Written by Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock, Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
In The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey shares research from a Harris Poll of 23,000 employees that:
- Only 37% of employees had a clear understanding of their organisation’s goals. And only 20% were enthusiastic about them.
- Only 15% felt enabled to execute on key priorities.
- A mere 10% felt their organisation held people accountable for results.
Those numbers are uncomfortable enough on their own. But Covey brings them to life by imagining what a football team would look like if it operated this way.
Of 11 players on the pitch…
- Only 4 would know which goal is theirs
- Only 2 would actually care
- Only 2 would know their position
- and 9 out of 11 would be competing against their own teammates rather than the opposition.
That’s not a team. It’s a collection of individuals running in different directions. And yet, this is the reality many organisations are unknowingly operating in – not because they lack strategy, but because alignment, clarity and shared commitment haven’t cascaded beyond the boardroom.
We wanted to test this. When we recently brought together around 90 senior leaders – a mix of CEOs, MDs, HRDs, CPOs and Directors from across the UK and Europe – for our Chaos to Clarity: The Executive Team Reset for 2026 event in London, we used live polling to find out whether these dynamics were showing up in their organisations too. The room spanned over 25 industries, from financial services and pharmaceuticals to hospitality, construction and aerospace. What united them was a shared challenge: strategy exists, but it isn’t delivering the clarity, alignment and momentum needed to drive results.
The perception gap no one's talking about
We asked six questions across three areas – goal clarity, measures of success, and motivation – with a twist. For each area, we asked leaders to rate themselves, then rate how they believed the majority of their colleagues would score.
The results were revealing.
On goal clarity, leaders scored their own understanding of their organisation’s meaningful, shared goal at 6.8 out of 10. But when asked whether they believed the majority of their colleagues understood that same goal, the score dropped to 5.0 – a gap of 1.8 points.
On measures of success, the pattern deepened. Leaders rated their own clarity on success measures at 7.2, but their confidence that colleagues understood the same measures fell to just 4.8 – a gap of 2.4 points.
On motivation and energy, leaders scored their own excitement about what lies ahead at a healthy 7.8. Yet their belief that colleagues shared that energy came in at 5.8 – a 2.0 point gap.
What's top of the agenda for those in the room?
When we asked the room what challenge was most pressing, the responses reinforced everything the data was showing. Engaging people and getting buy-in to the goal came out on top at 34%, closely followed by executive team alignment and performance as a team at 33%. Prioritisation and execution of what’s most important sat at 24%, with clarity on the strategic goal itself at just 9%.
In other words, most leaders in the room weren’t struggling to define strategy – they were struggling to land it. The conversations that need to happen to move from a strategic plan to genuine organisational momentum often aren’t happening. Or they’re happening on the surface, without getting to the real dynamics underneath.
Diagnosing what's really going on
One of the most valuable parts of the morning – and something we heard repeatedly in feedback – was the power of facilitated, honest conversation between leaders who were grappling with similar challenges. Sharing approaches across industries, sizes and contexts to find their ‘difference that makes the difference’.
But the conversations also surfaced that many of the leaders in the room knew something wasn’t quite right in their executive team – they just hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, or hadn’t found the space to address it.
So if you’re reading this, it’s worth asking yourself some honest questions:
- If you asked every member of your executive team to independently write down the organisation’s number one strategic priority, would they all write the same thing?
- Could your people connect what they’re doing on a Tuesday afternoon to your overarching goal?
- Which of the Seven Deadly Sins might be playing out in your organisation – and would your team feel safe enough to tell you?
- When was the last time your executive team had a conversation that was genuinely uncomfortable, but genuinely necessary?
If any of those questions give you pause, you’re not alone. And the good news is that closing the perception gap doesn’t require a wholesale strategy rewrite. It starts with understanding – objectively and honestly – where you really are right now.
This is precisely why diagnostic conversations sit at the heart of how we begin every piece of work with a client. Before we build anything, we start by getting beneath the surface: the unspoken assumptions, the competing priorities, the elephants in the room that leadership teams are often dancing around. Through structured 1:1 diagnostic interviews with each member of the executive team, we establish a clear, objective picture of where the team stands today – the real picture, not the one that gets presented at board meetings.
It’s this diagnostic phase that enables executive teams to have the high-performance conversations that genuinely shift the dial, rather than another strategy away-day that produces a document nobody refers to again. From there, the work is about forging a clear, compelling vision of the future state – and building an achievable journey to get there.
Whether it’s through our Crazy Goal Programme – helping executive teams create a bold, shared strategic ambition that galvanises the entire organisation – or our Executive Team Performance Programme – designed to surface the hidden dynamics, build trust, and create the conditions for genuine alignment – the starting point is always the same: getting honest about where you really are.
Because the gap between where leaders think they are and where their organisation actually is? That’s where the real work begins.
If you’d like to explore how diagnostic conversations could help your executive team cut through the noise and get to what really matters, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch or sign up to our upcoming webinar on enabling peak performance around your team goals.
