Leader Behaviour Is the Signal
Organisations receive strategy through several channels at once: what leadership says, what the organisation rewards, and what leaders do. When the channels conflict, people believe the behaviour.
The reason is economic, not psychological: behaviour is the costly signal. Words are cheap, incentive formulas are abstract, but what the CEO actually spends time on, gets angry about, and celebrates is unfakeable and observed daily by everyone. An organisation is a machine for reading its leaders, and it reads fluently whether or not anything worth reading is being written.
The implications
Three follow hard. A strategy the leadership team does not visibly live is, operationally, not the strategy: it is a document about a strategy that might have existed. Redesigning incentives without changing leader behaviour repackages the old signal, which is the core of culture change being retail, not wholesale: culture moves person by person, behaviour by behaviour, not by memo. And the CEO as chief system designer has one system more read than any other, their own observable behaviour, which deserves to be designed with at least the care given to the compensation plan.
The diagnostic
Ask employees what actually gets you ahead here. Not what the values poster says, what actually works. The answer is the real strategy, and the distance between that answer and the official one is a precise measure of how much signal the leadership team is burning. In most organisations the employees' answer is more coherent than the strategy document, because it was assembled from evidence.
How this connects to OKRs
This is the tie-breaker rule across our whole methodology. It is why empowered OKR teams require push-and-pull management rather than sponsorship-by-memo: managers who push their skills into OKR work are signalling that the goals matter, in the only currency employees trust. And it is why an executive sponsor who never attends a check-in has already communicated the real priority, whatever the kick-off deck promised. If the leadership calendar does not show the strategy, the organisation has correctly concluded there is not one.
One line to keep: If the leadership calendar does not show the strategy, the organisation has correctly concluded there is not one.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
What is the real strategy of an organisation? +
Whatever gets you ahead in practice, which employees can name precisely. The distance between that answer and the official strategy is a measure of how much signal the leadership team is burning. When words and behaviour conflict, people believe the behaviour.
How does this affect an OKR rollout? +
An executive sponsor who never attends a check-in has already communicated the real priority, whatever the kick-off deck promised. Managers who push their own skills into the goal work signal that the goals matter, in the only currency employees trust.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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