Transfer vision effectively: the real test happens two levels below you

I can usually tell within a fortnight of an offsite whether the vision will survive. It is not the quality of the slides or the energy in the room. It is what happens when I ask a divisional head, the following week, where the company is going and what that means for her team on Thursday. If she reaches for the deck, or gives me the CEO’s words in the CEO’s voice, the picture has been heard. It has not transferred.

Most leaders I work with believe their vision is clear because they are clear. They wrote it. They have said it forty times. The people closest to them nod along. The evidence says that confidence is misplaced at exactly the level that matters most: one rung below the top team, where enterprise priorities are meant to become unit priorities and very often do not.

So here is the claim, and it is narrower than it sounds. A vision has transferred when people two levels below you can state it, explain why it matters to their own unit, and use it to settle a trade-off you never see. That transfer runs through your direct reports. The stage is the least important channel you have.

This is the first of the three focus areas in From vision to execution. The chapter covers the arc from picture to scoreboard; this part covers the mechanics of transfer and a test you can run without commissioning anything.

Where the picture breaks

Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder asked managers in 124 organisations to list their company’s strategic priorities. Only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of them. The more useful finding is where the loss happens. Agreement within the top team averaged 51%. Among the senior executives who report to that team, it fell to 22%. After that, the decline was gradual.

The cliff is not on the shop floor, where leaders tend to look for it. It sits directly beneath the people you meet every Monday. Your top team lives in two worlds: the enterprise table and their own function. Their direct reports mostly live in one. If nobody translates the enterprise picture into the language of the function, the function’s own priorities win by default — not out of disloyalty, but because they are the only priorities anyone has made concrete.

The same study found that top executives rated their company’s alignment higher than managers further down did, on every measure. That is the trap. The people best placed to fix transfer are the people least likely to believe it needs fixing.

It shows up in broader workforce data too. Gallup found that only 41% of employees strongly agree that they know what their company stands for and what makes it different from competitors. When Michael Mankins and Richard Steele studied the gap between plans and outcomes, they found companies on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise. Lost transfer is not the only cause of that gap. In my experience it is the cheapest one to close.

The transfer ladder

I think of transfer as four rungs, each harder than the last.

Heard. They were in the room, or on the email. This is where most vision work stops, and it is where most leaders assume it has finished.

Repeated. They can say the sentence back to you. Better, but still fragile. A sentence people can only recite is a password, not a filter.

Explained. They can tell you, in their own words, why it matters for their unit — what it asks of finance, of the Madrid office, of the night shift. This is the rung where the MIT cliff lives.

Used. They cite it to kill, fund or reshape work, in a meeting you did not attend. This is the only rung that changes results.

Rung	What you hear when you ask	What it tells you	The next practical step
Heard	A reference to the March session	The broadcast happened; nothing else is known	Stop counting attendance as progress
Repeated	Your sentence, in your voice	Memory, not ownership	Ask what it means for their team
Explained	The sentence, then a unit-specific “so for us…”	Translation has started	Ask for one decision it changed
Used	A client dropped because it pulled them off the plan	The vision is now a filter	Tell that story in the next forum

The single most useful finding in the MIT work is about the move from Repeated to Explained. Across the 69 items in their execution survey, the best predictor of alignment was how consistently managers explained their team’s priorities in terms of both their unit and the company as a whole. Not town halls. Not posters. A boss, at every level, explaining why this matters for the team and why it matters for the company.

That is a practical behaviour, and it is learnable. It is also the behaviour most top-team members skip, because they assume their direct reports already know.

Build the sentence for translation, not applause

Kotter’s rule of thumb, in his 1995 study of change efforts, was that if you cannot explain the vision to someone in five minutes and get a reaction that shows both understanding and interest, you are not finished with that phase. Five minutes is generous. I push for one sentence, because a sentence travels and a paragraph gets summarised by whoever is in the room.

A sentence built for transfer does three things. It names who you serve. It names what will be true that is not true today. And, if you can bear it, it names what you will stop being. Applause sentences fail the third test. They are designed so nobody in the room loses anything, which means nobody two levels down can use them to decide anything.

Then comes the step most companies miss. Each member of the top team writes the translation for their own unit: two lines, in their own words, beginning For us, that means…. Not a cascade deck. Two lines. I ask to see them side by side, because the gaps and contradictions show up immediately. Finance’s translation quietly protects the old cost model. Sales’ translation describes the customers the vision says you will stop chasing. Better to find that on a page than in a quarter.

If your vision is compelling and credible, your team will contribute with ideas to advance it.

