The views within an executive team diverge because each executive looks at the same reality from a different function, and that information is unevenly distributed. One sees market pressure arrive first, the other only sees it once it has already shown up in the figures.
That difference is not a sign of disagreement about strategy. It is the result of where someone stands in the organization, which signals land there first, and how that person weighs risk. Five recognizable causes underlie this.
A commercial director hears about a price move by competitors through the sales team, often weeks before it becomes visible in the revenue figures. An operations director only sees that same market pressure reflected later, in the form of tighter margins or suppliers starting to negotiate differently. At a company of roughly 150 employees, there is sometimes a quarter between those two moments. By the time the topic reaches the executive table, one person feels this has been an issue for a long time, while the other feels it is only just beginning.
A financial director responsible for the cash position assesses a new investment differently than a director responsible for growth. Neither judgment is wrong, they are the result of the role. This becomes difficult as soon as this difference is not named and both parties assume that the other sees the same risk as they do. In practice, it then only becomes clear during execution that there was never agreement, only a meeting in which no one had probed further.
Regulation, competitive moves and technological shifts develop at their own pace, independent of the internal planning cycle. An executive team that recalibrates its strategy once a year is, at that moment, looking back at a picture of the market that existed three quarters ago. Meanwhile, each executive, outside that cycle, has already adjusted their own view based on what they encountered along the way. Those adjustments have never been compared with one another, so the divergence has existed long before anyone notices it.
At a manufacturing company of about 80 employees, it only became clear after a disappointing quarter that two executives had a completely different picture of how much time a new market launch would take. Not because either of them had misjudged it, but because neither had ever voiced that assumption out loud. Such differences do not surface in a regular executive meeting, where the agenda usually revolves around current problems rather than the question of whether everyone is still working from the same picture of the future.
The feeling that there is noise between executives is often present, but difficult to substantiate without it turning into a dispute over who is right. One way to turn that feeling into something concrete is to have each executive plot themselves on the same five axes and then place the outcomes side by side. Where the points lie close together, there is agreement. Where they lie far apart, a conversation is needed that has not yet taken place. Anyone who has been wondering about this for a while and wants to know whether this is the moment, can read what a strategic second opinion involves and when it adds something. A first impression of your own team's divergence can be obtained with the free ten-question mini-test, which gives an indication of the team's pressure profile.
It is up to the executive team itself to decide whether a diverging picture is a problem right now or can wait a little longer. What does help is making the difference visible before it surfaces through a disappointing result, and then tracking whether the chosen course actually changes anything, which is described in more detail in the piece about how you can track the effect of a strategy without waiting for the annual figures. Once the five axes and the divergence are on the table, it becomes clear which themes require a decision, and those themes ultimately translate into tasks, hours and systems on the work floor. Anyone who wants to know exactly what a decision about the strategic agenda means for who will do which work can find that in the workscan on ftetoai.com.
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