Only 11% of organisations execute strategy well. The difference isn’t smarts—it’s health
Nobody likes to admit that as a team, they’re not exactly “functional.”
But what does functional actually look like—and what does dysfunctional look like—when we’re talking about senior leadership teams?
Functional teams fight in the room and align in the hallway. Dysfunctional teams agree in the room and fight in the hallway.
Functional teams hold each other accountable for commitments. Dysfunctional teams hold each other responsible for failures.
Functional teams have one strategy and argue about execution. Dysfunctional teams have one PowerPoint and twelve interpretations.
Functional team members can admit “I don’t know” and ask for help. Dysfunctional team members pretend confidence and protect territory.
Functional teams measure collective outcomes. Dysfunctional teams measure individual functional contributions.
Which side of this list did your last leadership meeting fall on?
And while all highly driven, talented leadership teams go through ups and downs, dysfunctional teams display unhealthy behaviour by default. It’s just how they roll. But admitting it? That would be regarded almost as treason.
The 89% Problem
According to the 2025 Global State of Strategy Execution report, only 11% of organisations reach Strategy Execution Leader maturity. They’re not concentrated in any one region, industry, or size band.
The other 89%? They’re not failing because of bad strategies.
Harvard Business Review estimated that 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. A full 61% of executives said they were unprepared for the strategic challenges they faced upon appointment. No surprise, then, that 50–60% of executives fail within the first 18 months of being promoted or hired.
McKinsey’s 2024–2025 survey found that only 21% of executives reported their strategies passed four or more of their Ten Tests of Strategy—a 40% drop from fifteen years earlier. Nearly half of organisations lose momentum during redesign efforts. A third fail to deliver even after implementation.
Patrick Lencioni, after two decades working with CEOs, put it bluntly:
“The seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are. It has everything to do with how healthy they are.”
A successful organisation needs to be two things: smart and healthy. Most leaders pour 95% of their attention into smart—strategy, finance, marketing, technology—and almost none into healthy.
But Numbers Never Convinced Anyone to Step Into the Uncomfortable
Read that again.
No matter what data you present, if there’s not enough courage and willingness to turn team dysfunction around, it will never be addressed at the root. If you’re lucky, you defer the problem to HR and request a few executive training courses—hoping they’ll somehow address the gaping wound.
They won’t.
What the 11% Do Differently
The organisations that reach Strategy Execution Leader status don’t have secret strategies or smarter people. They have different habits:
Weekly or biweekly check-ins on strategic priorities—not monthly, not quarterly
Retrospectives after each cycle—learning from what worked and what didn’t, without blame
Blockers removed within days, not weeks—because someone is actually empowered to remove them
Outcomes measured collectively—not by function, not by individual contribution
Strategy connected to daily work—not living in a slide deck that gets dusted off twice a year
None of this is complicated. All of it is pretty uncomfortable.
So What Does It Actually Look Like?
Not a turnaround story with a dramatic crisis. Not a burning platform.
Just a slow, honest reckoning with the fact that four companies operating under one name weren’t actually operating as one. That silos weren’t just an org chart problem—they were a leadership behaviour problem. And that the cost wasn’t showing up as a single line item. It was showing up everywhere: in duplicated effort, in strategies that stalled, in collaboration that never happened, in talent that quietly disengaged.
Here’s what three years of fixing that looked like.
From Boardroom Booklets to Broken Silos
The Group CFO had a problem he couldn’t spreadsheet his way out of.
As finance leader of a fourth-generation manufacturing conglomerate—spanning safety equipment, engineered textiles, industrial coatings, and medical products—he’d watched the same pattern repeat for years. Big dreams. Beautifully crafted strategic plans. And precious few that ever reached full fruition.
Four companies.
Two thousand employees.
Nearly a century of history.
And almost zero cross-collaboration.
“We kept talking about breaking down silos,” he recalls. “But what did we actually do about it?”
The Booklet That Started a Chaos
In 2019, he brought an idea to the board. He’d been experimenting with a goal-setting methodology—first in his own life, trying to bring structure to personal goals. He wondered if it could work for an entire group of companies that had never truly operated as one.
