Can you describe what right looks like when you're done?

Can you describe what right looks like when you're done?

I ask leaders this question when I coach them, and the pause I get back is usually the answer. Not because they are bad leaders, and not because they do not care about strategy, but because most people who inherit a strategy have inherited it as a set of activities, targets, or slide-deck bullets rather than as a picture of what the organization looks like when the strategy is achieved.

That is a different kind of understanding, and it is the one that keeps a leader oriented when the ground shifts under them.

I use the line deliberately. It is plainer than “vision” or “goals” or “outcomes” or “north star,” and it does not carry the baggage that comes with those words. It asks the leader to close their eyes for a moment and describe the condition, not the number.

What does the organization look like the day the strategy is done? Who does it serve? How does it feel to work in? What does it deliver, and to whom? What is different from where it stands today? These are answerable questions, and when a leader can answer them clearly, they are aligned with the strategy in the way strategy actually requires. When they cannot, they may be executing tactics with commitment while pointing themselves at a picture that does not match the one the executive team is holding.

The literature on strategy failure has said for years that people do not understand the strategy. That framing is not wrong, but it is loose. What most leaders actually cannot describe is a specific two-part picture: what right looks like when the organization gets there, and what their own part in getting the organization there was. Miss either half, and a leader is disconnected. Get one but not the other, and they are still disconnected, just in a different direction.

The first half, the endstate picture, is where most strategic conversations invest their energy. Executives write vision statements. Boards ratify strategic plans. Consultants build strategy maps. All of that work has a purpose, and none of it is a substitute for the leader in the middle being able to describe, in their own words, what the finished condition looks like.

Communication is not the same thing as alignment. Almost every organization believes it communicates its strategy well. Fewer can demonstrate that the strategy is actually held, in the same shape, by the leaders it needs to reach. The distance between the two is where most strategy failure lives, and it is not closed by better slides.

The second half is where the disconnect gets quieter and more dangerous. A leader can know what right looks like when the organization is done and still not know what part of getting there is theirs. That gap does not usually announce itself. Instead, it produces a leader who executes competently against activities they inferred were theirs, or who waits for direction that was assumed to have been given, or who works hard on the wrong problem because nobody clearly named which problem belonged to them.

That is not a performance issue. It is a role clarity issue, and it lives on the same continuum as the endstate question.

I have been on the receiving end of both disconnects, and so has almost every leader who has been in the profession long enough to be reading this. I have executed strategy without a picture of where we were headed and figured it out from context. I have been given the picture and left to figure out my part on the fly.

Neither is a failure of character. Both are failures of translation, and the failure is upstream of the leader they land on. That is worth naming, because the reflex when strategy stalls is to blame execution, which is another way of blaming the leader closest to the work. Sometimes execution is the problem. More often, translation was.

Here is the reflection I want to invite. Think about the strategy your organization is currently running on. Not the words on the slide. The picture behind them. Most leaders, tested honestly on whether they can describe the finished condition and their own specific role in producing it, discover a gap they had not named. That gap is not usually the strategy. It is the alignment underneath the strategy, and the alignment underneath is what determines whether the strategy will do what it was written to do.

The purpose of this note is not to solve the disconnect. It is to reduce the blind spot around it. Leaders at every level from the boardroom to the frontline manager sit inside this problem, and most sit inside it without noticing. The organizations that will move well through the next decade of change are the ones where a leader at any level can finish two sentences without hesitation. What right looks like when we are done. What my part in getting us there is.

Which brings me back to where I started.

Can you describe what right looks like when you're done?

If not you, then someone in the room with you. And if not them, then the disconnect is closer to the top than most executive teams want to believe. Closing that distance is a specific kind of work, and it is not the same work as writing the strategy.