Strategy Dies in the Space Between Your Senior Leaders

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

You’ve got the strategy. You’ve got the talent. You’ve done the offsite, built the plan, and set the targets. So why isn’t it working?

Here’s what I know: strategy doesn’t die because it was poorly designed—although plenty of it is. And it doesn’t die because the people weren’t smart enough or committed enough. Strategy dies in the space between your senior leaders. In the things left unsaid. The assumptions never surfaced. The trust that was assumed but never built. The friction no one names because everyone is too polite, too busy, or too uncertain to go there.

That space between? It’s not empty. It’s full of competing interpretations, misaligned priorities, and unspoken tension. And it is the single most overlooked variable in strategic performance.

The Alignment Illusion

Consider this: research from HBR and Workpath found that 82% of executives believe their leadership team is aligned on strategy. The actual alignment rate? Only 23%. That gap—nearly 60 points—is where strategy withers away. Not on a spreadsheet. Not in a competitor’s market move. In the space between leaders who genuinely believe they’re on the same page when they are not even reading the same book.

This isn’t a reflection of poor leadership. It’s a reflection of what happens when organizations treat team dynamics as a secondary concern—something to address “when there’s time,” which of course there never is. The 82% number tells you something important: most senior teams don’t know they have a problem. They experience agreement in the room and assume it translates into coordinated action. It rarely does.

That space between is not empty.

The space between senior leaders is where energy either flows or gets stuck. It’s where trust either accelerates decision-making or quietly strangles it. And it operates according to a principle I come back to again and again in my work: everything is energy, everything is connected, and everything moves in response to everything else. It’s not just physics — it’s the operating system your organization runs on, whether you see it or not.

When I say strategy dies in the space between, I mean something very specific. I mean that the relational infrastructure of your leadership team—how well they actually know each other’s thinking, communication patterns, motivational drivers, and blind spots—is the infrastructure of strategy execution. Not the org chart. Not the project plan. The quality of the connections between the people responsible for making the plan real.

This is not about personality conflicts or leadership failures. It’s about attention. Most organizations invest enormous energy in designing strategy and almost none in building the relational capacity to execute it. We assume that smart, experienced people will naturally figure out how to work together under pressure. They don’t. Not without intentional investment in understanding how each person thinks, communicates, and contributes.

What Becomes Possible When You Pay Attention

Here’s where the conversation shifts from problem to possibility. Because when you invest in the people you’re counting on to carry the plan forward, when you make team dynamics a first-order strategic priority instead of a nice-to-have — the return is remarkable.

This is why I integrate PrinciplesUs (principlesus.com) into every strategic engagement. Created with Ray Dalio, Dr. Adam Grant, Dr. Brian Little, and Dr. John Golden, PrinciplesUs brings research-grade personality science into the practical reality of how teams actually work together. It’s not another engagement survey. It’s a way of seeing what’s really happening in the cognitive, interpersonal, and motivational dynamics of your leadership team—and then doing something meaningful with that insight.

The premise is elegantly simple: understand yourself, understand others, help others understand you. But the impact runs deep. When leaders see how their own cognitive and interpersonal wiring interacts with everyone else’s at the table, the conversation shifts. The things that felt like personality friction reveal themselves as predictable patterns—patterns that can be worked with instead of worked around.

PrinciplesUs gives teams a shared language for navigating differences. And that language becomes the foundation for the kind of candid, trust-rich dialogue that strategy execution actually requires. In my experience, this is where the shift from “working group” to “high-performing team” begins—not with a better plan, but with better understanding of each other.

PrinciplesUs made such a huge difference in my planning sessions that I simply won’t run projects now without it. I saw teams who had worked together for years open up in ways I was warned ahead of time would never happen. They recognized each other’s strengths — not in expertise, but in their individual ways of navigating relationships, stressors, and personal passions. Suddenly, things that used to irritate them about each other were understood in a whole new light, and respect, awareness, and camaraderie deepened—not to mention trust. It created space for the team to then move into some of the hardest work they have to do in designing strategy, negotiating priorities and resources, calling out unrealistic goals and setting expectations with each other and for the team.

