📆 12/26/2025 10:44 PM

Business & Management News

Strategy Implementation, Leadership, Executive Team

• 📆 12/26/2025 10:44 PM

• 📰 HarvardBiz

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• 17 min. at publisher

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This article discusses the crucial role of the extended leadership team (ELT) in strategy implementation, highlighting how their influence is often underestimated, leading to strategy failures. It analyzes the disconnect between the C-suite’s vision and the ELT’s execution, emphasizing the need to involve this layer in the strategic process for better outcomes.

Early in my work with “John,” the CEO of a media company, he invited me to observe him as he unveiled the company’s strategy to a group of 20 senior leaders. His narrative was compelling—clear about the need to change, confident in the ambition, and persuasive on the priorities.

The mood in the room was upbeat, with many nodding along as he outlined each strategic pillar. The implicit directive was also unmistakable: Absorb the logic, ask clarifying questions, and get on with the work. Once John left, I canvassed opinions and soon realized there was less alignment and confidence than I had expected. A regional leader explained that incentives still rewarded legacy activities. A functional head noted that the strategy didn’t address several missing capabilities. Another admitted that, although he believed in the strategy, he was unclear about what he was expected to change. I recognized this familiar pattern. When strategies don’t work, people blame the C-suite for lack of clarity or follow-through, middle managers for blocking progress, or frontline employees for not playing their part. Yet the real influence often sits with a different group entirely: the extended leadership team , the tier beneath the C-suite comprising business-unit presidents, regional CEOs, and functional heads. These leaders make choices every day about which customers to prioritize, which capabilities to build, where to allocate resources, and which long-standing activities and processes to evolve. Yet they’re frequently treated as recipients of strategy rather than its architects. The result is predictable: Strategies that look coherent in the boardroom fail at the next level down and beyond. Research supports this. A review of 188 studies on strategy implementation found that this leadership layer is rarely considered a distinct group. In one study of 4,000 executives and middle managers across 124 organizations, only 28% could name their company’s top three strategic priorities—and the sharpest drop in alignment occurred between the C-suite and the ELT . The opportunity is clear. When the C-suite and the ELT operate as a connected, strategically capable system, organizations execute more coherently, adapt more quickly, and build stronger momentum. Here are four ways to do that. Co-develop the Strategy Leaders increasingly run open strategy exercises: large-scale listening campaigns, crowdsourced idea platforms, and enterprise-wide workshops involving hundreds or even thousands of people. These efforts generate energy and insight, helping people feel heard. They rarely, however, create deeper participation from the ELT. Breadth of input can’t make up for a lack of depth where it matters most. Strategy becomes stronger and more executable when the ELT helps shape the assumptions, choices, and trade-offs early in the process. They’re closest to the markets, customers, and capabilities that determine whether the strategy actually lands. I often begin by examining the beliefs that hold senior leaders back from involving the ELT more. When I asked John, he shared concerns that the process would take longer, surface more problems than ideas, and expose weaknesses in the strategy. With a reframe, we considered what it would take to make the strategy a success and soon found that these concerns could strengthen it by building resilience, improving alignment, and anticipating execution risks sooner. Try this: Explore the reasons why you’re holding back from engaging the ELT and consider new possibilities. Engage ELT members early in hypothesis generation to identify the problems the strategy needs to address. Involve the ELT in defining what winning looks like across the customer segments and geographic markets in which they operate. Design iterative sessions to clarify trade-offs between innovation, efficiency, and risk. Develop Strategic Judgment ELT members progress by delivering results, turning around business units, and running complex operations. Their strength lies in execution. Many have had limited opportunities to develop strategic judgment, which requires systems awareness, pattern recognition, and the ability to make choices in conditions where information is incomplete and trade-offs are unavoidable. John recognized this in his own ELT. He could see their strong operational instincts, yet he wanted them to widen their field of view—to spot signals in adjacent markets, to explore what shifts in customer behavior might mean for the whole portfolio, and to test whether their plans still held up under different scenarios. Research shows that leaders who work with multiple possible futures generate stronger strategic insight and adapt more effectively to uncertainty, reducing overconfidence in single-path predictions. As John’s ELT expanded their perspective, the quality and depth of their contributions to strategic discussions improved. This capability operates on two levels. The ELT shapes enterprise direction alongside the C-suite, and they make strategic calls in their domains—markets, formats, customer segments, and functions. Strengthening judgment at one level reinforces it at the other, helping leaders connect immediate P&L demands to longer-term positioning. A technology company I advised used quarterly “strategic challenges” to help ELT members build strategic judgment by repositioning a declining product, entering a new market, and redesigning the customer experience. These exercises exposed leaders to unfamiliar contexts and helped them develop the mental range required to challenge assumptions, see patterns, and connect local decisions to the wider enterprise. Within two years, this approach doubled the number of ELT leaders stepping successfully into enterprise roles. C-suite leaders elevate strategic judgment by investing in deliberate learning environments rather than relying solely on experience. ELT members benefit from structured opportunities to test ideas, stretch their thinking, and reflect on decisions with peers who bring different mental models to the table. The