Lever 1 of 7 ยท Strategy Execution by Design
Leadership and trust
When trust and cohesion are missing at the top, the impact ripples fast. Projects stall, priorities blur, and people spend more energy protecting themselves than pushing the work forward. It is not only the leadership team that suffers. The whole organisation feels it.
Leadership and trust is the first lever of strategy execution: whether the executive team operates as one team, stays present after the strategy is signed, keeps learning together, and is candid enough that the real risks get named in the room. When this lever is weak, every other lever inherits the damage.
Why this lever comes first
Most execution failures get diagnosed downstream. The programme slipped, the capability was thin, the governance was heavy. Those are usually symptoms of something that happened earlier, at a leadership table where a decision was made without the information that would have changed it.
That is why leadership and trust is the first lever in the Strategy Execution by Design model. It is the foundation every other lever rests on. Across my research and the work since, five elements consistently decide whether strategy moves from paper to practice.
of senior leaders rated alignment of culture and leadership enablement as a top priority for execution. It was the second highest rated theme in the research, behind only clear strategic direction.
Reti, R. (2022). Maximising Firm Performance Through Strategy Execution. Massey University. Senior leaders in large New Zealand firms.
The five elements
Each element is a separate diagnostic. Weakness in any one of them shows up differently.
First team: your peers matter more than your function
Executive teams that execute well behave like actual teams. Leaders put the enterprise first, not their own department. It sounds obvious and it is harder than it looks, because it means stepping out of your silo and treating your peers as partners rather than competitors for the same finite resource.
When leaders are genuinely aligned behind collective goals and support each other publicly, execution accelerates. Where functional loyalty trumped enterprise loyalty, decisions dragged on and accountability became a dirty word.
This echoes Patrick Lencioni's first team principle in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and Jon Katzenbach's findings in The Wisdom of Teams: cohesive top teams accelerate execution, while siloed loyalty kills momentum.
- Set collective goals that matter more than departmental wins.
- Debate fiercely behind closed doors, then present a united front.
- Design incentives that reward collaboration, not just individual performance.
Leadership in the moment: small behaviours, big impact
Grand strategic announcements get the attention. Execution happens in the small moments: how you listen in a meeting, how you respond when someone shares a half-formed idea, how you handle tension when things get uncomfortable.
Leaders were blunt with me about this. Strategies rarely derail through dramatic failure. They derail in the everyday moments when leaders brush off a concern or default to protecting themselves. Trust builds through consistent small acts: following through on commitments, really listening, and building on other people's ideas instead of shooting them down.
Kouzes and Posner found the same in The Leadership Challenge: credibility is earned through consistent behaviour. Kotter's Leading Change warns that transformation stalls when leaders' daily actions do not match the strategy.
- Pay attention to your micro-reactions.
- When someone speaks up, show you value their input by engaging with it, not dismissing it.
- Do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it.
- Listen more than you talk.
- Ask for help if you have knowledge or capability gaps that prevent you from leading effectively.
Learning: leaders who stay curious
Execution environments are messy. Plans hit reality, assumptions get tested, and things rarely go exactly as expected. The leaders who adapt best are the ones who stay curious and keep learning.
Some executives describe themselves as learners in public. They share what they are discovering and encourage their teams to experiment. Others admit that a fear of looking weak stops them asking questions or saying they do not know. The difference shows up in how much their teams trust them.
Leaders who encourage continuous learning build cultures that innovate more and recover faster from setbacks. At its core this is self-awareness: a willingness to question your own assumptions and actively seek feedback.
Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset shows curiosity and openness drive resilience. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline frames learning organisations as the ones that adapt and execute most effectively.
- Share your own learning journey with your team.
- Ask more questions than you give answers.
- Create regular forums to reflect on what is working and what is not.
- Invest in your own development. It gives others permission to do the same.
Trust and psychological safety: the hidden accelerators
In senior leadership, trust and psychological safety are inseparable. Together they create the conditions where leaders can speak candidly, disagree productively and decide quickly.
