The Strategy Meeting Looks Great. Monday Does Not.

Picture this. You are in the offsite. The room is sharp. The deck is sharp. The mission for next year is crisp and bold. Everyone nods. Someone snaps a photo of the whiteboard. You walk out thinking, "We finally nailed it." Then Monday shows up. Sales hears that the new platform is the whole game. Product hears that the platform matters, but migration risk means they should protect legacy revenue too. Finance trims the budget that was supposedly non-negotiable. Managers go back to their teams and give updates that sound aligned on the surface. Underneath, each one is hedging in their own way, because they have seen this movie before. Your strategy did not fail. Your people did not fail. The space between vision and execution is clogged with friction that leadership created and never measured.

The Real Alignment Killer Lives Between The Slide And The System

Most executives believe they have a communication problem. In reality they have a credibility problem. People listen to the vision. Then they watch what happens when pressure hits. Do goals hold steady long enough to matter. Do decisions stay closed once they are called final. Do metrics and promotions actually favor the strategic bets that were just blessed in that offsite. When those answers drift, trust drops fast. A major meta analysis by Dirks and Ferrin found that trust in leadership is one of the strongest predictors of performance and cooperation. Source Once trust erodes, people stop coordinating and start protecting themselves instead. Here is the ugly part. Employees respond rationally. If they expect this quarter's "north star" to morph three times by next month, they keep a mental Plan B. They hedge language. They keep options open. It looks like caution. It is self defense. You can feel this in your own tools. Less "I will." More "should be fine." More "we will try." Your own Workplace data already shows that when ownership language drops, alignment is not just wobbling. It is leaking out of the system long before the next miss. The friction between vision and execution is not abstract. It has a shape. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Friction Source 1: You Keep Shifting The Target

Every time you add a new top priority, reopen a decision, or "refine" a direction without killing something else, you create drag. Psychologists Arie Kruglanski and colleagues showed that people make real progress when they commit to a single focal goal. That focus triggers a process called goal shielding, where the active goal suppresses distractions from competing goals. Source When leaders keep changing the scoreboard, that shield shatters. People juggle three different versions of what matters. Progress slows even as effort climbs. You already know how this feels. A team pours three weeks into the new strategic bet. Mid sprint, an executive barges in with "one more thing" that is now critical. No one says no, because this person can move careers. The roadmap bloats. Deadlines stay the same. The team does what every sane adult does in that setup. They cut corners, then spend weeks fixing the damage. Gerald Hockey's research on chronic time pressure found that people under constant deadline stress narrow their focus and lean on shortcuts, which drives mistakes and rework. Source You see energy. The system absorbs damage. CPOs sit in the one seat that can name this pattern without ego. You see goals mutate. You see "final" decisions come back to life. You see managers smile in the room then scramble in Slack afterwards. The question is whether you treat that as vibes, or as operating data.

Friction Source 2: The Scoreboards Fight The Story

Walk through your last all-hands in your head. What did you call the company's core bets. Now look at who got promoted and celebrated over the last twelve months. If those stories do not match, your people are not confused. They are paying attention. Your high performers are not aligning to the strategy document. They are aligning to the actual rewards. You say you want a shift to high value customers, while sales still maxes comp on raw revenue. You say product quality is everything, while engineering's scoreboard is feature count. You say the new platform is the future, while the person who hit a short term side goal on an old product gets the CEO shoutout. Research on trust in leadership keeps pointing to the same thing. When people believe leaders mean what they say and will stick with it, performance climbs. When the official story conflicts with the real scoreboard, people stop betting on the shared goal and start playing defense for their own team. Source Workplace sees this constantly. The language around the same initiative splinters across functions. One org talks about long term adoption. Another only talks about this quarter's numbers. A third keeps referencing a legacy metric that nobody will say out loud in the exec room any more. On the surface everyone is rowing together. Under the hood they are rowing in different directions, pulled by different scoreboards. That gap is not a culture problem. That gap is the friction between the story you tell and the math you pay on.