The 5Cs—Reading the System

If Quantum Intelligence is the awareness that your organization is a living, interconnected system, then the question becomes: how do you actually read that system? How do you see what’s flowing and what’s stuck?

This is where the 5Cs Culture Assessment comes in. Built on research from Dr. Jamie Shapiro and validated across thousands of organizations, the 5Cs don’t measure how people feel about their jobs. They measure the conditions that drive how the system actually functions.

Connection. Candid Communication. Clarity. Collaboration. Contribution.

Together, these five dimensions explain roughly half of overall job satisfaction. But more importantly for our purposes, they function as a real-time diagnostic of your organization’s energetic health — the very dynamics that Quantum Intelligence tells us determine whether a living system thrives or stalls.

Connection is the foundation — the level of trust, care, and psychological safety people actually feel with one another. It’s the baseline energy that either flows freely between people or doesn’t. Candid Communication measures whether people can say what needs to be said without performing a political risk calculation first. In system terms, it’s the quality of the signal moving through the network. Clarity reveals whether goals, roles, and expectations are genuinely shared — or just assumed. Without it, energy scatters. Collaboration shows how reliably the team works across functions and boundaries, how well the interconnections actually hold under pressure. And Contribution captures whether people experience their work as meaningful and purposeful — whether their energy is directed toward something that matters.

When any of these conditions weaken at the senior team level, the effects don’t stay contained. They cascade. Because in an interconnected system, a disruption at the top ripples through everything below it. Decisions slow. Priorities fragment. Execution becomes a negotiation instead of a coordinated effort. The strategy just never quite lands.

The Bigger Equation: Strategy Design + Team Performance

Everything I’ve described so far—the alignment illusion, the space between, the 5Cs—exists within a larger strategic reality. One that most organizations still haven’t reckoned with.

Traditional strategic planning treats the organization like a machine. Define the inputs, set the targets, pull the levers, and wait for the outputs. It’s tidy. It’s logical. And it fails at staggering rates. Some 67% of well-formulated strategies never reach their goals—not because the analysis was wrong, but because the approach itself was built on a flawed assumption: that organizations are predictable, linear systems.

They’re not. They’re living systems. Complex, adaptive, and deeply interconnected. Everything within them is energy—the energy of people, relationships, decisions, and culture—and everything moves in response to everything else. This isn’t metaphor. It’s the operating reality that traditional planning ignores.

This understanding is the foundation of Essential Strategy, the formula I developed over three decades of working inside these living systems. Essential Strategy is built on four interconnected elements—Purpose, Growth, and Evolution, managed in Equilibrium. The formula is guided by four rules that reframe how we think about what strategy actually requires.

Purpose must be internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution. That means it’s not enough for your mission to sound good on a website—it has to inspire common cause from within while delivering real value to those you serve.

Growth must be intentional, matched by the adaptive learning and expansion of capabilities required to sustain both speed and scale. This is where most organizations trip: they chase external growth targets without building the internal capacity to support them, and then wonder why things break.

Evolution actively anticipates the changing needs of all those who serve and are served by the organization—not reacting to disruption after the fact, but sensing and preparing for what’s coming.

Purpose, Growth, and Evolution exist in a state of dynamic Equilibrium, a continuous balancing act that becomes the mechanism for prioritizing where time, energy, and resources are invested.

Equilibrium is not a concept but rather a catalyst. It is a decision-making mechanism for prioritizing time, energy, and resource when new opportunities emerge or market change triggers a pivot. It is what keeps strategy from becoming a static document that sits on a shelf while the world moves on without it. When Purpose, Growth, and Evolution are treated as interconnected and held in active balance, the strategy stays alive. It adapts. It breathes with the organization rather than suffocating it.

