Your people follow the signal, not the strategy

You say collaboration. Yet you incentivise the lone wolf... and cross-functional delivery breaks.

You say innovation. Yet you punish the failure... and people stop raising risks early.

You say accountability. Yet you protect the senior leader who doesn't deliver... and commitment erodes at every level beneath them.

You say customer-first. Yet you open every meeting with financials... and decisions start serving the numbers, not the customer.

Every one of these is a reinforcement signal. Your people read every one of them. And they follow the signal, not the strategy.

This is where execution quietly breaks down. The plan and the governance are rarely the problem. The cultural gap between what you design and what you do is.

There are two types of reinforcement. Formal: reward, recognition, performance management, promotion. These are the ones you design.

Informal: where leaders spend their time, how they respond to bad news, what gets discussed first on Monday morning, the stories that get retold, and what quietly gets tolerated.

The informal signals were never designed. They formed through habit and history. And they are louder than any values statement.

In my research, one respondent said it plainly: "Collectivism was encouraged but not rewarded. We could not move the strategy forward in silos."

The strategy said one thing. The system said another. People followed the system. Execution stalled.

You say collaboration. Yet you incentivise the lone wolf... and cross-functional delivery breaks.

You say innovation. Yet you punish the failure... and people stop raising risks early.

You say accountability. Yet you protect the senior leader who doesn't deliver... and commitment erodes at every level beneath them.

You say customer-first. Yet you open every meeting with financials... and decisions start serving the numbers, not the customer.

Every one of these is a reinforcement signal. Your people read every one of them. And they follow the signal, not the strategy.

This is where execution quietly breaks down. The plan and the governance are rarely the problem. The cultural gap between what you design and what you do is.

There are two types of reinforcement. Formal: reward, recognition, performance management, promotion. These are the ones you design.

Informal: where leaders spend their time, how they respond to bad news, what gets discussed first on Monday morning, the stories that get retold, and what quietly gets tolerated.

The informal signals were never designed. They formed through habit and history. And they are louder than any values statement.

The formal signals are easy to audit. The informal ones are the ones people actually read, and they were never designed. Surfacing what your system is really rewarding, and changing it, is the work in Leadership.

In my research, one respondent said it plainly: "Collectivism was encouraged but not rewarded. We could not move the strategy forward in silos."

The strategy said one thing. The system said another. People followed the system. Execution stalled.

This is part of lever 7 (Culture for Execution) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →

Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →

Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.

The one-pager maps the cultural gap your organisation is living with right now. See it on LinkedIn →