Most corporate transformations fail for a simple reason: the wrong people are drawing up the blueprints. Bringing midlevel leaders into the boardroom changes the game entirely.
A team of McKinsey consultants once sat down with a group of cynical plant managers to pitch a massive corporate transformation. The managers had heard it all before: higher EBITDA, optimized cash flow, better margins. To them, it just sounded like more work with zero local benefit.
The consultants completely flipped the script. Instead of presenting a rigid, top-down plan, they asked the managers a simple question: "What have you been waiting for years for leadership to fix?"
The floodgates opened. Years of neglected maintenance and operational bottlenecks came pouring out. While these issues seemed small individually, together they totaled a staggering $50 million drag on the company.
Leadership made an on-the-spot commitment: the very first savings generated by the transformation would be funneled directly back into the factories. Furthermore, managers were given total autonomy to approve repairs under $200,000 without corporate oversight. Almost overnight, the loudest skeptics became the strategy's fiercest advocates.
The Cost of the Disconnected C-Suite
Leadership strategist David Lancefield argues in the Harvard Business Review that the tier directly below the C-suite—business-unit presidents, regional CEOs, and functional heads—is the most consequential leadership layer in any organization.
Ironically, it is also the most neglected.
These leaders possess massive operational leverage and have more influence over whether a strategy succeeds than anyone in the boardroom. Yet, they are rarely given a seat at the table when plans are actually written.
The Research Void: Academic literature routinely ignores this critical tier. In a meta-analysis of 188 strategy execution studies, this leadership layer didn't appear as a subject of research even once.
The Strategic Blindspot: Across a study of 124 organizations, fewer than three in 10 leaders could actually articulate what their company was trying to achieve.
"Involvement in execution creates compliance; involvement in development creates ownership." — David Lancefield
Most midlevel leaders build their careers on execution—turning around struggling units and delivering results under pressure. However, because the C-suite rarely invests in building their "systems awareness," these leaders often lack the tools to spot trends in adjacent markets, stress-test scenarios, or see how decisions in their department impact the rest of the business.
CEOs often resist inviting this tier into strategy-making out of fear. They worry that more voices will mean more friction, complications, and direct challenges to their vision. But as Lancefield points out, those friction points are much better discovered in a boardroom than out in the market.
Broken Systems Sabotage New Strategies
According to the McKinsey State of Organizations 2026 report—which surveyed over 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries—a primary reason strategies fail is that organizations expect leaders to change their behavior without changing the systems that govern them.
When performance reviews, incentives, and governance structures lag behind a new strategy, managers continue to optimize for old priorities.
For example, a media company advised by Lancefield began demanding growth in digital audiences. However, the corporate office continued to track performance using traditional, legacy metrics. The C-suite had changed the destination, but forgot to update the dashboard.
The Four Levers of Behavioral Change
McKinsey’s research identifies four essential levers required to make a new strategy stick. Relying on just one or two is a costly shortcut—companies that deploy all four see an eightfold increase in successful outcomes:
| Lever | Action Required |
| 1. Purpose | Give people a convincing, authentic reason to change. |
| 2. Role Modeling | Ensure top leaders visibly practice what they preach. |
| 3. System Redesign | Align incentives, metrics, and tools with the new goals. |
| 4. Skill Building | Train people in the specific capabilities required to act differently. |
Driving Cross-Functional Ownership
To break down silos and get leaders of separate domains to make decisions together, Lancefield champions a simple solution: strategic rotation.
In the case of the aforementioned media company, divisional heads were given temporary ownership of enterprise-wide challenges outside their comfort zones. Broadcast executives tackled digital audience growth, while digital heads managed cross-format content.
Within months, the walls crumbled. Divisional heads were actively sharing audience data, fluidly moving talent between teams, and partnering on joint initiatives that none of them could have executed alone.
When leaders share accountability for outcomes outside their immediate domain, they develop the exact strategic instincts the organization needs to survive. Most CEOs conceptually understand this—they just need the courage to pull up a few more chairs to the table.