culture becomes even stronger when leaders share the “why” behind major choices, helping ELT members see the trade-offs that shaped decisions. Try this: Use cross-unit scenario sessions or “challenge groups” where leaders practice making choices under uncertainty and test assumptions together. Rotate ELT members through cross-business initiatives. Assign projects that expose them to new markets or customer contexts so they can connect domain decisions to organization priorities more effectively. Embed reflection into decision rhythms. Use short debriefs after major decisions or market events to analyze what happened, what assumptions were at play, and what patterns may emerge next. The goal is to get ELT members to start connecting decisions across horizons, particularly how short-term targets influence long-term positioning. They should seek out insights from other organizations and industries and challenge assumptions that underpin the choices they’re making. Research shows that leaders who can hold multiple perspectives at once respond more effectively to uncertainty and maintain stronger performance over time. Cascade with Coherence A strategy comes to life when leaders understand the choices it demands and feel equipped to translate them into action. This coherence rarely happens by chance. Many ELT members operate in systems where incentives, metrics, and decision rights still reflect the organization’s past, not its future. In one study, only 26% of senior leaders agreed that their incentives—and KPIs specifically—were aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. John saw this tension in his own organization. When we reviewed the signals his C-suite colleagues were sending their direct reports in the ELT, performance reviews revealed a mismatch: The roles they shaped, objectives they agreed on, and targets they set still anchored leaders to historical priorities. The organization’s strategy called for growth in digital formats and underserved audiences, yet ELT members continued to be evaluated on traditional ratings metrics. Alignment required more than new plans; it required changing the incentives, measures, and governance routines that shaped how leaders made decisions. As John and his C-suite colleagues reset expectations with their direct reports in the ELT—clarifying what was non-negotiable, where leaders had latitude, and how their decisions connected to the strategy—the effects showed up quickly. ELT members began surfacing barriers sooner, making clearer trade-offs, and acting with greater confidence. They felt better able to commit to the strategy because they could see how it shaped their decisions and how their work contributed to the whole. The shift was energizing. Two critical actions strengthen coherence across the system: Clarify the few enterprise-wide non-negotiables that guide decisions and give ELT leaders the authority to act on them in their domains. Align incentives and operating mechanisms so shared success carries meaningful weight and collaboration produces tangible rewards. Creative Connective Tissue A strategy gains momentum when the senior-most leaders operate as a connected community. However, the ELT often resembles a federation: a group of highly capable people who run sizeable domains, each with its own metrics, rhythms, and pressures. Their autonomy fuels performance and occasionally sparks healthy competition but rarely strengthens the organization’s ability to move in a coherent manner. John saw this dynamic. His divisional heads were highly capable operators who knew their markets intimately, but they focused primarily on the priorities of their own channels and regions. They missed out on developing opportunities across digital, broadcast, and emerging formats because no single leader had the mandate to look across the whole system. He introduced a simple mechanism to strengthen collaboration: a rotating “enterprise steward” role. Each steward took responsibility for a cross-cutting priority, such as audience growth in underserved segments or multi-platform content development, for a defined period. The role provided visibility, legitimacy, and a shared sense of ownership. Within months, collaboration patterns across the ELT began to shift. Leaders partnered on editorial initiatives that combined regional insights with digital capabilities, exchanged data on audience behavior, and moved talent between teams to accelerate innovation. In time, they built a powerful habit of working and thinking together across organizational boundaries. Research shows that senior leaders who operate with a strong sense of shared accountability foster higher levels of initiative-taking, psychological safety, and organizational adaptability. Collaboration becomes a leadership multiplier, amplifying the strengths of each division while reducing the friction that often slows execution. Two actions help ELTs strengthen this connective tissue: Create shared enterprise priorities by assigning rotating stewardship roles that give leaders responsibility for a cross-cutting priority. This builds coherence within the ELT and exposes leaders to parts of the organization they wouldn’t normally influence. Highlight collaborative wins with real visibility by celebrating moments where leaders overcome boundaries, share resources, or combine capabilities to deliver enterprise outcomes. Stories and symbols travel far in organizations; they shape expectations and norms quickly. When senior leaders feel connected through shared accountability and mutual reliance, the organization experiences strategy as a unifying force rather than a set of parallel initiatives. They move ideas, talent, and decisions across boundaries with greater ease. Over time, this collective rhythm becomes self-reinforcing—the organization learns to operate as a single system, not a set of loosely connected parts. . . . Collectively, the ELT shapes how the strategy comes to life—through the choices they make, the priorities they reinforce, and the momentum they create. When the C-suite opens the strategy-making circle and ELT leaders step forward as thinkers and stewards of their domains, the organization gains a deeper, more grounded intelligence about what it takes to win. Strengthening this partnership through co-development, strategic judgement, coherent cascading, and strong connective tissue builds a leadership system capable of navigating complexity and delivering meaningful progress. Strategy becomes less of a broadcast and more of a shared endeavor—lived, owned, and advanced by the people with the greatest leverage over its success.

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