Strategy Needs Stewardship | Populi Consulting

Ask a leadership team who owns strategy, and you will probably get a perfectly reasonable answer.

‘We all do.’

And that is exactly how it should be. The CEO or Managing Director sets the overall direction. The Board provides challenge and oversight. The senior leadership team draws on expertise across the business and takes responsibility for delivery.

But when everyone owns strategy, it can become surprisingly easy for nobody to own the process that keeps it alive.

I have seen this happen in good businesses, with experienced people and sensible strategies.

The strategy is not necessarily wrong. The people are not incapable. What is often missing is the rhythm that keeps the strategy moving once everyone returns to running the business.

Strategy has to compete with the day to day

The difficulty with strategy is that it is constantly competing with something more urgent. A customer problem needs resolving, sales are below target, someone has resigned, margins are under pressure, a supplier has let you down, or the cash position needs attention. None of these things can simply be ignored.

So the leadership meeting that was supposed to focus on strategic priorities gets consumed by operational issues. The strategic project is pushed back another month and the decision that needed to be made gets deferred. Gradually, something everyone agrees is important becomes something nobody quite gets around to acting on.

That is rarely because people do not care. It is because the urgent has a habit of defeating the important.

A strategy is not a document

I have never been particularly interested in strategy as a beautifully presented document. A strategy only really matters when it starts influencing what people do.

• where the business invests
• which opportunities it pursues
• which opportunities it declines
• what the leadership team spends its time discussing
• how resources are allocated
• what gets measured
• who is accountable for what
• what the business chooses not to do

If those things are not changing, the strategy may exist on paper, but it is not yet shaping the business.

So, who should own it?

The CEO or MD should absolutely own the strategic direction of the business. I do not believe an external consultant, adviser or even an internal strategy function should take that responsibility away from them.

The Board needs to challenge, test and support that direction. The leadership team needs genuine ownership of delivery.

Perhaps the distinction is simpler than we sometimes make it.

The CEO and Board own the direction.

The leadership team owns delivery.

But somebody still needs to steward the process that connects the two.

Who ensures the strategic priorities remain visible? Who notices when operational pressures are gradually pushing them to the back burner? Who asks why something agreed three months ago remains undone? Who questions whether the leadership team is spending its time on what it said mattered most? Who creates the space for difficult strategic conversations that might otherwise be postponed?

That is a different kind of ownership. It is not ownership of the strategy. It is stewardship of the strategic process.

The MD should not have to carry everything

This becomes especially important as businesses grow.

In smaller businesses, the MD or owner often holds much of the strategy in their head. They know the customers, understand the market and know which opportunities matter. Because the organisation is relatively small, informal conversations can be enough to keep everyone broadly aligned.

Then the business grows. More people arrive. Responsibilities expand. Management layers develop. Decisions become more complicated.

What once worked through instinct, proximity and conversation begins to creak.

Often the response is for the MD to carry even more. More decisions come back to them. More meetings require their involvement. More problems find their way onto their desk.

The irony is that the person who should be spending more time thinking strategically ends up with less time to do so.

The result is not only more pressure on the MD. Decisions slow down, opportunities wait, senior people become less confident, and growth becomes increasingly dependent on one individual.

That is one way good leaders become bottlenecks.

A mature leadership team has a role here too. It does not simply fulfil its functional responsibilities. It also protects the strategic priorities of the wider business rather than continually escalating operational decisions upwards.

Growth does not necessarily require more bureaucracy. But it almost always requires more deliberate structure.

Strategic rhythm matters

The answer is not another strategy document. And it certainly is not more meetings for the sake of meetings. What is needed is a simple strategic rhythm.

Clear priorities: What are the handful of things that really matter over the next 12 months?

Clear ownership: Who is responsible for advancing each priority?

Regular review: Are we making progress?

Meaningful measures: How will we know whether anything is changing?

Decision discipline: What needs deciding, by whom and by when?

Space for challenge: What assumptions have changed? What are we avoiding? What are we missing?

None of this is particularly complicated. Maintaining it consistently, when everyone is busy running the business, is considerably harder.

For Boards, this creates another responsibility: not to run the strategic process themselves, but to be satisfied that one exists, that it is working, and that strategic priorities are genuinely being advanced.

Where an independent perspective can help

In some organisations, the CEO, Chair, Company Secretary or another senior leader can provide this stewardship perfectly well. The point is not that every business needs an external adviser. Rather, the point is that every business needs the process.

However, there are times when an independent perspective becomes particularly valuable.

Not someone arriving with all the answers, and certainly not someone taking ownership of strategy away from the leadership team.

Instead, someone who can step slightly outside the day-to-day business and ask: Are we doing what we said we would do?

Someone who can challenge without getting caught up in internal politics. Someone who notices when the same issue keeps recurring. Someone who can help the MD step back from the detail. And someone who keeps bringing the conversation back to what matters.

I have found that some of the most valuable conversations I have with leaders are not about giving them an answer. They are about creating enough space and clarity for them to find their own answer.

That distinction matters.

The adviser should not own the strategy. The leadership team must. But an independent adviser can help sustain the challenge, discipline and rhythm that keep it moving.

Strategy should become business as usual

Ultimately, the test of strategy is not what happens during the annual strategy day, but what happens afterwards.

Does the leadership team keep discussing it? Do decisions reflect it? Are priorities shifting? Are people accountable? Can the organisation explain where it is going and why? Does the MD have enough space to lead rather than being continually pulled back into the detail?

If not, the problem may not lie in the strategy itself. It may be the process that turns strategic intent into action.

When everyone owns the strategy, somebody still needs to protect the process that keeps it moving.

Not to own the answers. Not to take responsibility away from the leadership team. But to maintain the clarity, challenge and discipline that turn strategic intent into action.

So perhaps the most useful question is not: Who owns our strategy?

It is: Who is ensuring it actually happens?

If your leadership team knows where the business needs to go, but keeping strategic priorities moving is proving harder, this is an area where Populi Consulting can help.