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Leading Greats #146
On paper, the ambition makes sense. Most strategies do not fail at the idea level:
Ronnie Kinsey, MBA
January 06, 2026
Welcome to Leading Greats, my Tuesday weekly newsletter.
Here I offer actionable leadership, business, and personal development insights and tools from my decades of experience as a learner, leader, and high-performance coach.
It’s been a priceless accumulation. I am pleased to share this with you.
Strategies fail at the human level.
In concept, growth targets are rational. Timelines look achievable. The narrative is polished.
Then execution begins.
What shows up is not resistance. It‘s misalignment hiding in plain sight.
The strategy asks for behaviors that the culture does not reinforce.
The culture expects skills that the workforce was never built to deliver.
Middle leaders are left translating intent into reality without the authority, capability, or margin to do so well.
This is where momentum leaks.
Under strain, culture does not disappear. It compresses:
Teams revert to habits that feel safe.
Decision-making narrows.
Coordination weakens.
People default to what avoids friction, not what advances the work.
That pattern is often misread as a motivation problem.
It is not. It is a capability problem wrapped in a cultural one.
Many organizations carry a quiet assumption.
If the strategy is clear enough, people will stretch to meet it.
Stretching only works when the underlying skills exist, and the environment supports their use.
Otherwise, stretch becomes strain.
Strain becomes inconsistency.
Inconsistency weakens trust.
The most visible symptom shows up in the middle.
Senior leadership speaks in direction.
Front-line teams live in execution.
Middle leadership absorbs the friction between the two.
This layer is expected to drive outcomes while stabilizing morale, enforce standards while protecting relationships, and move faster without dropping quality.
When alignment is weak, the role becomes the bottleneck, not because of talent, but because of workload.
Capable middle leaders do not need more inspiration.
What is missing is coherence.
Strategies must account for actual operating capacity.
Cultures must reward sound judgment under constraint, not just output.
Skills development must stay tied to real work, not abstract competency models.
When those elements align, something subtle but decisive changes.
Decisions speed up without becoming reckless.
Teams stop reworking the same problems.
Energy returns because effort starts producing visible progress.
The shift is audible in everyday language:
Less justification.
More ownership.
Fewer meetings to clarify what should already be clear.
The cost of misalignment is easy to underestimate because it is not immediately apparent.
It shows up as calendar congestion, delayed handoffs, cautious communication, and capable people quietly disengaging from work that once challenged them.
Alignment is not a one-time initiative. It is an operating condition.
I know strategy, culture, and skills are aligned when priorities hold under stress, leaders at every level make compatible decisions without escalation, and progress does not require constant supervision to sustain.
That is not idealism.
That is what durable performance actually looks like.
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