Friction Source 3: The Shadow Hierarchy Runs The Place

Every company has two structures. The org chart. The human gravity map. You already know the roles on that second map. The weather setter. When they are in a good mood the room breathes. When they are tense everyone shrinks. The shadow decider. Their support matters more than the formal owner's title. The safe harbor. The person people run to when they need someone to tell the truth without getting crushed. These people are not always in the top boxes. Sometimes they report two layers down. Sometimes they lead nothing on paper and everything in reality. Your own Workplace data can spot them. You see whose messages generate long response chains. You see who gets tagged when decisions stall. You see whose name shows up whenever someone is scared, stuck, or skeptical. If those gravity centers pull in a different direction than the official strategy, you have a second operating system. One version of the mission in the slide deck. Another in the back channel where work really gets traded. You can coach managers all day on alignment. If you never bring the shadow hierarchy into the conversation, you keep treating symptoms and ignoring the engine.

How To Put Friction On A Dashboard

You cannot fix what you will not measure. Here is what high leverage CPOs are doing now.

1. Track Decision Reopen Rate

Start simple. For executive level and for a few critical teams, count how often decisions labeled final come back for debate. Workplace already helps surface this by flagging reopened threads, "quick revisit" comments, and long clarification chains around supposedly settled topics. Put that reopen rate on a slide right next to revenue and margin. When the number spikes, say out loud what it really means. Leaders are teaching people not to trust the plan.

2. Watch Ownership Language Like A Hawk

Pull a month of written updates on one critical initiative. Count how often leaders say "I will" or "my team will" versus "we will try" or "should be fine." Workplace already scores this kind of language pattern at scale. Drops in ownership language and rises in hedging are early fingerprints of execution risk. Do not use this to police tone. Use it to ask why people are so reluctant to commit. Unstable goals. Conflicting metrics. A leader who keeps yanking work midstream. The language points you to the system break.

3. Pin Down Priority Fragmentation

Pick one strategic bet. Ask three different functions to put the goal in one sentence and name the top two metrics that prove success. If you get three different answers, you have fragmentation. Workplace can accelerate this check by scanning communication across teams and showing how often different phrases and metrics cluster around the same project. When the language splinters, the work splinters. Your job is not to shame anyone. Your job is to bring that fragmentation into the exec room and force a single story.

The CPO Playbook To Strip Out Friction

Data only matters if you use it to change how leaders behave. Here is where you earn your seat with the CEO.

1. Set Stability Standards For Strategy

Push the executive team to agree on hard rules. Headline priorities for the year only change at defined windows. For example, quarterly. Any out of cycle change must come with a written explanation of what changed in the world and what dies to make room. No new cross functional initiative gets greenlit unless the sponsor names which existing work stops, who owns the new thing, and which metrics shift. If they cannot answer, the idea waits. This is not red tape. This is how you protect the goal shielding that actually lets teams finish meaningful work. Source

2. Clean Up Scorecard Collisions

Run a brutal but simple exercise. Line up company level goals in one column. Line up each function's top KPIs in the next. Any KPI that pulls attention in a different direction than the main bets is a collision. Bring that grid to the CEO. Not as a complaint. As a diagnosis. Then fix it fast. Shift comp plans. Retire zombie metrics. Change the definition of "top rating" so leaders cannot max out while damaging the long term play.

3. Make The Shadow Hierarchy Explicit

Use Workplace data and your own eyes to map the influencers who actually move emotion and action. Bring them into the strategy process early. Give them context before the all-hands. Ask them to pressure test the plan and the operating rules. Then set one standard for everyone, star or not. How dissent gets raised. Where decisions get challenged. What happens after a call is made. Hold that line so gravity helps the strategy instead of warping it.

The Question Every CPO Should Put In Front Of Their CEO

If you are a CPO, your job is not to launch another engagement survey or another values campaign. Your job is to walk into your next one on one with the CEO with real evidence of the friction layer that sits between their vision and the work. Show them the reopen rates. Show them the hedging in updates. Show them how many different stories exist about the same priority. Then ask one question they cannot dodge. "If we muted every strategy deck for the next quarter and only watched how decisions, priorities, and ownership actually show up in our tools, would we still believe vision and execution are on the same side." If the honest answer is no, you are looking at the real performance agenda. Not another slogan. Not another program. The grind of stripping friction out of the system until people can finally stop hedging and start betting on the work again. The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones with the prettiest strategy documents. They will be the ones whose leaders are disciplined enough to keep the story, the scoreboards, and the daily behavior pointed in the same direction long enough for execution to actually catch up.