Connect Employees to the Big Picture Strategy: Why & How

Smart Leaders Connect Employees to the Big Picture Strategy
Do your employees understand how their work connects to the organization’s big picture strategy? Based on decades of work with high-growth companies, one thing is clear: business strategy and growth plans should never live exclusively in the executive suite.

Why?

Because high performing teams want — and need — to see how their efforts matter. They are more engaged, more accountable, and more effective when they have a clear line of sight from their day-to-day work to the organization’s strategic priorities. Without that connection, even talented people struggle to make the right decisions, prioritize effectively, or stay fully committed.

High Performing Organizations Use Strategic Clarity to Create Connection
Experienced leaders know that a growth strategy is only as strong as its clarity. It must be clear enough to understand, believable enough to trust, and practical enough to execute.

Our organizational alignment research reinforces this point. Strategic clarity alone accounts for 31% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing companies. That is not a strategy communication issue — it is a leadership issue.

Savvy leaders invest the time and discipline required to set a clear direction and translate strategy into actionable priorities at every level. They don’t just announce the strategy; they operationalize it so employees understand how their roles contribute to where the organization is headed and why it matters.

When employees can connect their work to the broader strategy, execution improves, accountability increases, and momentum builds. The ability to connect employees to the big picture strategy is not a “nice to have” — it is a defining capability of smart leadership.

Four Attributes of a Clear Strategic Plan
If leaders expect employees to connect to the big picture strategy, the strategy itself must be built for execution. At a minimum, it must be:

• Understood
  People at every level can explain what the strategy is, why it matters, and how success will be measured.
• Committed to
  Leaders and teams genuinely believe in the direction and are willing to make the hard trade-offs required to support it.
• Equal to the challenge
  The strategy is ambitious enough to address market realities rather than simply extend past practices.
• Supported by sufficient resources
  Time, talent, funding, and decision authority are aligned to enable real progress.

None of these strategy attributes are controversial. Yet many business strategies fall short because they are crafted for approval, not execution. When those responsible for delivering results do not see the strategy as clear, credible, or doable, even well-intended plans stall before they ever gain traction.

Actively Sharing and Cascading Your Strategy to Better Connect Employees to the Big Picture Strategy

The step many executive strategy retreats underestimate — or skip altogether — is the disciplined work of actively sharing and cascading the strategy across the organization. Too often, leaders limit involvement to a small circle of people they believe “need to know,” and they do so late in the process, after key decisions are already locked in.

That narrow approach creates distance, not alignment.

Our change management simulation data and culture survey results consistently show the same pattern: most employees want more transparency into both short- and long-term organizational plans, and they want a meaningful voice in shaping how those plans are executed. They are not asking to set strategy, but they do want context, clarity, and relevance.

Employees want to understand where the organization is headed and why. Just as importantly, they want to see how their day-to-day work contributes to that direction and drives real business results. When leaders make strategy visible, relevant, and actionable, engagement increases — and execution follows.

Two Steps to Better Cascade Your Strategy
So how do leaders effectively cascade strategy throughout the organization? It starts with involvement and is sustained through management alignment.

1. Actively Spread the Net
   As you shape strategic direction and execution plans, include employees from every level of the organization wherever possible. Effective strategy development mirrors strong change management — it invites broader input early, not as an afterthought.

   Frontline employees and individual contributors are the ones who will ultimately bring the strategy to life. Their perspectives often surface practical risks, operational realities, and improvement opportunities that senior leaders alone cannot see. The more employees believe in the strategic direction, the stronger their ownership, engagement, and commitment to team execution.

2. Ensure All Line Managers Are Fully Aboard
   Mid-level and frontline managers sit at the critical intersection between strategy and execution. They are responsible for communicating intent, translating priorities into action, and making day-to-day adjustments as conditions change.

   If managers are unclear, skeptical, or misaligned, the strategy stalls. Leadership commitment, enthusiasm, and strategic clarity must cascade through managers before it can cascade through teams.

   When a strategy is clear, credible, broadly accepted, and genuinely implementable, it has what it needs to succeed — not on paper, but in practice.

The Bottom Line
A strategy that lives only at the top will never deliver results at scale. Employees want to understand how their work drives business outcomes and how today’s effort connects to tomorrow’s opportunities in their careers. That requires more than a polished rollout — it demands early involvement, clear choices, and disciplined follow-through. Engage key stakeholders from the start, then deliberately cascade strategy, goals, roles, and success metrics in ways people can act on. When employees see the connection, execution stops being a push and starts becoming a pull.

To begin to connect employees to the big picture strategy, Stress Test Your Strategic Now to know where you stand.

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.