Is Your Company Wasting Millions? The Hidden Cause of Misalignment

The broken link between strategy and execution. Why your company is wasting millions

Imagine that your company is wasting millions of dollars per year, not because of bad products or channels, but because the focus of your teams is not in the right place.

This is a problem of misalignment between your strategy and your execution. And if you have this at your company, you are not alone. Plenty of studies show that a lack of alignment is more common than one might think. For example, a Harvard Business Review study found that while most executives believe their organizations are highly aligned, their actual strategic alignment is only 23%.

This is a big gap between your current status and where you would want to be. Let’s talk about the reasons for this and how to solve them.

Reasons for Misalignment

Although there are many reasons why teams can be misaligned in their execution, I see these as the main problems:

• Lack of alignment at the top: If your management team has different goals and isn't aligned on a common strategy, their teams will be pushing in different directions. This creates a chaotic environment where no one is working toward the same vision.

• Little or no communication: Strategy is not part of the team's daily life. Even if there is an agreed strategy, teams might have seen it once and never again, making their decisions disconnected from the bigger picture.

• Quick gains: Teams might focus on short-term goals and ignore long-term ones, preventing any development towards strategic objectives. This can feel productive in the moment, but it can cripple your long-term growth.

Finding Alignment

To close your strategic gap and open up strategic opportunities, you should start doing the following:

• Clear North-Star: Clarify your vision and strategy. This needs to be a collaborative effort, worked on and agreed upon by the management team with the help of relevant stakeholders. All teams should have shared goals that everyone understands.

• Communicate it constantly: It's a fact of life: no matter how many times you tell people something, someone won’t be listening, couldn’t attend, or will just forget. Having the strategy present in your daily work—on dashboards, in meetings, on posters—will help everyone remember.

• Draw the links between your strategy and your execution: Create a simple diagram that helps you follow how different work is contributing to a strategic goal, or potentially is not. When teams plan and prioritize, they can easily see if their work is strategic and if they are advancing the company's goals.

• Make people be part of the strategy: By bringing the strategy closer to the team’s execution work, they will feel like they understand it. They will see that their work is important and advances the goals and vision of the business, typically driving a feeling of empowerment and ownership.

Here's a visual example of how strategic alignment can be a powerful force:

From Chaos to Business Impact

Strategic alignment is not just a buzzword; it's a proven way to stop wasting resources and start driving real business impact.

Do you want to measure your potential strategic gap and figure out if you need to change the way that you are working? Check out my Strategic Gap Analysis course to see how you can do this quickly and measure your alignment.