How Leaders Accidentally Create Strategy

May 2026

How repeated comments turn into organisational priorities

In a recent session, a CEO I work with was trying to understand why his team kept gravitating towards an initiative he considered a second-order priority – while the work he actually needed them focused on was stalling.

As we traced it back, the pattern became clear. Over the previous month, he’d returned to that initiative, lightly, in three separate conversations. Raising a question here or there, checking in on progress in passing. Each time, he’d moved on quickly. But his team hadn’t.

By the time he noticed, one of his senior managers had already begun reworking the delivery plan, and another had quietly deprioritised a piece of work that had been on the critical path, and the team had started scheduling around it. Not because anyone had misunderstood the strategy – but because they were doing exactly what attentive teams do. They were following the signal, not the plan.

This is one of the most common and least visible dynamics I see at senior level.

Leaders invest considerable effort in setting clear priorities, communicating direction, and aligning their teams. And then, without realising it, they gradually override all of it – not through big decisions, but through small ones. A comment here. A reaction there. A follow-up question that signals something matters more than the deck says it does.

The difficult truth is that your team is often highly aligned; to signals you don’t realise you’re sending.

Teams are constantly reading the environment. Not just listening to what you say in all-hands meetings or strategy sessions, but tracking where your attention lands, what you return to, what visibly unsettles you, and what you let pass without comment. Over time, that pattern becomes the real operating strategy – regardless of what’s written in any plan.

None of this is irrational behaviour from the team. It is, in fact, sophisticated organisational intelligence. They are learning how to interpret you. And the longer they work with you, the better they become at it.

The challenge is that most leaders don’t think of themselves as signal generators. They think of strategy as something declared – in documents, in planning cycles, in OKRs. But strategy is also something enacted, daily, through attention, energy, and follow-through. And those two versions don’t always match.

That gap – between the strategy you believe you’re communicating and the one your organisation is actually responding to – is where drift, confusion, and misalignment quietly take root.

What makes this particularly hard to see is that the leaders I work with at this level are, almost universally, thoughtful and self-aware. They’re not careless communicators. They’re often genuinely curious, intellectually engaged, and close to the work in ways that reflect real capability and high standards. But those same qualities – curiosity, closeness, high standards – can inadvertently produce exactly the noise they’re trying to eliminate.

Thinking out loud in a meeting is natural. Staying close to a piece of work you care about is understandable. Reacting with energy to something that concerns you is human. The question is whether the organisation is experiencing that as leadership — or as instruction.

This doesn’t mean becoming measured to the point of inertia, or scrubbing all spontaneity from how you lead. It means developing a clearer picture of the signals you’re actually transmitting – and making more deliberate choices about which ones you want the organisation to act on.

A practical place to start: look at the past two weeks. What have you mentioned more than once? What have you reacted to most visibly? What have you followed up on – and what have you let go?

That pattern is likely a more accurate map of your current organisational priorities than any strategy document.

Reflect: The signals you send are often more powerful than the strategy you set. Start with honest self-observation.

What have you repeated, reacted to, or followed up on in the past fortnight – and what does that suggest your organisation believes matters most to you?
Where might your curiosity or involvement in a piece of work be read as direction, rather than interest?
If your team were mapping your real priorities based on your behaviour this month, how closely would that map match your intended strategy?

Design: Leaders can’t eliminate the signal dynamic, but they can become more intentional about it.

What’s one area where you could be more deliberate about separating exploration from direction – and how might you signal that distinction clearly to your team?
Where could you create more explicit permission for your team to push back when they sense a shift in priority that hasn’t been confirmed?
What would a short, regular check look like – with yourself or your team – to surface the gap between stated strategy and lived priorities?

System: Over time, the patterns you create shape how the whole organisation makes sense of what matters.

What organisational behaviours – the things people consistently prioritise or avoid – might be a direct reflection of signals you’ve been sending?
Where is your team optimising for your visibility rather than for genuine value – and what might be driving that?
What would it take for your organisation to act from strategic clarity rather than leader interpretation?