Winning by making strategy everyone's business

Many organisations struggle with strategy adoption due to a lack of team buy-in and engagement, often stemming from unclear communication, misalignment with company culture, or resistance to change.

By embracing a challenger mindset, organisations can tackle these barriers and foster a culture of strategic engagement, ownership, and action.

Why strategy fails without buy-in

The African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone… but if you want to go far, go together”, is an apt thought for anyone leading a group of people (big or small) towards strategic change or transformation to hold closely.

A common pitfall is overemphasising strategy development, while underestimating the role of people in delivering change. Leaders may meticulously define a strategy and design a roadmap for transformation, yet these efforts can be met with resistance, indifference or apathy.

Often the resistance is subtle, manifesting in disengagement, partial adoption, and a culture of box-ticking rather than active contribution. At that point, something needs to change to get you unstuck as a leader, a team and an organisation.

Commitment means employees actively engaging with the strategy, taking ownership of their roles, and aligning their daily decisions with organisational goals.

Employees need to be clear on why the strategic direction has been chosen (high intellectual buy-in) and committed to making it happen (high emotional buy-in) – creating champions for the strategy. Failure to establish the right kind of buy-in emotionally and/or intellectually suffocates progress, ultimately leading to an organisation being ‘stuck’.

MCA Matrix

Source: Leslie de Chernatony & MCA Consulting

How challenger mindset builds collective will and action

Inspired by Adam Morgan’s work in The Pirate Inside, the challenger mindset culture shifts teams from passive participants to active champions of strategy. This mindset influences a culture of movement and action by instilling clarity, accountability, and a relentless focus on progress. Let’s focus on three of these principles.

Define a singular vision by prioritising focus and clarity to guide action

The secret weapon of the Challenger is clarity, this clarity inspires and informs action. Challengers are clear about what they stand for, what they reject, and how their mission is in service of a much bigger outcome. The vision is expressed in a way that makes it irresistible to be a part of.

For example, when Lexus set out to challenge the dominance of BMW and Mercedes in the USA decades ago, they had a clear vision in mind: to redefine the luxury experience¹. They rejected the industry norms of the time and set their own standards for what luxury could be.

The brand doubled down on the table stakes of comfort, performance, elegance and technology. They also focused on aspects competitors overlooked, such as reliability, hassle-free dealer interactions and a one-of-a-kind ownership experience. Within 12 years of launching this vision, Lexus outsold both brands to become the best-selling luxury import in the country.

The clear and single-minded nature of the vision meant that everyone – from the engineer to the service manager, to the salesperson and the tea lady – knew what their role was and how they could contribute to its day-to-day delivery.

Today it has become commonplace to find leaders trying to squeeze everything into a vision, creating a Frankenstein statement that never truly lives beyond the PowerPoint it was created in. Remember that clarity is your secret weapon to creating buy-in.

Action steps:

Frame the vision around a challenge or opportunity that inspires action and commitment
Ensure every team member understands how their role contributes to this vision
Use the vision as a decision-making tool to guide allocation of effort and resources

Create binding mechanisms and embed strategy into daily activities

To build and maintain momentum leaders must implement regular reinforcement. Habits, triggers, enablers and other behavioural mechanisms are great ways of keeping the end goal top of mind and to encourage the desired actions on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It is also important to identify, nurture and reward people who champion the strategy.

Consider Zappos, which set out to deliver WOW experiences to clients, taking the idea of being customer-obsessed to a different level². To fulfil this vision, they focused on hiring the right people and defined 10 distinctive values to guide the daily actions of all employees.

They introduced The Offer Program, which offered unhappy employees a financial incentive to quit – ensuring that only the champions who were truly aligned with the company’s vision remained. Calls with customers at Zappos are untimed and unscripted, allowing customer service people to engage on a more human level.

Zappos exemplifies how a clear vision can thrive through various binding mechanisms, creating daily buy-in for the strategy.

Action steps:

Identify and empower champions who embody the Challenger spirit
Reinforce the vision through rituals, incentives and guiding mechanisms
Make delivery visible through dashboards, competitions, awards and recognition

Demonstrate a different kind of passion and build evidence for your strategy

The third principle of the Challenger Mindset is to become a Refuser. Once again, clarity is the common thread that empowers leaders to say no to 100 things that don’t serve the vision and to passionately pursue the few things that do.

Strategies will inevitably face roadblocks and barriers to execution, especially when they are not viewed as a priority or driven from the top. Refusers constructively push against these roadblocks, limiting assumptions, legacy processes and resistance that stands in the way of the vision.

Ken Kutaragi, an engineer at Sony, refused to abandon the vision for a gaming division despite internal pushback from executives who saw gaming as a distraction from Sony’s core electronics business¹. Facing scepticism and limited support, Kutaragi partnered with Nintendo to develop a prototype, proving the concept’s viability.

When the partnership fell through, he convinced Sony leadership to back his vision, ultimately leading to the launch of PlayStation – one of the most successful gaming brands in history. Passion for an idea needs to be supported with the requisite evidence to build support for it.

Challenger mindset requires you to be persistent in challenging ‘the way things have always been done’, if your strategy is to stand a chance. The resultant evidence you build will help convert more people and drive the right kind of buy-in to tip the scales in your favour.

Action steps

Highlight and challenge outdated thinking and processes that hinder progress
Encourage and facilitate ‘test and learn’ environments to build evidence for the strategy
Look for inspiration from adjacent/other industries to support your case for change

In summary

Successful strategy execution relies on a clearly defined vision, embedded in people’s daily actions. It also requires signals, evidence and quick wins that demonstrate its potential. The challenger mindset provides principles that empower leaders to create buy-in, driving action and building momentum for the strategy. It helps leaders and organisations ‘get unstuck’ by building collective will.

As a leader, consider spending as much time on working out how you will bring people along on the journey as you do on crafting and refining the strategy.