From Boardroom to Frontline
Rachael Kelly | The Strategic Step Advisory
The board has approved it. The document is polished. The leadership team is energised. But chances are that when it comes to execution the results will vary. AchieveIt's 2025 State of Strategy Execution survey, which surveyed more than 250 leaders across private enterprise, government, healthcare and higher education, found that 66% believe consistent, real-time updates significantly increase the likelihood of hitting growth targets. That says as much about what's usually missing as what works.
So what does it take to move from a board-approved strategy to action at every level? Here's what I've seen work across sectors.
1. Start with a retrospective
Before a single new objective is written, look back. What was left undone from the last strategy? What has changed in the operating environment, and how does the focus need to shift?
Organisations carry momentum, half-finished initiatives, and embedded assumptions into every new strategy cycle. Acknowledging that openly creates a far more grounded starting point. Ask: what's important but hasn't been done? What can we carry forward? What needs to be retired?
2. Be clear on whether you're changing or evolving
Many of the most effective strategies I've supported have been horizon-based. They didn't ask organisations to reinvent themselves, but to mature and deepen what they already had over a three-to-five-year period.
Before cascading objectives downward, be explicit with the leadership team: are we changing direction, or building capability in our current direction? The answer shapes how you communicate the strategy and what you ask people to do differently.
This distinction matters more than people realise. When people feel constantly disrupted without visible progress, they disengage. When they can see they're building toward something, they stay the course.
3. Translate objectives at every level
A high-level guiding statement like 'adapting to shifts in an ever-changing context' means very little to a team leader running weekly operations, and even less to an individual contributor.
The real work is taking each strategic objective and asking: what does this mean for the executive leadership team, senior leadership, people leaders and individuals specifically? What do they need to do differently and how will we know?
Goals work best when they are specific, measurable, and transparent at every level, and when the link between everyday work and the bigger picture is made explicit. It requires deliberate effort to make that connection; it won't emerge on its own. A practical test: hand any individual contributor the strategy document and ask them what it means for their role next week. If they can't answer, the work isn't done.
4. Invest where you need to
Can the strategy be delivered with the people, systems and tools the organisation already has? Often not, and that's fine to admit at the outset rather than discover it mid-year.
A capability gap usually shows up in one of three places: not enough people, people without the right skills, or systems that can't produce the information the strategy depends on. Each needs a different response. A skills gap might mean training or a new hire. A systems gap might mean a modest technology investment, or simply better use of what's already there. A capacity gap might mean rephasing the roadmap so fewer things are attempted at once.
The cost of skipping this step shows up later, and it's a people cost. When teams are asked to deliver against a strategy without the resourcing to match, the result is burnout and disengagement long before it's a missed target. Naming the investment required at the start protects the people being asked to deliver it.
5. Agree on measurement at the time of goal-setting
This is where strategy most commonly becomes theoretical. Organisations agree on objectives and then struggle to define how they'll know whether those objectives are being achieved.
From my own experience working with boards, it can be genuinely difficult for a board to get clear evidence that the organisation is progressing against strategy. Define the measures up front. Agree the format. Settle a cadence for reporting progress up to the board, through the organisation, and to external stakeholders where relevant.
6. Build the board's view, not just the department's
Measurement at goal-setting solves half the problem. The other half is how that measurement reaches the board.
Boards are routinely handed a stack of papers from different departments, each reporting against their own metrics, in their own format, on their own cycle. The board is left to assemble a single picture of strategic progress from pieces that were never designed to fit together. That's a heavy lift for any director, and an easy way for genuine risks or genuine wins to get lost between the lines.
The fix is designed at the same time as the goal cascade itself: a single reporting structure, mapped back to the strategic pillars, that pulls from each department's data without requiring the board to do the translation themselves. What's on track. What's slipping. What decision the board actually needs to make, and by when.
Done well, this turns board reporting from a compliance exercise into the mechanism that closes the loop: from strategy, to execution, to evidence, and back to the board's next decision.
If this article has piqued your interest, get in touch with the team to talk through your gaps and see how we can help.