E.Ed.21 - Strategy Is A Team Sport
The Business and Leadership Coaching Company
July 2026 | Series: Senior Leader | Edition: 21 | Theme: Strategy
Read Time: 7 Minutes
Strategy formed entirely alone, however sharp, rarely survives contact with an organisation built by many people.
You are, by instinct and by training, a strong individual strategic thinker. Given a problem, you can model it, weigh the trade-offs, arrive at a defensible position faster and more rigorously than most people in the room. This is a genuine strength, and it carries a quiet liability that becomes more pronounced the more senior you get: the habit of treating strategy as something you produce, alone, and then deliver, fully formed, to an organisation expected to simply execute it.
Organisations, in practice, do not execute strategy that way. They execute strategy they have had some hand in shaping, that has been tested against the operational reality of the people who actually have to deliver it, that has survived contact with the objections of those closest to the work. A strategy arriving fully formed from above, however technically sound, tends to be received as an instruction rather than owned as a direction, and instructions get complied with rather than championed.
The Leadership Squeeze makes this particularly acute for you. You are forming strategy under pressure from multiple directions at once, board expectations above, team capacity below, peer positioning laterally, and the temptation, entirely understandable, is to resolve that pressure privately and present the team with the finished answer, because involving them earlier feels like it would simply add more competing voices to an already complicated calculation.
What gets lost in that shortcut is precisely the thing that makes strategy executable rather than merely correct. Your direct reports, the people managing the portfolio day to day, hold operational knowledge you do not have direct access to: where the actual friction points are, which initiatives the team has quietly stopped believing in, what capacity genuinely exists versus what looks available on a resourcing spreadsheet. Strategy formed without that input is strategy formed with a structural blind spot built in.
There is also a sponsorship dimension here that compounds over time. A team that was consulted, even briefly, even imperfectly, in the shaping of a direction tends to defend that direction when it gets challenged elsewhere in the organisation, because some part of it is genuinely theirs. A team that received the strategy as a finished decision has no particular reason to defend it under pressure, beyond simple compliance, and compliance is a thin foundation when the inevitable resistance arrives.
None of this means dissolving your own strategic judgement into a consensus exercise, that would trade one failure mode for another, and would also waste the genuine analytical strength that got you into this seat in the first place. It means treating the team as a necessary input into the strategy, not merely its eventual audience, building in deliberate moments where the thinking is tested, challenged, and improved before it is finalised and communicated downward.
A practical version of this is smaller than it sounds. Before the strategy is finalised, not after, you bring the rough shape of it to two or three trusted members of your team, individually or in a small group, and ask a genuine, open question: where does this break, what am I not seeing, what would make this fail in practice. The discomfort of exposing unfinished thinking is real, and it produces a measurably stronger final strategy than refining alone ever does.
The Inner Chamber still matters in this process, distinctly from the team consultation. There is a difference between testing operational feasibility with your direct reports and testing the rawer, more political dimensions of your thinking, the parts you are not yet ready to expose inside the organisation, with someone entirely outside it. Both inputs sharpen the eventual strategy. Neither replaces the other.
There is a particular trap worth naming for someone at your level, the assumption that involving the team signals indecision or weakness, that a strong leader arrives with the answer rather than builds it visibly with others. The opposite tends to be true in practice. Leaders who visibly involve their team in shaping direction, while retaining clear ownership of the final call, are read as more confident, not less, because the involvement signals security rather than uncertainty.
The Soft Skills Gap shows up here in a specific, correctable way. The analytical rigour that produces a strong individual strategy is not, on its own, the same skill as building a strategy collaboratively enough that an organisation actually moves behind it. The first is what got you promoted. The second is what determines whether the strategy you are now responsible for actually lands.
There is also a legacy dimension worth sitting with honestly. A strategy you designed entirely alone and pushed through by force of position is, structurally, fragile, dependent on your continued presence and authority to hold it together. A strategy the team helped shape and genuinely owns is considerably more durable, more likely to survive a reorganisation, a leadership change, or your own eventual move to the next role.
Strategy is, in the end, only as good as the organisation' s willingness to actually execute it, and willingness is built in the shaping, not announced in the delivery. Your individual strategic capability remains the foundation. What determines whether that capability translates into organisational movement is whether the team got to help build the direction, or was simply handed it, fully formed, and asked to follow.
There is a useful distinction worth holding onto here, between consultation and abdication. Bringing the rough strategy to two or three trusted reports for genuine challenge is not the same as opening the direction up to a vote, and conflating the two is precisely what stops senior leaders from involving their teams at all, for fear of losing control of the eventual decision. You retain the final call throughout. What changes is how much sharper, and how much more owned, that final call becomes.
A useful test, before any major strategic communication, is to ask yourself honestly whether you could currently explain not just the direction but the reasoning behind it, in terms your most operationally minded direct report would find credible. If you cannot, the strategy has not yet been pressure tested enough against the reality it will need to survive, and that gap is worth closing before the wider rollout, not after.
There is also a longer-term capability being built every time you run this process properly. The direct reports who get pulled into shaping strategy early are also, quietly, being developed into the kind of leaders capable of holding strategic conversations themselves, which is precisely the bench strength an organisation, and your own succession planning, eventually depends on.
None of this requires waiting for a formal planning cycle to begin practising differently. The next piece of strategic thinking you are currently refining alone is the next opportunity to test this shift, in miniature, before the stakes are higher and the habits are harder to change.
It is worth noticing, too, what tends to happen to your own thinking once you make a regular habit of testing strategy before finalising it. The analytical strength that already serves you well does not diminish through this process, it sharpens, because nothing exposes a weak assumption faster than a capable, operationally grounded colleague asking a direct, well-informed question about it. Strategy formed this way tends to arrive at execution already carrying fewer hidden flaws than strategy formed entirely in isolation and only tested for the first time once it has already been announced as decided, at which point correcting course costs considerably more, in both credibility and momentum, than it would have cost to surface the same flaw a week earlier in a smaller, more private room.
There is one more discipline worth naming, the habit of closing the loop publicly once a strategy shaped this way has actually been executed. When a direct report' s early challenge meaningfully changed the final direction, saying so, plainly, in front of the wider team, does more for the credibility of this whole approach than any amount of private appreciation ever could. It signals, concretely rather than rhetorically, that involvement in shaping strategy is not a courtesy extended to make people feel heard, it is a genuine input that changes outcomes, and people who believe that distinction real tends to bring considerably sharper thinking to the next round of challenge than people who suspect their input was symbolic all along.
If the strategy you are carrying has not yet been pressure tested by the people who will need to execute it, that is the next honest step.
If you would like to think it through in a receptive and non-judgemental space with someone who will listen carefully and reflect back what they hear, a Discovery Call is a confidential 30-minute conversation about where you are, what is in the way, what you could and would want to do about it, and how coaching can support you in moving from uncertainty to clarity to strategic action.
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If a Discovery Call feels like a bigger step than you are currently ready for, perhaps the Find Your Focus: The Executive Strategic Audit is an easier place to begin. It asks some honest questions that help you take stock of how you are navigating your seat, whether you have the support you need, and the leader you are building. It is the first step in the same direction: introspection now, a conversation, insight, clarity and strategy when you are ready.
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