Ask a business owner or founder what their organization is working toward, and you’ll get a clean, confident answer. Then, ask five of their staff the same question, and you’ll most likely get five different ones, all delivered with equal confidence.
That’s not a red flag on its own. Different roles should look different day to day.
The red flag is when none of those five answers really connect back to what the business is trying to achieve. Research from Harvard Business Review backs this up: leaders and employees estimated their strategic agreement at 82%, but when researchers actually tested their understanding of the strategy, real alignment was two to three times lower.
This is the gap most businesses hardly name. Not just a missing vision, rather a vision that never actually left the room. It stayed exactly where it started: in the owner’s head.
Why “having” a vision isn’t the same as it working
A vision doesn’t achieve much on its own. It doesn’t tell a staff member which task to handle first when both compete for the same hour. It doesn’t tell them who’s supposed to decide something when the owner isn’t around. It doesn’t explain to them why their specific role matters to the bigger picture of the organization.
None of that happens through a single meeting, a one-line memo, or hoping it gets absorbed over time. It has to be intentionally translated: what are we building, why does it matter, what’s this person’s part in it?
What it looks like when that translation never happens
Everyone is busy. Everyone could be confident. And the business still isn’t moving anywhere in particular. Why? because effort without direction just produces motion, not progress.
Staff aren’t mostly confused because they got careless. They get confused because nobody closed the gap between what they know or believe they’re working toward and what the business is actually working toward. Gallup’s research found that only 22% of employees think their leaders have a clear direction for the organization at all, which makes that confusion less of an exception and more of a default.
Before we fix up marketing, pricing, brand, expansion or anything else. Lets’ close this gap.
So, here’s one question worth pondering on: if you stopped five people in your business right now and asked them what they’re working toward, would their answers point toward the same thing you’re aiming for?
A business that never closes this gap doesn’t just stall, it slowly becomes irrelevant too, the same way a person does when they stop growing.
References
- Harvard Business Review, “Is Your Company as Strategically Aligned as You Think It Is?”
- Gallup research, cited in “The Strategic Alignment Illusion”
- Faith Oladimeji, “Grow or Become Irrelevant: A Guide to Daily Growth”
