Have you ever been in a room where the strategy is something only the executive team or the board gets to talk about? I have. It’s in a binder on a shelf or a slide deck that is quickly forgotten. Often, it was built with the very best intentions, and sometimes, it’s even a good strategy. But here’s the thing: if your people don’t know your strategy, they can’t execute on it and worse, if they’ve never had a chance to contribute to it, you’re missing out on some valuable insights, the ones from the people closest to the work.

Strategy should never be hidden. It should be shared, understood, and alive in the day-to-day. Your team wants to know where you’re going and how their work fits in. When strategy is kept behind closed doors, execution suffers. Research has shown that most employees don’t understand their organization’s strategy – even nearly two decades after Harvard Business Review highlighted the issue in 2005 (The Office of Strategy Management, Kaplan & Norton, HBR, Oct 2005).

If your team can’t connect their daily actions to the bigger picture, you’ve got a gap. And that gap will cost you.

Include people in different ways, but include them

I’m not suggesting that everyone should be sitting around the table to craft a new three-year vision, but there are many ways to involve people at all levels. These are a few that I’ve seen work well:

• When launching or refreshing the strategy, kick off town halls with an overview or update. And not just to present, but to listen too.
• Conduct pulse surveys or roundtable conversations that ask: What feels clear? What feels missing?
• Have cross-functional teams working on key priorities so departments aren’t siloed.
• Share stories and real examples from the front lines to illustrate strategic priorities in action.

When people are invited to participate, even just to react, refine, or bring the strategy to life, they feel trusted and valued. It builds buy-in, and it builds alignment.

Empower people to act on it

One of the most important (and hardest) parts? Letting people make decisions in service of the strategy (i.e., trusting your people).

This means shifting some decision-making power to the front line – with the right context and support, of course. When people are closer to the action, they’re often in the best position to make timely, informed choices. But they need a few things to do it well:

• Clear expectations and boundaries so they know where they have room to move.
• Access to tools, information, and context and not just rules to follow.
• Support and recognition, especially when they take initiative, even if things don’t go perfectly.

Empowered employees act with more confidence, creativity, and ownership. And when aligned to strategy, that’s where the real magic happens.

Align the culture or strategy will always struggle

You can have a brilliant strategy, but if the culture doesn’t support it, it won’t stick. Often, I’ve seen leaders frustrated that their team isn’t executing on the strategy. And while these leaders would like to blame it on communication or resources, it’s actually a matter of culture.

As Groysberg and colleagues wrote, culture must act as a support system for strategy (Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose? Groysberg et al., HBR, June 2022). You can’t say innovation matters and then punish risk-taking. You can’t talk about collaboration but only reward individual performance.

If you want strategy to work, it needs to be embedded in how you lead, how you measure, and how you show up every day.

Strategy is not just a leadership tool. It’s a team sport. The more people know it, understand it, and see their role in it, the more likely it is to succeed.

So share it. Talk about it. Involve your people. Let them drive it forward.

Because your strategy lives or dies in execution, and execution lives or dies with your people.