Most strategies don’t fail because they’re badly designed. They fail because the people who need to execute them never truly bought in.
Getting your team to follow the strategy comes down to three things: involving them in building it, communicating the why before the what, and making the plan visible and reviewable on a regular cadence. Teams don’t resist good strategies — they resist strategies they didn’t help shape and don’t fully understand.
Here’s a practical guide to closing the gap between the strategy you have and the strategy your team actually executes.
Why Teams Don’t Follow the Strategy
Research consistently shows that around two-thirds of business strategies fail during execution. The most common reasons have nothing to do with the quality of the strategy itself. They have everything to do with people.
The typical failure pattern looks like this: leadership spends weeks or months building a strategy. It gets presented at an all-hands meeting or in a town hall. People nod. The slides go into a shared folder. And then nothing changes — because the day-to-day work continues exactly as before.
The problem isn’t communication. It’s ownership. People don’t execute strategies they don’t feel responsible for. And you can’t create that sense of responsibility by presenting a strategy at someone. You have to build it with them.
Step 1: Involve the Team in Building the Strategy, Not Just Hearing It
This is the single biggest lever available to any leader. Strategies built in isolation — in the boardroom, by the senior leadership team, without input from the people who will execute them — almost always underperform strategies built collaboratively.
It’s not just about buy-in, though that matters enormously. It’s also about quality. The people closest to the work know things that leadership doesn’t. They know which initiatives are realistic and which are wishful thinking. They know where the bottlenecks are. They know what the customer actually says when nobody senior is in the room.
The practical implication: run a strategy workshop that involves your team in shaping the plan, not just hearing it. Use the OGSM process as your backbone — work through the objective, goals, and strategies together. People commit to what they helped create.
This doesn’t mean the final strategy is decided by committee. Leadership still sets the direction. But there’s a world of difference between “here is the strategy” and “we built this strategy together, and here is how your work connects to it.”
Step 2: Communicate the Why Before the What
Most strategy communication starts in the wrong place. It opens with the plan — the goals, the initiatives, the timelines — before ever explaining why the strategy exists and why it matters right now.
People don’t need to memorise the plan. They need to understand the reasoning behind it. When they do, they can make better decisions independently — without waiting to be told what to do in every situation.
Before sharing the OGSM itself, answer these three questions for your team:
- Why now? What changed in the market, the business, or the environment that makes this strategy necessary?
- Why this direction? What alternatives did you consider, and why did you choose this path over others?
- What’s at stake? What happens if the strategy succeeds — and what happens if it doesn’t?
Teams that understand the reasoning behind a strategy are far more likely to adapt intelligently when circumstances change — rather than rigidly following a plan that no longer fits, or abandoning it altogether when they hit the first obstacle.
Step 3: Make the Strategy Visible
One of the great advantages of OGSM is that it fits on a single page. Use that. A strategy that lives in a presentation file and gets opened twice a year isn’t a strategy — it’s an archive.
Pin the OGSM somewhere your team sees it regularly. Print it. Post it in the shared workspace, physical or digital. Open every team meeting with a glance at the relevant strategies and measures. Keep it alive as a working document, not a historical record.
The goal is to make the strategy the natural context for every decision your team makes. When someone proposes a new initiative, the first question should be: which strategy does this support? If it doesn’t support any of them, that’s useful information.
Step 4: Connect Individual Roles to the Strategic Goals
Abstract strategy doesn’t motivate people. Personal relevance does. Every person on your team should be able to answer the question: “What specifically am I doing that contributes to this strategy?”
This is where OGSM’s cascade becomes powerful. Once you have a company-level OGSM, each team or department can build their own — with strategies and measures that connect directly to the level above. An individual’s day-to-day initiatives should be traceable, step by step, all the way up to the company objective.
When people can draw that line from their daily work to the bigger picture, the strategy stops feeling like something leadership does and starts feeling like something everyone is part of.
Step 5: Review It Together, Regularly
A strategy only stays alive if it’s regularly revisited. Build a review cadence into your team’s rhythm — monthly or quarterly — where you look at the OGSM together, assess progress against the measures, identify what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly.
These reviews serve two purposes. First, they keep the strategy current — adjusting initiatives and measures as the situation evolves. Second, and equally important, they send a consistent signal: this strategy matters, we take it seriously, and we’re accountable to it as a team.
The review meeting is where strategy execution actually happens. Without it, even the best-built OGSM will quietly fade into the background as the urgency of day-to-day work takes over.
Step 6: Celebrate Progress, Not Just Results
Strategy execution is a long game. Annual goals don’t get achieved in a week. If your team only hears about the strategy when something goes wrong or a target is missed, the strategy becomes associated with pressure and criticism — not progress and purpose.
Deliberately acknowledge progress along the way. A strategy that was 20% executed three months ago and is now 60% executed is a team that’s moving. Recognise it. Name the specific initiatives that drove the progress. Connect the dots between the team’s effort and the results on the OGSM.
Momentum is a strategy execution tool. Teams that feel they’re winning keep going. Teams that feel they’re failing — regardless of actual progress — disengage.
The Common Thread: Ownership
Every step in this guide points to the same underlying principle: strategy execution is an ownership problem, not a communication problem.
You can communicate a strategy perfectly — clearly, frequently, in multiple formats — and still see it fail if the people executing it don’t feel personally responsible for its success. Building that ownership requires involvement in the strategy’s creation, clarity about the reasoning behind it, visible connection between individual work and collective goals, and a consistent rhythm of review and recognition.
OGSM is built for exactly this. Its one-page format makes the strategy accessible. Its collaborative creation process builds ownership. Its review structure keeps it alive. When it’s used well, the OGSM isn’t a document your team files away — it’s the plan they work from every day.
Build the Foundation First
If your team doesn’t yet have an OGSM to rally around, that’s the right place to start. Our OGSM Template for PowerPoint and OGSM Template for Excel give you a structured, ready-to-use framework you can build with your team in a single session — and share immediately in a format everyone can work from.
A strategy your team helped build is a strategy your team will execute. Start there.
Related: What Is OGSM? | Top 10 OGSM Tips | OGSM for Startups