You Don't Rise to Your Strategy

Why the best plans fail at the level of your systems

Walk into most leadership meetings and you'll see something fascinating. Seven smart people sitting around a table, each optimizing for completely different outcomes.

The sales director talks about hitting sales targets. The operations manager talks about efficiency projects. The marketing director talks about brand initiatives.

Everyone's doing their job well. No one's doing the company's job.

"We need to help people take off their functional hat and put on their leadership team hat," Patrik explains on the podcast. "But most never make that switch."

This isn't malicious. You get promoted because you're great at sales, or operations, or marketing. Then suddenly you're supposed to care equally about everything else. But your metrics, your team, your expertise - it's all still functional.

So you show up to strategy meetings thinking like a department head, not a company leader.

The skills that don't exist

Here's where it gets uncomfortable: most leaders have never been taught how to execute strategy collectively.

They can build departmental plans. They can't break company goals into cross-functional initiatives.

They can optimize their function. They can't optimize the whole.

They can defend their budget. They can't allocate resources based on company priorities.

Fewer than 5% of senior executives have ever taken a course in operational planning. We promote functional experts to leadership roles and expect them to magically know how to execute company strategy.

But functional excellence and strategic execution are completely different skills.

The meeting symptom

Bad leadership meetings aren't about facilitation techniques. They're symptoms of this deeper problem.

"I ask every CEO about their leadership team meetings," Patrik says. "Almost everyone gives it a two out of four. More dissatisfied than satisfied."

Here's what actually happens: Week after week, the sales director defends sales priorities. The operations manager defends operational priorities. The marketing director defends marketing priorities.

They coordinate. They share information. They avoid stepping on each other's toes.

But they never actually decide what the company should do. Because nobody's really accountable for company outcomes except the CEO.

The lonely accountability

This is the brutal reality: the CEO is the only person in the room measured on overall company performance.

Everyone else gets evaluated on functional metrics. Sales targets. Operational efficiency. Marketing ROI. Their job is to optimize their piece, not the whole.

So the CEO sits in leadership meetings surrounded by people who are fundamentally optimizing for different things. They might agree with the strategy intellectually, but when resources get tight, they prioritize their function.

The CEO can't execute strategy alone. But they're often the only one truly accountable for it.

The systems gap

Without execution systems, even brilliant strategies die in this coordination theater.

Real strategy systems force collective accountability. Quarterly planning sessions where leadership teams break company priorities into specific cross-functional initiatives. Weekly meetings tracking progress on shared commitments, not functional updates.

Most importantly: shared metrics. Part of every leadership team member's evaluation tied to overall company performance, not just functional success.

"You don't rise to the level of your goals," James Clear writes. "You fall to the level of your systems."

Most leadership teams have coordination systems, not execution systems.

The choice

You can keep believing your leadership team is aligned because they attend the same meetings and nod at the same slides.

Or you can test it. Ask each member to write down your three strategic priorities. See how aligned they really are.

Then decide: do you want a leadership team that coordinates departments, or one that executes company strategy?

Because right now, you probably have very smart people doing very good functional work that adds up to very little strategic progress.

The question isn't whether you have a good strategy. It's whether you have a leadership team capable of executing it together.