Connecting People to Strategy: Why Every Leader Must Close the Gap

Most organisations have a strategy. Far fewer have people who can tell you how their work connects to it.

Ask most employees to explain how their work contributes to the organisation’s strategy, and you will get one of two responses. Some will offer a confident, specific answer. Far more will pause, and eventually describe their tasks rather than their contribution. The pause is often a signal that strategy has been written but not translated.

In my work with leadership teams across the globe, this is one of the most persistent gaps I see. The strategy exists. It has been carefully developed, beautifully designed, and presented at the offsite. But somewhere between the executive team and the person doing the work, the thread gets lost. People are busy and working hard, yet many cannot articulate how what they do connects to where the organisation is heading.

This is a translation problem. Leaders often misdiagnose it as a motivation problem.

Where the disconnect comes from

Strategy usually breaks down in one of two places.

The first is at the top. Senior leaders develop the strategy but do not communicate it widely or often enough. It stays in the language of the boardroom, referenced in quarterly updates but never genuinely brought to life. People hear the words but do not absorb the meaning.

The second is closer to the ground. The strategy may be communicated, but leaders do not demonstrate how their own team contributes to it. This is the more common failure, and the more fixable one. It is not enough for people to know the strategy. They need to see themselves in it.

Strategist and author Alicia McKay captured the root of this when she joined me on the Thriving Leaders Podcast. Most organisations, she argues, treat strategy as something they have, an output, a deliverable, a document, rather than something they do. The document gets written, parked, and brought out once a year to report against, a bit like keeping a book on the bedside table and hoping you absorb it without reading it. What goes missing, in her words, is the middle. There is usually a lofty vision at the top and a very detailed list of operational activity at the bottom, but little in between to connect the two. The vision is the why. The operational plan is the what. The missing middle is the how, and it is the hardest part to get right because it asks leaders to sit in an uncomfortable level of abstraction: specific enough to guide real decisions, but not so prescriptive that it strips people of judgment.

When that middle is absent, the result is a workforce that is diligent but directionless. People fill their days with activity without a clear sense of whether that activity matters. Over time, that gap erodes engagement, because it is very hard to feel that your work is significant when you cannot see where it leads.

Start with why the organisation exists, not what it does

The instinct for many leaders is to close this gap by explaining the strategy in more detail. More context, more cascading, more slides. But the first step is not the strategy at all. It is purpose.

There is an important difference between what an organisation does and why it exists. The what is the product, the service, the deliverables. The why is the reason any of it matters. When people are connected to purpose first, the strategy has something to attach to. Without it, strategy is just a set of priorities competing for attention.

I think about purpose at four levels: the organisation’s purpose, the team’s purpose, the meaningful work people do each day, and their own individual values. A leader’s job is to help people connect across all four. The strategy sits inside this picture, but it is not the starting point. People rarely commit to a plan. They commit to a reason.

This is also where purpose has to meet the individual. Organisational purpose statements, however well crafted, do not create meaning on their own. Meaning is made in the space where the organisation’s reason for existing overlaps with what a person genuinely cares about. The leader’s role is to help people find that overlap.

Make the contribution meaningful and digestible

Once purpose is in place, the task becomes helping people understand their contribution to the strategy in a way that is both meaningful and digestible. This is a genuine leadership skill, and it is one that is rarely taught or expected.

I was reminded of how powerful this can be in a conversation on the Thriving Leaders Podcast with researcher and author Zach Mercurio, whose work focuses on meaningful work and helping people feel that they matter. Zach described a practice used across NASA during the Apollo missions. Every group, he explained, had what was called a ladder to the moon. At the top of the ladder sat the mission: to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. At the bottom sat an individual or group’s actual tasks for that month. In between were the tangible, measurable objectives that connected the two. People could look at the ladder and see, concretely, how their work laddered up to something far bigger than themselves.

What I find most useful about this is the middle of the ladder. Leaders often try to connect people directly from their daily tasks to the organisation’s grandest ambition, and the leap is simply too large to feel real. The rungs in between, the measurable objectives that the task actually feeds, are what make the connection credible. Contribution becomes something people can see, not something they are asked to take on faith.

Zach also described a beautifully simple version of the same idea from a supervisor at a national park in the United States. Each week, the supervisor would photograph the work his team had completed: a repaired bridge with visitors walking across it, a reopened bathroom with a shorter queue, a family using a trail. On Friday mornings he would send an email with the subject line “look what you did,” and simply attach the photos. His reasoning, as Zach recounted it, was that his people should never have to wonder whether they made a difference, because he gave them the evidence every week.

Most leaders are far better placed than they realise to provide this kind of evidence. They often have the line of sight to see how an individual’s efforts flowed through to an outcome further down the track. Showing people that connection, giving them proof of their impact, is a skill worth developing deliberately.

Do not force the connection

Not every task connects neatly to the strategy. There is an important caveat here. An enthusiastic leader, acting with the best intentions, can do the opposite. When you try to construct an artificial link, people can tell. A forced connection between someone’s work and the organisational strategy feels like spin, and can undermine trust. If the thread is genuinely there, help people see it clearly. If it is not, it is worth talking to your manager about which part of the strategy your team genuinely contributes to, and focusing your attention there. Perhaps the team needs to refocus.

On the flipside, when we try to build the strategy so that everyone can see themselves in it, we find that we are trying to sum up everything the organisation does. It becomes an impossible wish list, and doesn’t provide clarity or focus. It is lovely in that everyone can see how they contribute, but useless for helping anyone make a decision or determine a trade-off, because it tries to cover everything. A good strategy has to be narrow enough to tell people what not to do, which is why it cannot simply be a collage of every team’s priorities.

This raises a more useful possibility. If a piece of work cannot be connected to where the organisation is heading, the honest question is not how to justify it, but whether it should continue at all.

Let strategy become a lens for decisions

This is where the connection between strategy and daily work becomes genuinely powerful. When people understand the strategy and can see their contribution to it, strategy stops being a document and becomes a lens.

A clear strategy helps people make choices. It tells them what to prioritise, what to say yes to, and, just as importantly, what to stop doing. Teams that understand where the organisation is heading can look at their own workload and ask a sharper question: does this actually move us towards the strategy, or is it simply work we have always done? It is a filter, a yes or no gate for deciding which new work to take on.

The shift, from strategy as something leaders talk about to something teams use and execute, is one of the most valuable outcomes of connecting people to the plan. It gives people permission to question activity that no longer serves the direction, and it reduces the busywork that accumulates in every organisation over time. Alignment, at its best, is not about everyone doing more. It is about everyone doing the right things.

The leadership skill worth building

Every leader should be able to explain how their team’s work contributes to the organisation’s strategy. Not in the abstract language of the strategy deck, but in a way their people can feel and act on. That ability is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism by which strategy becomes real.

The work starts with purpose, connects to what people genuinely value, gives them real clarity, and helps people focus on the important work that will have the biggest impact. Do that consistently, and strategy stops being something that happens in the boardroom. It becomes something your people can see themselves in, and act on, every day.

Claire Gray helps executive teams and senior leadership groups build the relationships, alignment and accountability that make cross-functional collaboration work in practice. If your leaders come together and then drift back to their own patch, or make decisions without clarity on direction and authority, this is the work. Explore how to work together at thrivingculture.com.au.

P.S. If you’d like help developing your strategy with your executive team. Or you’d like to bring your senior leaders or people leaders together to develop the skills to communicate and connect their teams to strategy I’d love to chat.