By the time a strategic decision impacts revenue, it rarely looks like a leadership problem.
It looks like Sales is not making enough calls. Marketing is attracting the wrong leads. The pipeline is weak. Teams needs more focus, more urgency, and more accountability.
Those things may all be true. But they are also closest to the number, which makes them much easier to blame than a decision made six months earlier.
I have thought about this for years because of Lewis Hamilton.
A few years ago, I was sitting in a company strategy day after a difficult first half. Hamilton had recently won at Silverstone after a long stretch without a victory, and his win was presented as a story about perseverance.
Keep working. Stay resilient. Difficult periods pass.
I remember thinking that this was a spectacularly odd reading of what had happened.
Hamilton had not forgotten how to drive. He had not suddenly rediscovered commitment or developed a better attitude. He had been telling Mercedes for some time that the car was not working for him, while the team continued to pursue a technical direction that was plainly not producing the results it expected. They won when they started to listen to him again.
The problem was not that he needed to try harder inside the same conditions.
The conditions needed to change.
When I questioned the lesson afterwards, my manager said, “Oh, so you think you’re like Lewis Hamilton, do you?”
For the avoidance of doubt, I did not.
But it stayed with me because it was such a neat example of how quickly a criticism of the system can be turned into a judgement about the person working inside it.
Companies do this all the time when revenue starts to soften.
They look at the people closest to the number and ask why they are not performing. What they are less likely to do is go back through the decisions that shaped the work now reaching the market.
A strategy changes. The business chooses a new customer, a new market, or a new way to position itself. Leadership experiences that as a decision made.
Everyone else has to work out what it means.
Roger Martin has argued for years that the distinction between strategy and execution is misleading. Strategy is not a set of choices made at the top followed by choiceless activity below. The people supposedly executing it are still making choices under uncertainty, competition, and constraint.
That is exactly what happens after the all-hands.
Sales has to decide which leads are still worth pursuing. Marketing has to decide whether the old message still applies. Product has to decide which customer feedback matters now. Managers have to answer questions that were not resolved in the announcement.
What stops?
What carries on?
Are we rebuilding everything again?
Is this one likely to last?
Strategy is not implemented when it is announced. It is interpreted and remade through everyday conversations and decisions.
Managers work out what it means, explain it to their teams, and fill in whatever leadership left unresolved.
If the reasoning, trade-offs, and boundaries do not travel with the decision, different parts of the organisation create different answers.
I have worked in companies where strategy changed often enough that people became quite practical about it.
“He’ll change his mind again in a couple of weeks, so I’m not changing anything.”
That sounds cynical because it was. It was also based on experience.
If you have rebuilt the deck three times, abandoned two campaigns, and changed the target customer twice, waiting before committing to the latest direction is not especially irrational.
People hedge. They delay bigger decisions. They escalate choices they would normally make themselves. They continue with the version of the strategy they trust until the new one proves it is going to last.
So sales keeps using the deck it believes will work. Marketing starts building for the newest customer. Product weighs feedback against a different set of priorities.
Each team makes reasonable choices from its own interpretation of the company’s direction.
This is where alignment starts to break, although it may not look dramatic at the time.
In many B2B companies, the consequences are delayed by the structure of the business itself.
The pipeline closing today may have been created under the previous positioning, before the customer or strategy changed. In a long B2B sales cycle, buyers encounter the company through the website, sales calls, demos, proposals, implementation, and account conversations.
That delay gives the organisation time to compensate.
Existing opportunities keep moving. Customer relationships absorb some inconsistency. Experienced staff quietly hold the gaps together.
They rewrite the deck, interpret what leadership probably meant, smooth over handovers, and bring the founder into the room when nobody else can join the pieces.
Experienced people are very good at making unclear systems look functional.
But the newer work is being created under different assumptions. Marketing is generating demand from one version of the customer while sales is still pursuing another. Product is prioritising against a third.
Buyers do not experience separate internal departments. They experience one supplier.
The value takes more explanation. Different stakeholders hear different versions. Decisions slow because the company becomes harder to understand and trust.
No single moment necessarily looks catastrophic.
The process simply becomes less convincing.
Months later, the pipeline weakens. Now the problem looks like execution.
The campaign is reviewed. Sales is challenged. Conversion rates are inspected. People are told to increase activity and do their jobs.
Leaders are under pressure too. Boards want answers. Shareholders want growth. Nobody enjoys explaining a poor quarter.
But leadership still determines whether that pressure produces a better diagnosis or simply travels down the organisation as blame.
“I just need people to do their jobs” sounds reasonable until you remember that strategy changes what the job is.
It changes which customers matter, what the company is promising, which work should take priority, and which decisions people are expected to make without asking permission.
When direction keeps shifting, people often narrow their judgement rather than stop working.
They stick to safer claims, familiar customers, and reversible decisions. Activity continues, but the coordination work thins out.
The organisation still looks busy. It is just less coherent.
Not every missed target starts with leadership. Sometimes sales performance is the problem. Sometimes the campaign is weak. Sometimes people are simply not doing what they need to do.
But when the numbers change, the diagnosis should not begin and end with the team closest to them.
It is worth asking:
What changed six or nine months earlier? Did sales, marketing, and product build the same company from that decision, or did each build its own version?
The lesson from Hamilton was never that effort did not matter.
It was that the visible performer can be working extremely hard inside conditions created somewhere else.
By the time those conditions appear in revenue, the people being blamed may have spent months trying to hold them together.
If you're dealing with a growth challenge you can't quite explain, book a free Alignment Call. We'll look at what's happening, where the disconnect might be, and what you could do next.
Revenue rarely changes the moment a strategic decision is made. Teams first interpret the new direction, adjust their behaviour, and create workarounds where they lack clarity. Those small changes accumulate over time before eventually appearing as slower sales, inconsistent messaging, delayed launches, or weaker commercial performance.
Sales and marketing are usually where customers experience the effects of earlier decisions. By the time revenue begins to soften, the original cause may be months old. Improving campaigns or sales activity can treat the symptoms without addressing the underlying leadership or alignment issue.
Common signs include different teams describing the customer differently, increasing founder involvement in sales, repeated revisions to messaging, inconsistent customer conversations, slower decision-making, and commercial teams creating their own versions of the strategy.
Customer research provides an external evidence base that leadership, sales, marketing, and product can use to make decisions from the same understanding of the customer. Instead of relying on assumptions or individual opinions, teams can align around evidence of how customers actually think, buy, and decide.
If growth has stalled, messaging keeps changing, sales performance varies between people, or important commercial decisions rely heavily on one person's knowledge, it may be time to investigate whether the business has become misaligned before investing in more marketing or sales activity.