Would your whole team give the same answer?

Hi Nik,

Every week I share one thing I have observed in the field of commercial leadership. This week it is about communication, specifically whether your team actually understands the North Star, or just believes they do.

I have a question I ask most commercial leaders early on: if I stopped every person on your team today and asked them what their key priorities are this quarter, would I get a consistent answer? Nearly every time, there is a pause before the response comes, and the response itself tends to be a little vague. Not because the leader does not know their own goals, they almost always do, but because they are genuinely unsure whether that clarity has actually made it all the way down to the individuals doing the work.

If we do not know where we are going, it is difficult to know how to get there, and harder still to know when we have arrived. That sounds obvious written down. It is far less obvious inside a busy quarter, where it is easy to assume everyone already knows the goals, when quite often that is rarely the case.

This week in the field

What I notice most often is that leaders assume alignment because the strategy was communicated once, in a deck, in a kickoff, in a message pinned somewhere. But understanding a priority and being able to explain it in your own words, consistently, under a bit of pressure, are two very different things. In the conversations I have had recently, the leaders who get the clearest read on this are the ones who have actually tested it, asking a few people on their team, separately, what they believe the priority is, and comparing the answers.

Where I have seen this tested honestly, the answers rarely line up as well as the leader expects. One person will talk about a KPI, another about a specific account, another about something that was true last quarter but has quietly moved on. None of them are wrong exactly, they are just working from slightly different versions of the same North Star, which over a quarter adds up to a team pulling in directions that only look aligned from a distance.

Commercial teams have an advantage most functions do not, performance is fairly binary, you either hit the number or you did not. But that same clarity can be a little misleading, because there is a great deal more that goes into hitting the number than the number itself. Input metrics, management business objectives, OKRs, all of it plays a part in whether a leader and their team end up successful. The question worth sitting with is not just whether the goal is understood, it is whether the systems and the priorities that actually get you there are equally understood and in place.

What it means in practice

What tends to shift things is not repeating the strategy more often, it is checking understanding rather than assuming it. What I have seen work is leaders asking their team to explain the priority back in their own words, not repeat it, explain it, and treating any hesitation or vagueness in that answer as useful information rather than a mild irritation.

It is often as simple as asking the right question, and being genuinely willing to sit with whatever answer comes back. Nothing complicated is required here, just the discipline to check rather than assume, and to keep checking, because a commercial team only really performs efficiently when everyone is rowing toward the same specific thing, not a version of it, and using the same inputs and systems to get there.

The question to sit with this week

If I asked everyone on your team, individually, what their key priorities are this quarter, would I get a consistent answer, or would I get a room full of slightly different stories?

Curious where you'd score on this? Take the free CODE Leadership Scorecard, five minutes, free.