The board liked it. They spent weeks drafting objectives. They produced a glossy booklet. They called a townhall and presented the new approach to the entire organisation.
“And then,” he says, “the chaos started.”
The head of HR approached him afterward, wanting to help. But there was no change management plan. No roadmap. No real buy-in beyond the boardroom. They’d handed people a booklet and expected transformation.
It didn’t work.
Three Years in the Wilderness
What followed was a period most leadership teams never survive: three years of experimentation, false starts, and slow coalition-building.
2019: The failed booklet launch.
2021: A major group restructuring.
2022: Finally—external coaching, proper investment, and a structured approach.
“Don’t underestimate the time it takes,” he says now. “Not just to adopt a methodology—but the mindset. You need patience and perseverance in the face of failure, resistance, and cynicism.”
The mistake most leaders make? Spending all their energy trying to convert the skeptics.
He learned to do the opposite.
“Focus on the small number of early adopters. They will take it forward.”
Within the group, there were pockets of people hungry for structure—people who wanted to understand what the organisation was actually trying to achieve and how their work connected to it. Those became his champions.
Not assigned champions. Volunteer champions. People who applied for the role because they saw it as a leadership development opportunity—not an additional burden stapled onto their existing job.
The Shift That Changed Everything
The methodology mattered far less than the behaviour change underneath it.
The first attempt was top-down: board creates strategy, hands it to the organisation, expects compliance.
The approach that finally worked was different. It invited people in. It made the discomfort explicit. It forced leaders to hold themselves accountable before asking it of anyone else.
“Be prepared to move into the discomfort,” he says. “Holding people accountable is difficult. But it must be done.”
The hardest part wasn’t the framework. It was rewiring how a century-old organisation thought about execution—shifting from outputs to outcomes, from activity to impact, from isolated business units to a genuinely integrated group. From a collection of executives to one team.
“On the surface, it looks easy. But once you start working with it, you find how difficult it is.”
What Actually Changed
Today, the group operates quite differently.
The senior leadership team is aligned—not on paper, but in practice. Business unit leaders deliver budgets connected to long-term group objectives, not just annual targets. People across different companies collaborate, offer support, share expertise. Things that “would never have happened” before.
They even invited a major supplier into their strategy execution process. Years of talking about collaboration—and now it’s real, because the process almost forced them to do it.
“Many of the things we set out as objectives, we would have achieved anyway,” he reflects. “But through this process, achievement—or failure—was greatly accelerated.”
That’s the point. Healthy leadership teams don’t necessarily have better strategies. They discover faster what’s working and what isn’t. And they adjust—without politics, ego, or silos getting in the way.
The Lesson for Leaders Watching From the Sidelines
His advice is blunt:
“Find YOUR process. It’s not plug and play.”
“Senior leadership sponsorship is non-negotiable.”
“You will get it wrong. Be prepared to pivot and keep adjusting.”
And perhaps most importantly:
“Don’t expect this to happen fast. We went from 2019 to 2022 before we had real traction. Most people give up after six months.”
The Bottom Line
The 89% of organisations failing to execute their strategies aren’t failing because they lack smart people or good ideas.
They’re failing because they haven’t done the slow, uncomfortable work of building a leadership team that can actually follow through.
Functional leadership teams can achieve almost anything they set out to do. But it takes longer and demands more than most leaders anticipate—or are willing to admit.
This group spent three years in the wilderness. They came out the other side aligned, accountable, and executing as one.
The question for every leadership team is simple:
Are you willing to do the work?
And if you’re not sure where to start—start by asking your team which of these five dysfunctions they see most often:
Absence of trust?
Fear of conflict?
Lack of commitment?
Avoidance of peer-to-peer accountability?
Inattention to results?
Their answers will tell you everything.
If this landed, I’d love to hear which dysfunction your team struggles with most.
Drop me a line—I read every response.
Next month: What the 11% actually do differently—and why most leadership teams won’t do it.
— Fran
