Why Your Company Isn't Delivering Results (And How to Fix It)

In the business world, a perplexing paradox persists. Companies armed with seemingly all the right ingredients for success—innovative products and services, solid market strategies, and teams brimming with talent—often find themselves falling short of their goals.

These organizations boast impressive total addressable markets, funding, a solid customer base, and staff with stellar track records from other successful companies. Despite this alchemy of positive attributes, we still see promising ventures falter. Frustration soon mounts, and a troubling disconnect between potential and performance emerges that keeps winning elusive. Why?

I’ve thought about this on several occasions, and throughout my career in the tech industry, I've witnessed this conundrum firsthand. The experience of companies possessing all the right ingredients yet failing to rise to the top has consistently left me baffled. It's a scenario that defies conventional business logic and challenges the understanding of what drives success.

Here's the kicker – according to one McKinsey survey, a staggering 70% of executives report that their companies grapple with strategy execution, despite having meticulously crafted plans and top talent in place. The financial consequences are obvious, but worse, disenfranchised employees end up feeling stuck wondering what’s going on (and a way out).

Right Strategy, Right People, Wrong Results

The root causes of strategy failure are not always straightforward. Clear patterns do emerge, however, when examining why even the most robust plans and talented teams falter. Based on my observations and experience, there are several key factors that consistently crop up that undermine execution success. These underlying issues reveal a complex calculus behind why great strategies can fail to deliver expected results.

Psychological Factors

Lots of bias. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, can lead decision-makers to favor information that supports their point of view, resulting in poor strategic choices and leaving out key details that impact business goals. One of these classic biases is groupthink, where the desire for conformity over all else results in negative or limited outcomes.

Fear of speaking up. People may fear voicing their opinions, even when they have valuable insights or concerns. Sadly, I've seen how this sentiment can incapacitate even the most talented people. Digging into this problem, this fear stems from several factors:

o   Perceived repercussions. People worry about being labeled troublemakers or facing retaliation from superiors if they ‘dare’ express their true thoughts and opinions. It not only robs the company of good ideas but creates stress for individuals. And incidentally, this is the same challenge that occurs when employees try to manage up and they hedge their real thoughts with being direct versus saying something that gets them frozen out or worse, fired.

o   Cultural company norms. In some company cultures, hierarchy and authority are emphasized to the extent that questioning or challenging decisions is discouraged or not allowed. Even when the course is clearly wrong, the entrenched structure and alignment to the system must be followed.

Ideas aren't listened to. A significant barrier to execution can be the belief that one's contributions aren't valued. This becomes a 'why bother' approach to critical processes and decisions. This sentiment is further emphasized through:

o   Lack of feedback. When employees don't receive constructive feedback or acknowledgment for their suggestions, they can assume their input is not valued. Like the with bias and the fear of speaking up, when there’s no evidence that a person’s ideas are sought out, let alone valued, the unvoiced concerns create a belief that it won't make a difference to try.

o   Management apathy. If leadership consistently fails to act on employee input, a perception of apathy can develop that can lead to widespread disengagement. One example of where this perceived apathy can show up is with company survey results that go nowhere. It can also happen in public forums like townhalls where audience questions are not answered or are so severely moderated that people conclude that the comment or question doesn’t matter, or wasn’t deemed ‘favorable’ to management, so it was watered down or skipped.

Resistance to change. Organizations often face resistance to changing established ways of working. In startups this normalized as the business grows with people believing that what got us here, will get us there, which leads to simply avoiding obvious and nuanced changes occurring in the organization. Much of the underlining resistance comes from:

o   Comfort with the status quo. Employees, and even leaders, may be comfortable with existing processes, and resist change due to the uncertainty and effort involved in adopting new methods. Or simply, there is a misguided belief that what’s working now will work forever.

o   Insufficient communication. Change initiatives can fail if not communicated effectively, leaving employees unclear about the benefits and reasons for the change. Leaders can operate in a bubble speaking in closed door conversations with a small subset of stakeholders who don’t have a way to properly gather data from the field and bring that into critical decisions.

o   Hidden disagreements. Even in non-toxic environments, hidden disagreements can fester and are interrelated to how things get done (or don’t get done) especially in siloed organizations. If two parties or teams dislike the other’s approach, and it’s been allowed to build for a long time, then one or both sides automatically veto ideas and actions. Or the alternative to be a good corporate citizen is to say ‘yes’ to an opposing viewpoint in a public meeting and do the complete opposite in execution.

Leadership issues. Naturally, you can’t ignore a major obstacle in getting results without looking at how leadership behaviors and actions impact engagement. Autocratic leaders can demotivate employees, while overly permissive leaders can fail to provide necessary direction. Research by Gallup shows that companies with engaged leadership see 21% higher profitability and 17% higher productivity. Unaddressed underperformance or lack of engagement can spread and impact overall team performance.

Shifting the Paradigm

What is the best way to deal with all of this?  Thinking about a top to bottom approach is the key and developing a process that promotes effective synergies between individuals, teams, and leadership.

Embracing the uncomfortable. First, addressing organizational synergy requires a multifaceted approach. It starts with embracing discomfort, as change is challenging and often uncomfortable. Everyone must adopt a collective mindset and commit to behavioral changes. This process demands accountability at all organizational levels with a concerted effort at alignment. Creating safe spaces to encourage open discussion and ideation of best practices is also needed to make this work.

Enhancing team dynamics. A key strategy in this process is implementing structured team-building activities. These should be led by a specialist such as a coach, HR, or other specialist who can objectively assess team dynamics and provide proper facilitation. From here you can define specific actions to implement be it good meeting etiquette, skills development, succession planning, and possibly restructuring.

Building leadership conscious. This goes beyond implementing empathy training; it's about recognizing that individual leaders don't know everything, don't have all the answers, and need to dive deeper into why there might be blockers for people to work together properly. This is a uniquely personal metamorphosis in some cases.

To support this consciousness, methods such as informal feedback, surveys, or town halls, provide valuable data, but it really comes down to leaders taking a personal pledge to look under all rocks in the pursuit of fresh perspectives.  You can augment this approach with training and coaching, but starting with consistent exposure to understanding the employee experience about how work gets done, truly done, in an open and transparent manner, makes it possible to form a more attuned and responsive leadership team.

Path Forward

The right strategy, leadership, and people, aligned around common interests creates success. By addressing underlying work issues head-on and where employees feel valued and heard, companies can unlock their full potential and achieve sustained growth. I know from my change experience with rapidly growing companies, M&As, changing leadership, and a host of other challenges, what ensures everyone wins, is a direct commitment to alignment and cohesion.

When individuals harness their collective will and foster collaboration at all levels, companies bridge the chasm between potential and performance. The result is a powerful synergy of great strategies that deliver tangible results, coupled with a workforce that takes pride in their collective accomplishments turning well-crafted plans into success stories.