One line from my research has stayed with me. Asked why their organisation leant so heavily on process and control, a participant said simply: “We have it in place of trust.” That is what a trust deficit costs. It gets replaced with machinery, and the machinery is slower.
Psychological safety is not about comfort. It is about taking interpersonal risks: voicing concerns, offering new ideas, admitting mistakes and learning from them. Teams with high psychological safety adjust to setbacks faster and handle the bumps in execution better.
Amy Edmondson's foundational work on psychological safety shows high-safety teams innovate more and perform better. As Simon Sinek puts it, a team is not a group of people who work together, it is a group of people who trust each other.
- Match actions to words consistently.
- Share information openly.
- Invite and model dissent.
- Make learning from mistakes normal.
- Assume positive intent.
- Create genuinely safe spaces at the top table.
Relational engagement: networks carry the work
Here is something that surprised me. Strategy execution flows through relationships and networks, not org charts and reporting lines. The human connections that carry information, motivation and support across an organisation are largely invisible and entirely load-bearing.
It is a paradox in my own research. Asked to rank what enables execution, senior leaders placed relational engagement last of every theme. Yet when the same leaders described what actually went wrong, they kept returning to the quality of relationships as the thing that made everything else possible.
Relational engagement is not soft work. It is infrastructure. When relationships are strong, people pick up the phone, ask for help and solve problems quickly. When they are weak, small issues fester and become major roadblocks.
Rob Cross's The Hidden Power of Social Networks confirms it: networks, not org charts, predict collaboration and innovation. Herminia Ibarra shows in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader that leaders who cultivate broad connections deliver more effectively.
- Map your informal networks: not just who reports to whom, but who actually talks to whom.
- Strengthen connections across silos.
- Coach your people to spend as much time on relationships as they do on tasks.
Why leadership and trust is the foundation
My research surfaced something leaders rarely expect. Asked to rank what enables execution, senior leaders put clear strategic direction first and relational engagement last. Yet the same leaders, describing what actually went wrong in their organisations, kept returning to the leadership team: the conversations that did not happen, the risks that were softened on the way up, the decisions that were remade in the corridor.
That is the pattern worth sitting with. Leadership and trust is not what leaders say matters most. It is what turns out to have been missing when execution fails.
First team cohesion, trust, psychological safety, a learning mindset, moment-to-moment behaviour and relational engagement together create a climate where people feel safe to surface problems, debate vigorously and unite behind decisions. Without that foundation, even the most brilliant strategy remains an idea on a slide.
Leadership and trust is not a soft lever. It is the engine that powers every other lever in execution. Get it right and you set the stage for everything else to succeed. Neglect it and no amount of planning or technology will save your strategy.
A challenge for you
If you are a senior leader, be honest with yourself. Are you really putting the enterprise first, or quietly prioritising your own function? Do your peers trust you enough to bring you bad news and disagree with you openly? Are you investing as much energy in relationships as you are in processes and systems? If you are leading execution, are you active in the moment to enable your team?
Not sure which of the seven conditions is holding your execution back?
The Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment scores your organisation across all seven levers.
Take the assessment → See the full frameworkWritten by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand. Her research on strategy execution in large firms was completed through Massey University in 2022.
References drawn upon for Lever 1
- Cândido, C. J. F., & Santos, S. P. (2015). Strategy implementation: What is the failure rate? Journal of Management & Organization, 21(2), 237–262.
- Covey, S. M. R. (2006). The speed of trust. Free Press.
- Cross, R., & Parker, A. (2004). The hidden power of social networks. Harvard Business School Press.
- Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Ibarra, H. (2015). Act like a leader, think like a leader. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams. Harvard Business School Press.
- Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.
- Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge (6th ed.). Wiley.
- Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team. Jossey-Bass.
- Reti, R. (2022). Maximising firm performance through strategy execution. Massey University.
- Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline. Doubleday.
- Sinek, S. (2014). Leaders eat last. Portfolio/Penguin.