Is the CEO's Real Job Strategy? Or Execution?

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about the CEO's real job. Is it strategy or is it execution? What do you think? This comes from the CEO briefing that I get in the via email every day. If you're not getting it, you should. Or maybe you just refer to it so much. Just tune into our vlogs and you'll catch most of them. This came out on March the 20th, 2026, written by Lui Damascino. I hope I said that right. Okay. Let me begin. "The 2025 state of strategy execution report drawing on more than 250 senior organizational leaders found that 70% of leaders admit they fail at strategy execution. Only 29% reports strong leadership accountability for execution, and just one in four organizations link performance reviews to strategic goals." Seems odd.

"PMI's 2025 global research surveying more than 5,800 project professionals and executives found that only half our projects today meet a modern definition of success. The top barrier cited by executives was a disconnect between planning and execution." Okay. Leaders spend ... I mean, our members spend a lot of time and money on strategy. They bring us in and we help out and go through a period of exercises. And then some of them take the end product, the work product, and they put it on a shelf and forget about it. That's not our council. That's not what we want them to do, but that happens. How do you translate that 30,000-foot strategy down to everyday execution? Let's talk about that.

"What does not get enough attention in the infrastructure that determines whether a strategy actually reaches the front line or dies quietly somewhere between the executive team and the people responsible for execution." That's the critical thing.

Now, what about this is important to you? Well, you don't want to be one of those people that pays a consultant or assembles your team and invests lots of time and energy into producing a strategy only to see it wither away on the vine because you somehow didn't determine how you're going to take that 30,000 foot strategy and bring it down to everyday execution. That's the key. The strategy's wonderful. It will make your team better. Just having your top minds in your organization thinking about strategy and all getting on one sheet of music, that will make you better.

But the more you can push it down throughout the organization and to every single person in your organization, the better off you're going to be, the better off everyone's going to be. Okay. One example that I have from the way back machine, I worked with three executives. It was a family business and they had invested in a consultant and they had put together their mission, vision, and values and some strategy. And it was good. I mean, it was solid, I have to admit. And they were using it to make decisions among the three of them. They would say, "Okay, we're going to do X, Y, or Z, but let's hold it up to our mission, vision, and values first and make sure it's aligned properly with what we mutually agree." And they really did that. And I said, "Fellas, this is great. This is strategy. This is a business philosophy in action." I really liked it.

And I said, "Now, what about you've got these locations, their operations were spread out over many dozens of miles? Now, what about your manager in this location or that location?" And they looked at me sort of blankly and they said, "What are you talking about? " I'm like, "Well, wait, you've spent X dollars and X hours and you've really done a really good job here of this mission, vision, and values, but you haven't advocated for it anywhere else in your organization." And they hadn't. It never occurred to them. The consultant never told them that was a part of the puzzle. And once the common sense kicked in, "Oh my gosh, you're right. Holy moly." So I guess it doesn't come natural. Maybe you think of strategy as a separate exercise, but if you don't get it down to the execution phase, you've not gotten all the value for your time and money that you should have.

Okay. How do you get it there? How do you bring this 30,000 foot thing down into every day? Number one, repetition. There's no substitute. You have to talk about mission, vision, and values, and where you're going as a company all the time. If you meet with your employees once a year and you say it in a big presentation on a stage, that's great, but you've got to talk about it when you go out to the smaller meetings and the smaller groups, you've got to talk about it all the time. We all want to be original and fun and novel, but this is too important to trust to my sense of novelty. It's got to be talked about all the time in your organization.

Second thing, ruthless communication to every area of your company. You don't want this just to be with the senior team or the management team. You want this to go down to everybody in the company. And it's so simple to do. I mean, of course you're talking about it, but what about visual reminders? One of our members did a great series of posters and on one poster, whatever size it was, they were able to post this in every hallway, every job trailer, every work site. I mean, it was great. The graphics were wonderful. The message was great. Just get it out there and talk about it all the time. So you can say, not just, "I believe in this," but, "We went to the trouble to put this in words for all of you and we want to talk about it."

Number three, put tools in people's hands and in front of their eyes. So our folks get a laminated sheet of our strategic plan with our mission, vision, and values, and our culture descriptors and all those things, and they put it in their offices or their cubicles or whatever, and they tack it up and it literally is a couple feet away from their eyes every day.
Everybody gets a credit card size version. It's necessarily abbreviated, okay. But a credit card size version that they can put in their wallets, or in my case, I carry it in my briefcase so I can pull it out at a moment's notice in a meeting. Tools are handy things and there's no reason not to spend a few extra bucks to put those tools in people's hands.

Fourth thing, find champions. Throughout the organization, there are some people that are just never going to really get along with this. They're not going to be enthusiastic, but there are people who are. Are you ever going to get 100% of your employees to say, "Ra, ra, this is the way?" No, no. But what if you can go from 10% today to 30% a year from now and then 50% a year after that? That would be tremendous in terms of moving the needle. So find those champions that will help you talk about, communicate and really make the strategy, the values, et cetera, a part of the organizational culture.

And then the fifth thing, and this is important, have clear decision rights. What decisions need to escalate up to the CEO? What decisions need to escalate to some level of management? You want decisions made at the lowest possible levels. And if you've got clear mission, vision, and values, and strategy. You can do that. You can say that this decision can be made by the superintendent on the job site like that. No need to escalate that up the chain to the project manager and ultimately to the general superintendent or whoever. Have clarity about who can make what decisions, make the decisions at the correct levels, make sure there are consequences for decisions that are made. The consequences are understood.

The nature of construction back in the day was that if somebody made a poor decision, boy, the wall fell in on them. And that's not the case today. Contractors are much more tactful about how they give feedback. So as long as people understand that there might be a consequence for making a bad decision, but really you'd have to make a series, you'd have to have a cascade of bad decisions in most of our member companies before there would be any serious consequence. You want to encourage people to exercise their decision muscles. And if I make a call at this level on the job site and I screwed up, well, then by gosh, I screwed up. But normally we can recover from those things and it's a learning experience because how do we learn? We make mistakes and we learn from those mistakes much better than if somebody just wrote us a memo and talked to us about it.

And then we want decisions made at the lowest levels of organization for speed. Speed is so essential in construction these days in particular. And so having those decisions made at the lowest levels makes for a faster decision cascade too.

All right, let me finish up. The urgency of this only intensifies as organizations layer AI initiatives onto operating models that are already struggling to execute. Strategy determines where a company wants to go. The operating model determines whether it ever gets there. Make sure when you think about strategy, you think about now, we've got it. What are we going to do with it? How are we going to cascade it down through the organization and how are we going to execute at the people and the project levels? Let me know what you think, [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.

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