A team leaves a strategy briefing with a new priority and returns to a backlog that has not changed. Customers are still waiting for promised work, the support rota still needs covering, and a manager has asked for a report by Friday. The team may understand the direction while remaining uncertain about what it is expected to do next.
From a distance, continuing with existing work can look like ignoring the strategy. At the team level, it may reflect an unresolved choice between commitments. It can also reflect misunderstanding, disagreement, missing capability, or a decision to disregard a clear instruction. Those explanations need to be distinguished before a useful response is possible.
The starting point is a conversation about actual decisions. What did the team understand the strategy to mean? Which part of its work was expected to change? What happened when that change competed with another responsibility? The answers reveal where the direction has, or has not, reached everyday practice.
Ask What People Understood They Should Do
Strategic communication can explain the market and the ambition without establishing the implications for a particular team. People may understand why a company wants to grow recurring revenue but remain unsure which customer requests to accept or which capabilities to develop first.
Imagine a professional services business moving towards a repeatable managed service. Its delivery teams currently organise work around individual client projects. Leadership explains that a common offering should make service quality more consistent and reduce repeated setup work. The ambition is understandable, but the teams still need to know what counts as part of that offering.
Can a team adapt the service for a longstanding client? Which variations are supported? Is the common service ready to use, or are teams expected to help define it? Do existing projects continue under their current commitments? Different answers would lead to materially different work.
Managers can test understanding through examples. Ask the team how it would respond to a new client request and why. A discussion of a realistic case is more revealing than asking whether everyone is aligned. It can expose both a gap in the explanation and an unresolved decision that no amount of repeated communication will settle.
The aim is a shared basis for judgement. Teams do not need every task prescribed, but they need enough context to recognise which choices support the direction. Strategy becomes interpretation as people apply it, and that interpretation benefits from examples, accessible reasoning, and a route for clarification.
Reconcile the Commitments Already in Place
For the services team, client delivery remains real work after the announcement. Moving towards a common service may require documenting procedures, developing shared tools, and preparing support arrangements. Those activities take time from people whose current projects may already fill their working week.
The team’s manager should examine the combined demand. Which commitments are contractual? Which dates can be discussed? What maintenance and support work must continue? Which proposed improvements could wait? The answers should inform an explicit plan for creating capacity.
Simply describing the new work as the highest priority leaves the team to resolve the consequences. An employee may be reluctant to postpone a client deliverable when the same manager previously promised it would be completed. The organisation needs to decide what changes and support the people communicating that change.
Urgent work also needs a practical arrangement. A significant client issue may reasonably interrupt service development. Someone should then assess the effect on the plan and decide whether to adjust scope, timing, or staffing. Keeping both commitments unchanged can make the team appear unreliable when the underlying allocation has become infeasible.
Funding is part of this discussion, but a budget line does not provide usable capacity on its own. The business may need particular expertise, access to a system, or sustained participation from operational staff. If those conditions cannot be secured immediately, the plan should reflect the limitation rather than expect the team to compensate through additional effort indefinitely.
Examine the Signals Around the Work
Teams learn about priorities through everyday management. What does a manager ask about in a weekly meeting? Which achievements receive attention? What happens when someone spends time on shared capability instead of completing another billable task? These signals influence whether a new direction appears credible.
In the services business, staff might be asked to standardise delivery while continuing to be assessed against the same utilisation expectations. That creates a tension if preparation time is treated as unexplained absence from client work. The response should clarify how the new responsibility fits the role and how its contribution will be assessed.
This need not mean replacing every operational measure or tying everyone’s compensation to a company outcome. Client service, financial health, and professional responsibilities continue to matter. A useful performance discussion considers the person’s responsibilities and decisions in context, including the time legitimately committed to developing the common service.
Managers should also examine their own requests. A senior leader who repeatedly approves bespoke work while urging teams to standardise sends inconsistent instructions. The team may be following the most immediate authorised request rather than choosing to ignore the strategy. Resolve that conflict where the competing commitments are made.
A working agreement can make these expectations easier to apply. Atlassian’s working-agreements exercise provides a way for teams to discuss how they collaborate and make decisions. In this setting, an agreement could cover incoming requests, escalation, and when a proposed variation needs further approval. It still needs support from the managers who control the relevant commitments.
Understand Disagreement and Previous Experience
A team may question the strategy because it knows something important about the work. The proposed common service might exclude a client need that appears regularly, rely on unreliable data, or assume support coverage the business does not have. Those concerns should be examined as evidence.
Ask for specific examples and distinguish an observed limitation from a prediction. A claim that clients will never accept a standard service is broader than evidence that several current clients require an unsupported function. The latter can inform a trial, a change to scope, or a decision about which customers the offering should serve.
Leadership should respond to concerns with a decision or a clear plan for investigation. Silence leaves people unsure whether the issue has been accepted, rejected, or overlooked. Explaining why the business will proceed despite a concern is more useful than treating the concern itself as a lack of commitment.
Previous experience also matters. If staff have helped build several initiatives that were abandoned without explanation, they may be cautious about the next one. That caution does not prove the new direction is wrong, but another enthusiastic announcement is unlikely to settle the uncertainty. A bounded commitment with visible support gives people something more concrete to assess.
The organisation can explain what was learned from earlier work, which assumptions differ now, and what conditions would prompt another change. Credibility does not require a promise that the strategy will never change. It requires a reasonable account of how decisions will be made and what will happen to the work and people affected.
Provide a Realistic Route to Capability
Strategic change can ask people to do work they have not previously done. Delivering a repeatable managed service may require different approaches to monitoring, documentation, incident handling, and customer communication from those used in individual projects.
A general training course may help, but the business should identify the specific decisions and tasks staff need to perform. They may need supervised practice, access to experienced colleagues, working examples, or time to test a procedure before taking responsibility for it. The learning effort belongs in the delivery plan.
A limited trial can make these needs visible. The team might prepare the common service for a defined group of clients and follow the work through ordinary operations. That provides evidence about the procedures, tools, workload, and support required before the business makes a wider commitment.
The trial should not depend on exceptional effort that cannot be maintained. If the service works only because a senior specialist personally handles every unusual case, the business has identified a dependency to address. It has not yet demonstrated that the wider delivery model is ready.
Expectations should increase as capability develops and responsibilities become clearer. Teams need to understand what they are authorised to do, when to seek help, and how to report a problem. That allows managers to assess progress against conditions the team can reasonably work within.
Follow Through on Clear Expectations
Once the direction, commitments, support, and decision boundaries are sufficiently clear, teams remain responsible for carrying out the agreed work. Understanding constraints does not make every failure to act acceptable. It provides a better basis for distinguishing a genuine obstacle from an unfulfilled responsibility.
A manager should discuss a specific departure: what was expected, what happened, and what explanation the employee or team provides. The response may involve clarification, additional support, resolving another conflicting instruction, or addressing repeated disregard through the organisation’s management process. It should follow the evidence rather than a general judgement that the team is resistant.
Follow-through applies upwards too. If leadership agrees to provide specialist time or resolve a policy question, those commitments need to be checked. A team cannot be expected to act confidently on promises that repeatedly remain open.
The practical sign that strategy has reached a team is a change in ordinary decisions. People can explain why work has been selected, identify what has moved, raise an unfamiliar case, and obtain an answer from someone with authority. They can also show when evidence calls the plan into question. Those conditions make strategic participation a workable part of the job and give managers a sounder basis for expecting it.
