharp piece in the Business and Financial Times makes an uncomfortable argument: corporate strategy does not collapse in the boardroom. It collapses in the space between leadership and the people doing the actual work. The author challenges leaders to test this themselves. Stop five random employees in a hallway and ask them what the company is working toward. The answer, most leaders discover, is silence or something unrecognizable.
The Communication Angle
Here is the lesson, stated plainly: vision that lives only in documents and quarterly presentations is not vision. It is decoration.
Most leaders confuse broadcasting with communicating. They announce the strategy. They put it in a slide deck. They email the all-staff memo. Then they walk away believing the job is done. It is not even started. Broadcasting is one directional. Communication requires the message to land, to be understood, and to change how someone acts. If your team cannot tell a stranger what your organization is building and why it matters, your message never landed. Full stop.
The failure is almost always about translation, not intention. Leaders speak in the language of the boardroom: market share, EBITDA, strategic pillars, transformation roadmaps. The person packing the orders, answering the phones, or writing the code does not think in those terms. They think in terms of their day, their problems, and their contribution. Your job as a leader is to build a bridge between your language and theirs. Most leaders never try. They assume fluency in corporate vocabulary is shared. It is not.
The fix is specific. Before your next team meeting, take your company's stated vision and translate it into one sentence that a twelve-year-old could understand and care about. Not a dumbed-down version. A human version. Then attach a concrete example of how the work your team did last week moved toward that vision. That connection, vision to yesterday's work, is what makes strategy feel real rather than decorative. Do this consistently, and the message stops evaporating between floors.
There is also a structural problem worth naming. Leaders communicate the vision at the top of the year and then never return to it except during crisis. Repetition is not redundancy. Repetition is reinforcement. The best communicators I have studied say the important things often, through different lenses, in different settings. The vision should come up in your one-on-ones, your project kick-offs, your end-of-week notes. Not as a slogan. As a thread that ties everything together.
This is exactly the kind of scenario I break down in Say It Right Every Time. The chapter on translating intent covers the specific techniques for closing the distance between what a leader means and what a team member actually hears. It gives you a framework for stripping corporate language down to its core without losing the authority or the substance behind it.
Never Be Lost
for Words Again
Get word‑for‑word scripts for the conversations that shape your life, from job interviews and negotiations to difficult talks with family and partners, so you always know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Never Be Lost
for Words Again
Get word‑for‑word scripts for the conversations that shape your life, from job interviews and negotiations to difficult talks with family and partners, so you always know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Key Takeaway
This week, walk up to three people on your team and ask them one question: "In your own words, what are we trying to accomplish this year and why does it matter?" Do not coach them. Do not hint. Just listen. What you hear will tell you exactly how far your message has actually traveled. Then fix the gap with a direct, specific conversation grounded in their work, not your strategy document.
