How To Translate Strategy Into Daily Execution
When leaders choose alignment consistently, it pays off.
This expert opinion by Moshe Engelberg, PhD, speaker, executive coach, and author of The Amare Wave, was originally published on Inc.com.
At a senior leadership retreat I led recently, we asked the leadership team to do something deceptively simple: Look at their real work — current projects, initiatives, and priorities — and assess how well that work aligned operationally with the organization’s stated mission, vision, and strategy.
In my experience as an executive coach working with leadership teams, it is as crucial as it is unusual for assessment of operational alignment to be done. Unless leaders are willing to tell the truth about what isn’t working and take responsibility for changing it, it just seems easier to keep busy “heads down” doing business as usual. This, of course, requires trust.
Trust And Safety Come First
Before we asked leaders to examine whether their work was aligned, we focused on trust. The C-suite team went first, naming job security fears directly. They made a clear commitment that this work was about letting go of misaligned work, not people. We paired that transparency with a fun trust-building movement exercise to get everyone out of “meeting mode” and into a more human, open state.
Their candor made it safer to tell the truth. The physical reset helped people show up differently. Several noted that without this upfront trust-building, especially leaders naming their fears out loud, the alignment conversations that followed would have stayed polite and theoretical.
The lesson for any organization is simple: Alignment work lands only after leaders create psychological safety and go first. What is the bottom line? Leaders must let go of the things that no longer fit and act. Otherwise, all that hard-earned trust will quickly vanish.
How Pixar Continues To Do It
Pixar leadership learned early that alignment can’t be assumed. As the company grew, misalignment inevitably crept in, and processes that once were beneficial began to get in the way. Also, incentives shifted, and good work bogged down.
Pixar’s cofounder Ed Catmull didn’t treat that drift as a problem to hide. Instead, he treated it as a signal to intervene, and even something to expect. That’s why alignment at Pixar wasn’t just declared one time and presumed to last forever. It was revisited deliberately, repeatedly, as a core leadership responsibility.
Operational Alignment Has A Payoff
Research on strategy execution has shown for decades that most organizations don’t fail because of bad strategy. They fail because strategy never fully connects to daily work. Kaplan and Norton’s work on the Balanced Scorecard and multiple McKinsey studies show that organizations with strong alignment between strategy and execution outperform peers on growth, focus, and results.
Alignment pays. Misalignment costs. You see it in churn, mistrust, burnout, and busy people solving the wrong problems.
Reflection Questions
- What do you already know is operationally misaligned with your vision, mission, or strategy that you allow to continue anyway?
- What will it take for you to let go of what no longer fits?
- How often do your leaders explicitly ask how a project aligns with mission, vision, and strategy before approving it?
5 Steps To Operational Alignment
- Build an alignment assessment. Create a short alignment check with active input from your team. Demo how it will and won’t be used.
- Pause approvals for fit. Before approving new work, require a clear answer: How does this advance mission, vision, and strategy—and what will stop because of it?
- Make truth safe and useful. Signal clearly that surfacing misalignment is part of the work, not a threat to it. Align incentives accordingly.
- Go first. Publicly acknowledge misalignment in projects you’ve approved or that show up in your priorities. Correct it.
- Make misalignment visible and act on it. Regularly review where time, money, and attention go. Then, identify work that no longer fits, and stop or reshape it.
Team Talk
At your next team meeting, explain operational alignment. Share this article. Ask the team to list current projects and choose one to examine together. Ask, “How does this support the mission, vision, and strategy right now?” Listen without defending. If misalignment surfaces, decide together what to stop, reshape, or clarify.
Your Inspirational Challenge
Most leadership teams don’t struggle with alignment because they lack commitment. They struggle because alignment requires leaders to slow down, look honestly at the work they’re enabling, and change course, which really takes courage.
It means admitting that some work has continued because it’s familiar, not because it fits. That past approvals, which made sense once, don’t anymore. That stopping something no longer aligned can be harder than starting something new.
It’s a choice you make every day — in approvals, tradeoffs, and how you spend your time and energy. When you choose alignment consistently, your people see it. They feel it. Their focus sharpens. Trust builds, engagement returns, and people will put their energy where it actually matters.
