Stop Broadcasting the Strategy. Start Translating It.

Her engagement survey said 84% of employees were clear on the company's strategic priorities. Then someone asked her own senior team to name two of the five. Fewer than one in three could.

That's from a 2015 Harvard Business Review study. The CEO in the story wasn't lazy or evasive. She recited the strategy every month. The message went out. Something else didn't.

If you're 90 days into a PE-backed CEO role with a value-creation plan on your desk and a board that wants EBITDA up around 30% over three years, this is the failure mode that costs you a year you don't have. Not resistance. Not politics. Translation.

When "Everyone's Clear" and Nobody Moves

The HBR data is uncomfortable in a specific way. About 90% of middle managers say leadership communicates the strategy often enough. So, frequency isn't your problem. But only 16% of frontline supervisors clearly understand how the company's priorities connect to one another. Only 55% of middle managers can name even one of the top five priorities. And only 11% believe all their priorities are resourced to succeed.

People report clarity in a survey and then often go run last year's strategy on Monday, because "grow EBITDA 30%" never became "here's what you'll personally stop doing this week to make room for what matters now."

That's not a message problem. It's a translation problem. And it's one that almost nobody on the company org chart is accountable for solving.

The Job That Falls Through Every Crack

Ask 10 communications leaders what their function owns, and you'll get some version of the same answer: inform, engage, protect the narrative, and get the message out clearly and often. That's real work, and it's necessary. It's also where most communication stops, and that's the whole problem.

Now look at who owns what happens after the strategy is announced. Change management owns rollout and adoption, and it does its best work once the target behavior for each role has been defined. HR owns roles, incentives, capability, and structure. Strategy owns the destination. Finance owns the number.

Nobody in that list is on the hook for the step in between: taking "grow EBITDA 30% over three years" and rendering it as "the plant manager changes these two things starting this month, and stops doing this third thing to free the hours."

That step lives in the void between strategy and execution. Some CEOs hand it to a Chief of Staff or a Transformation Office, if there is one. When it works, that person is doing translation whether the title says so or not. But in most companies, no one is.

So, by default, it lands with the managers closest to the work. Each one interprets "grow EBITDA 30%" for their own team as best they can, which means the strategy gets translated differently across functions, and no two versions match.

And here's the part that matters if you're the CEO under the gun: this isn't a failure of the people around you. It's a failure of job design. Nobody was hired to do the translation, so it doesn't get done.

Why This Is a Communications Job

If no one owns translation, the question becomes: who should?

Strategy, Finance, HR, and Operations each define their own domain, not behavior across the enterprise.

Communication is one of the few functions that spans all of them.

It is already responsible for making complex, abstract ideas understandable, usable, and repeatable across the organization. At the executive level, that shows up as narratives, positioning, and alignment. One level down, it should show up as something far more concrete: what changes this week, by role.

Translation isn't a different discipline from communication. It's the same discipline, applied with consequences.

Right now, most communication functions are measured on reach, recall, and engagement. Did people hear it? Can they repeat it? Do they like it?

None of those require the message to change behavior.

Translation does.

It asks a different question: can a manager explain what their team will do differently on Monday, and what they will stop doing to make room?

That shift from clarity to consequence is what makes this a communications problem worth owning.

There's also a practical advantage. Communication already touches every initiative, every function, and every major message that moves through the company.

It is the only group with both the vantage point and the permission to standardize meaning across the organization.

Which makes it the most natural place for this responsibility to live.

Transmission Is the Job. Translation Is the Goal.

Here's the sharper way to think about corporate communication: its value-add for a portfolio company is to take a value-creation plan and turn it into role-specific, checkable behavior change, then verify it landed by asking people to explain, in their own words, what they're doing differently and what they've stopped. If they can do that, you have a strategy. If they can only quote the pillars back, you have a slogan with high recall.

And to be clear, this isn't a pitch to hand your comms team a bigger budget or more headcount. Translation is a cross-functional job that communication should architect and facilitate, working with strategy, operations, and HR.

Test this claim on your own company this week. Ask three function heads to write, in one paragraph, what changes on Monday because of the strategy. If you get three coherent paragraphs, ignore this piece.

In my opinion, a high clarity score is more dangerous than a low one. A low score prompts action; a high score prompts a misguided victory lap. All it really tells you is that people heard you. It doesn't tell you anyone changed what they do on Monday. And that behavior change is the only thing the board is paying for.

Fewer Town Halls, More Briefs

This isn't a case for talking less. It's a case for talking differently.

The town hall reciting the same three pillars is easy to produce and easy to measure, which is why it multiplies. A translation brief is harder. It gets written per function, tested by having the person repeat it, and revised until the wording matches the desired outcome.

It's slower to make than a deck. It's also the only version of "communicating the strategy" that shows up as adjusted EBITDA rather than a sentiment score.

The One Question to Ask Before Your Next Initiative

If the strategy has been announced and the numbers haven't moved, resist the instinct to schedule another all-hands. Ask a narrower question first.

Who, by name, owns translating this strategy into role-level behavior change for each function, and when will they deliver it, before we launch the next initiative?

And skip the survey when you check. Don't ask "do you understand the strategy," which gets you 84%. Ask a manager to show you next week's project list and point to what changed because of it.

If nobody can answer who owns translation in one sentence, and no task lists look different, you've found the real bottleneck. The message was heard. It just never became a job.

Name the translator. Make the strategy a deliverable. Rinse and repeat.