Executive Vision Alignment: Why Your Team Still Doesn’t “Get” the Vision, Even If You’ve Explained It 100 Times
- Laura Derbyshire
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Executive vision alignment breaks down as companies scale
If you’re a founder or CEO of a growing business, this will sound familiar.
You’ve explained the vision. You’ve repeated it. You’ve reinforced it in decks, town halls, offsites and Slack messages.
And yet, decisions still don’t quite line up: teams prioritise different things, strategy feels open to interpretation.
The problem isn’t communication - It’s alignment.
Executive vision alignment isn’t about explaining the strategy better, it’s about making sure the same story lands, travels and sticks across the leadership team.
Understanding isn’t the same as alignment
Most leadership teams assume that if people understand the vision, alignment will follow. It doesn’t.
Understanding is cognitive; alignment is behavioural. Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, famously said that
“strategy is what you don’t do.”
If your teams are making different decisions with the same information, the strategy hasn’t landed clearly enough.
If your team can’t explain the vision in the same words you would, you don’t have alignment, you have interpretation. And interpretation slows growth.
Why repetition doesn’t create clarity
There’s a belief in leadership teams that repetition equals clarity.
In reality, repetition amplifies ambiguity.
When vision isn’t fully resolved, repeating it simply gives teams more space to fill in the gaps themselves, based on:
Their function
Their incentives
Their risk tolerance
What they believe leadership really values
Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, has written extensively about this problem:
"people don’t resist strategy - they reinterpret it in ways that help them survive day to day"
Marketing hears growth, Product hears stability, Sales hears targets and Finance hears cost control.
Everyone thinks they’re aligned, often they’re not.
Your team isn’t resisting, they’re translating
When teams drift, it’s rarely because they don’t care or aren’t bought in.
It’s because vision arrives without enough structure to land consistently.
Reed Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, has been clear that
"alignment matters more than control"
But alignment only works when the context is unambiguous. When direction is vague, teams don’t ignore it - they translate it.
Vision without clarity forces interpretation, and Interpretation creates divergence.
That’s what happens when executive vision stays implicit instead of explicit.
Vision that isn’t visualised stays abstract
Most strategy lives in language: ambition, intention, aspiration.
But alignment happens when people can see:
What actually changes
What gets deprioritised
What trade-offs are now non-negotiable
How today’s decisions connect to the future
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has spoken about the importance of
"creating a shared picture of where the organisation is going, not just a set of goals".
If vision isn’t visualised, it stays theoretical: inspiring, but optional.
Optional strategies don’t scale.
Strategy without narrative doesn’t travel
Even the strongest strategy will stall if it can’t move through the organisation intact.
Teams don’t just need direction, they need narrative coherence.
That means answering:
Why this direction, now?
What problem are we solving?
What are we not doing anymore?
What does good decision-making look like next quarter?
As Jeff Bezos has consistently reinforced:
"alignment comes from shared understanding, not from process"
Without a clear narrative, strategy gets stuck at the top - it's agreed in principle, but diluted in execution. Most founders don’t need another engagement exercise. They need coherence.
Coherence is when:
vision is explicit, not assumed
priorities are ranked, not competing
trade-offs are visible, not political
decisions reinforce the strategy rather than undermine it
That’s when teams stop asking for clarification and start acting as if the direction is obvious.
How executive vision actually becomes scalable
Not through louder communication.Through clearer articulation.
That means:
Clarifying executive vision beyond ambition
Structuring priorities so interpretation isn’t required
Visualising direction so leadership teams share the same future view
Building a narrative that survives the journey through the business
If your strategy is clear in your head but inconsistent everywhere else, this is the work that fixes it.
OSER works directly with founders, CEOs and leadership teams to turn executive vision into shared direction, so decisions align, teams move faster, and growth stops feeling harder than it needs to be.
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