Active leadership in the moment

Strategy Execution by Design Series

Lever 1: Trust & Leadership
Element 2: Active Leadership in the moment

Delivery of strategy often fails in small moments; what role does leadership play?

I've worked with executives who can deliver an inspiring speech at a strategy roadshow - clear, confident, and energising, which is a critical skill on its own. However, when it comes to the meeting where priorities blur, the performance conversation that never happens, or the decision pushed down the line, this is where the gap between words and actions opens up.

And people notice. Quickly.

When leaders aren’t present in those everyday moments, delivery of a strategy starts to unravel. Teams lose confidence, behaviours drift, and culture slides back to the path of least resistance.

Kouzes and Posner call this the essence of leadership credibility: people believe you when they see you follow through. John Kotter found the same - transformation stalls when leaders fail to sustain visible action. In my own master’s research, leaders described how inconsistency at the top fragmented execution. Nods of agreement in the room, but very different interpretations once people walked out the door.

So why don’t leaders always step in? Often it’s fear of conflict, pressure to “keep things moving, low self confidence or the level of demand - being stretched so thin they default to silence. But leaving things unsaid doesn’t make them go away - it just signals inconsistency, and people fill the gap with their own interpretations.

I learned this lesson personally. Earlier in my career, I avoided a tough performance conversation with a team member whose work wasn’t hitting the mark. I told myself I was protecting the relationship, but really, I was afraid of a conversation I’d never had to have. What I was doing was eroding trust with the rest of the team, who could see the gap but also saw me doing nothing. When I finally had the conversation, respectfully but directly, the shift was immediate. The team leaned back in because they saw I was prepared to act, not just talk.

Execution doesn’t live in off-site decks or keynote speeches. It lives in how leaders show up in the everyday: modelling the behaviours they expect. 

So what can leaders do differently today?
- Notice behaviours that misalign with the strategy and call them in, respectfully.
- Ask yourself where you can show up visibly this week to model execution.
- Ask execution-focused questions, e.g., “What’s blocking progress?” or “How does this support our priority?”
- Close the loop: when someone raises an issue, follow up and show what was done.

Because executing strategy is fragile in the absence of leadership. It either breaks in the small moments - or comes alive through them.

This is why active leadership in the moment is central to Lever 1: Leadership Cohesion & Trust in my Execution by Design series.

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