Can Your Managers Name Your Top Three Strategic Priorities?

Strategic priorities are the few outcomes a company has decided matter most this year, and the simplest test of whether you have them is whether your managers can name them. Ask five managers, separately, to write down your top three strategic priorities. Then compare the lists. If they match, the priorities are doing their job. If they don't, the strategy exists but hasn't traveled.

It takes five minutes. Most CEOs who run it are surprised by what comes back.

The five-manager test

Pick five people who manage others: not your direct reports alone, but a mix of levels, so you hear from someone two layers down as well as the leadership team.

Ask each of them the same question, in writing, separately, without warning:

"What are the company's top three priorities this year?"

No prompt, no list to choose from, no slide to look at first. A message works. So does asking at the start of a one-to-one. What matters is that nobody compares notes before answering.

Then lay the five answers side by side and score them.

Most companies land in the middle rows. A typical set of answers from a 200-person company might read like this:

1. "Growth, customer experience, and getting the new platform out."
2. "Hitting the revenue number, I think hiring, and the platform."
3. "Enterprise deals, retention, and cost control."
4. "Honestly, it's mostly the platform launch for us."
5. "Customer focus, innovation, and people."

Five managers, at least eight different priorities. None of them is wrong, exactly. Each has taken the strategy and kept the part that looked most like their own job. That is normal, and it is how a company ends the year having worked hard on things leadership never chose.

What the research found

This isn't a quirk of small companies. In a study published in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2018, Sull, Sull and Yoder found that only 28% of executives and managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's strategic priorities. Their article, No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders, is worth reading in full.

Note who was being asked: not frontline staff, but the people responsible for making the strategy happen. If fewer than a third of them could name the priorities, the priorities were not steering much of their work.

Why strategic priorities don't travel

Priorities rarely fail to travel because people weren't told. They were told, usually at an all-hands, in a deck and maybe in an email. They fail to travel for more structural reasons.

There are too many of them. Eight priorities can't be remembered, so each person keeps the two or three that matter to them. Past five, a priority list stops forcing trade-offs and starts describing everything the company does.

They are themes, not outcomes. "Customer focus" and "operational excellence" are directions. Nobody can tell from either one what to do differently on Monday, so everyone carries on as before and calls it customer focus.

They have no number. A priority with no measure can't be checked, and something that is never checked stops being a priority sometime in the second quarter. People take their cue from what gets asked about in reviews.

Each manager translates them differently. A priority that reaches five managers as a phrase becomes five different plans. Without an agreed measure for each department, the translation happens silently, and nobody sees the disagreement until results come in.

They compete with what people are actually measured on. If a sales manager is told the priority is enterprise growth but is measured on total bookings, she will chase total bookings. She is not being disloyal. She is doing what the scorecard asks.

Leadership doesn't agree either. Sometimes the five-manager test is a mirror. If your own leadership team would give five different answers, the problem starts upstream, and it is worth reading about what leadership alignment actually requires before pushing priorities further down.

Most of these causes appear in the longer list of reasons why strategy fails at execution. Priorities that don't travel are often the first of them.

Strategic priorities examples for a 50–500 person company

A strong priority names an outcome, can be measured, and is specific enough that someone could disagree with it. Here are strategic priorities examples for a mid-sized company, each with the weak version most companies start from. The numbers are illustrative.

A company should pick three to five of these, not all six. The ones left out matter as much as the ones kept: writing down that "Grow without adding overhead" is not a priority this year tells every manager that a hire in service of enterprise growth is acceptable.

Two more things to notice. Every stronger version can be answered with a yes or no at year end. And every one has a single person next to it, not a department.

From strategic priorities to owned numbers

A priority with a company KPI is a big improvement on a theme. It still isn't enough to make the five-manager test come back clean, because most managers don't own the company KPI. They need a number of their own that ties to it.

Four questions get you from one to the other, in this order:

1. Where are we now? The current value of each company KPI, so targets start from a real baseline.
2. Where are we going? The three to five priorities, written as outcomes.
3. What could affect us? The risks and constraints that could knock each priority off course.
4. What must we deliver? For each priority, the KPIs for every department that contributes to it, each with one owner.

Take "Win in the enterprise segment." The company KPI is enterprise recurring revenue. Sales might own enterprise pipeline created. Marketing might own meetings booked with the 40 named target accounts. Customer success might own enterprise onboarding completed within 30 days. Product might own the two features enterprise buyers ask for most, shipped by mid-year.

Now ask the sales manager, the marketing manager and the customer success manager what the top priorities are. Each of them has a number that is part of one of them. They will remember it, because it is the number they are asked about.

The full method, from the strategy you already have to KPIs for every department, is in how to create KPIs. If you are setting priorities for next year now, the annual planning guide covers where this fits in the weeks before your financial year starts.

Run the test again in a month

Once the priorities are written as outcomes, each has a company KPI, and each department has its own numbers, ask the same five managers the same question again. Use different managers if you can.

The goal is not five identical sentences. It is five answers that name the same three outcomes, and five managers who can tell you which of their own numbers serves which one. When that happens, the strategy has traveled.

Frequently asked questions

What are strategic priorities?

Strategic priorities are the three to five outcomes a company has decided matter most in a given period, usually a year. Each should be specific enough to measure and to disagree with, and each should have a single owner. They sit between the long-term strategy and the day-to-day work.

How many strategic priorities should a company have?

Three to five. Fewer than three tends to hide several priorities under one heading, and more than five means the list no longer forces trade-offs. If managers can't remember them, there are probably too many.

What is the difference between strategic priorities and strategic goals?

The terms are often used interchangeably. Where they differ, a priority names what matters most ("win in the enterprise segment") and a goal is the measurable target that proves it ("enterprise recurring revenue to 2.5M"). A useful priority comes with at least one goal attached.

How do you communicate strategic priorities so they stick?

Keep them few, write them as outcomes, give each a number, and give every department a KPI that ties to one of them. Then ask about those numbers in every review. Priorities that are measured and asked about get remembered; priorities announced once do not.

What if my leadership team gives different answers?

Fix that first. Run the same test with the leadership team, compare the answers in the room, and agree one list before pushing anything further down. Managers can't converge on priorities their own leaders disagree about.