Why your people can't connect their work to the strategy

Ask your leadership team what the organisation's purpose is and you will get a clear, confident answer.

Ask the people three levels down how their daily work connects to it and you will get silence. Or five different answers. Or a polished line from the website that means nothing to how they spend their Monday morning.

That gap is where execution commitment leaks.

But in execution, purpose serves a different function entirely.

It is the mechanism through which people decide whether to bring discretionary effort. 

Whether to push through when things get hard. Whether to make the call that serves the strategy, not just the task in front of them.

When someone can see how their work connects to what the organisation is trying to achieve, they commit differently. 

When they can't, they comply. And compliance looks like engagement on a survey. It does not look like execution when the pressure is on.

This is not just a motivation problem. It is a decision-making problem.

When people lack a clear line of sight between their work and why the organisation exists, they default to local priorities. 

Strategy should build that bridge. In most organisations, it doesn't.

The quality of thousands of daily decisions across your organisation depends on whether people can see the connection.

In my research, 70% of senior leaders rated performance orientation as having a high to very high impact on strategy execution. Yet only 17% said their organisations had the supports in place to enable high performance.

That gap is not about motivation. It is a design failure.

One leader put it plainly: "We use purpose as a primary driver for our people, even though it means we need to work even harder."

That is purpose carrying the weight that performance systems, recognition, and leadership design should be sharing.

Purpose-driven organisations that rely on purpose alone are not building commitment. They are running on goodwill. 

And goodwill has a shelf life.

And here is what I find missing from the leadership conversation. Purpose is not sustained through communication. It is sustained through leader behaviour. 

What leaders prioritise, protect, and reinforce tells people what actually matters, regardless of what the values statement says. 

When those signals are misaligned, people learn fast. They comply. They don't commit.

What leaders prioritise, protect and reinforce is a design choice, not a personality trait. That's the work in Leadership: building an executive team whose signals match the strategy they've signed.

If every team in your organisation cannot articulate how their work connects to strategic outcomes, the purpose gap is not a communications problem.

It is a leadership design problem.

This is part of lever 6 (Performance & Commitment) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model.
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Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.

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