What makes this approach different from traditional planning isn’t complexity. It’s consciousness. It requires what I call Quantum Intelligent Leadership—the practice of leading through conscious awareness of the quantum reality your organization operates in. Recognizing that your presence, your attention, and your internal state ripple through the organization in ways that no org chart can capture — and this applies to everyone on your team.

Quantum Intelligent leaders don’t just manage strategy, they steward the conditions that allow strategy to take hold. They sense and respond to organizational energy rather than forcing predetermined outcomes. They create space for collective wisdom to emerge instead of directing from hierarchy. They hold purpose, growth, and evolution as simultaneous priorities rather than sequential checkboxes. And perhaps most critically, they understand that personal transformation and systemic transformation are intimately connected—that how a leader shows up energetically changes the field their entire team operates in.

And this is exactly where team dynamics becomes a strategic imperative rather than a soft-skill sideshow. The 5Cs, PrinciplesUs, the relational infrastructure between your senior leaders—these aren’t separate from strategy. They are the connective tissue that allows Purpose, Growth, and Evolution to function in Equilibrium. A leadership team that lacks trust cannot hold Purpose with integrity. A team that avoids candid communication will never build the adaptive learning capacity that Growth demands. A team operating in silos will miss the signals that Evolution requires. Without a cohesive, trust-rich leadership team, the most elegant strategy in the world will collapse under its own weight. The team is not adjacent to the framework. The team is what makes the framework work.

The Force Multiplier Effect

Now let me show you what the upside looks like. Because this isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about unlocking what was always there but never activated.

McKinsey’s research on team effectiveness found that teams with above-average trust were 3.3 times more efficient and 5.1 times more likely to produce results than teams where trust was below average. Not marginally better. Multiples better. That’s not a soft-skill return. That’s a force multiplier on every strategic initiative your team touches.

Organizations using Principles tools are reporting outcomes that map directly to this multiplier effect: 76% of participants become more comfortable sharing perspectives openly, and 77% report a significantly deeper understanding of others’ perspectives—the kind of understanding that transforms how teams align, decide, and execute.

These aren’t gains from restructuring, new hires, or technology investments. They come from paying attention to what was already in the room—the human dynamics that were either going to accelerate your strategy or quietly undermine it. The talent was there. The intelligence was there. What was missing was the connective tissue.

When teams gain this kind of awareness, the downstream effects are tangible. Meetings get shorter because people trust each other enough to skip the dog-and-pony show. Decisions get faster because assumptions are surfaced instead of buried. Conflict becomes productive instead of corrosive. And strategic priorities actually hold because everyone is operating from the same understanding—not just the same slide deck.

Why This Is the Most Important Thing on Your List Right Now

If you’re leading an organization through the complexity of 2026—AI integration, workforce transformation, market volatility, the ongoing pressure to do more with less—your leadership team’s ability to function as a cohesive unit isn’t a “people” issue separate from your “strategy” issues. It is, in and of itself, a strategic imperative.

Every change in leadership changes the dynamics of the entire team. Every new initiative tests the strength of the connections between the people responsible for it. Every time the environment shifts—and it will keep shifting—the team’s capacity to sense, adapt, and respond together is what determines whether you navigate it or get overwhelmed by it.

Strategy requires powerful, trusting, and aligned teams. One simply does not exist without the other.

The question isn’t whether your senior leaders are capable. They almost certainly are. The question is whether you’re investing in the space between them with the same rigor you bring to the strategy itself. Because that space is either your greatest multiplier or your most expensive blind spot.

If you’re a CEO or executive director reading this and recognizing the pattern—where the strategy looks right but the execution keeps falling short, where the team seems aligned but the results say otherwise—the answer isn’t a better plan. It’s a deeper understanding of the people charged with delivering it.

The organizations that outperform don’t just plan better. They understand each other better. They’ve done the work to surface the invisible dynamics that shape every interaction, every decision, and every strategic outcome.

That work starts with awareness—the most powerful strategic asset you possess.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.