I still use that line because it describes the top rung. Compelling means people want to help build it. Credible means they have evidence you will resource it and protect it when it costs you. That is the clearest signal I know that transfer has happened: the vision starts generating work you did not assign.

Make it cost something

Kotter described three communication patterns that kill a vision. A single launch meeting, which he estimated uses about .0001% of the year’s internal communication. A run of speeches by the chief executive, still only about .0005%. And the most corrosive: plenty of newsletters and speeches while very visible senior executives behave in ways that contradict the vision. In that third pattern, he wrote, cynicism goes up and belief in the communication goes down.

The fix is not volume. It is attaching the sentence to decisions people can see. Kotter noticed that executives who communicate well fold the vision into routine conversations — a business problem, a performance review, a quarterly look at a division’s numbers — and talk about how the issue fits, or does not fit, the bigger picture. When you approve or kill something, say the sentence out loud and name the trade-off. When you hire, ask the candidate what the sentence would mean in the role. When a pet project contradicts it, end the pet project in public, or rewrite the sentence. Doing neither teaches the company that the vision is weather.

Elite sport makes this concrete. A race plan in cycling is not a speech on the team bus. Each rider leaves the briefing knowing their own job: who protects whom, when to pull, when to sit up. A team where everyone knew only the destination would ride beautifully into the wrong finish. I write about that translation from the bike to the business on the elite-sport page, and it is the same discipline here: the destination is shared, the job is local.

Arguments

The case for

The data point the same way from several directions. Shared understanding collapses between the top team and the next level down, and leaders consistently overrate how aligned they are. The behaviour that best predicts alignment is managers explaining why priorities matter for their unit and the company, which is exactly the translation work I am describing. Kotter saw the same failure from the other end almost thirty years ago: visions announced once and then contradicted. A company that cannot state its priorities two levels down will staff, fund and hire against something else, and that leakage is real money.

A transferred vision also lets you leave the room: decisions get made well without you, because people have a filter.

The case against

The strongest objection is that people do not need the company’s vision; they need clarity about their own job. A night-shift supervisor will do excellent work with a clear target and a good manager, whether or not they can recite your sentence. That is partly true, which is why the Explained and Used rungs matter more than Repeated.

A second objection is that a fixed sentence calcifies. Markets move, and a vision repeated until everyone can finish it can stop people noticing that it has gone stale. Repetition without review becomes ritual.

A third is about scale. In a twenty-person company, proximity carries the picture; everyone hears the founder think out loud every day, and building a transfer system would be overhead. And a fourth is cultural: heavy vision work can tip into compliance theatre, where people perform agreement because it is safer than questioning a sentence the boss loves. In those cases the opposite of my thesis holds: less vision talk, and more honest argument, would serve the company better.

Where I stand

I hold the thesis, with conditions. If you have fewer than about fifty people and you are in the room daily, keep the sentence light and spend the energy elsewhere. If the market has shifted, rewrite the sentence before you push it harder; transferring a wrong picture efficiently is worse than not transferring it at all. And if people cannot challenge the sentence safely, fix that first, because a vision nobody can argue with is a vision nobody owns. When the sentence signals a real change of direction, transfer becomes part of a change roadmap, with head, heart and habit all needing work.

Beyond that size, and in a stable enough market, transfer is the work. In my seven-step coaching process it sits across two steps. Step 1, Vision, is where we sharpen the destination and agree what success looks like. Step 4, Influence, is where we work on how the picture cascades through other people instead of evaporating — storytelling, the unit translations, and early visible decisions that prove the sentence is real.

Try this: the two-levels-down audit

Run this over the next four weeks. It costs a few hours and no budget.

1. Write it cold. Ask each top-team member to write, from memory and without conferring, the vision sentence and the company’s top three priorities. Compare the answers in the next meeting. Settle differences before going further.
2. Write the translation. Each executive writes two lines beginning For us, that means… for their unit. Put them side by side and look for contradictions.
3. Sample two levels down. Pick six people who report to your direct reports. Ask each, one to one, the three questions: where are we going, why does it matter for your team, and what did you decide differently last month because of it.
4. Score the ladder. For each person, note the highest rung they reached: heard, repeated, explained or used. Do not average it. Look at where the drop happens.
5. Fix the channel, not the poster. Where the drop sits under a particular executive, the work is with that executive’s weekly habit of explaining why, not with another all-hands.
6. Repeat in a quarter. Same questions, different six people. You are looking for more examples at the Used rung.

Then sit with these questions:

• If my top team wrote the priorities from memory tomorrow, how many of them would match mine?
• Which executive’s unit would score lowest on the ladder, and what does that executive do differently each week?
• What decision did I make in the last month that contradicted the sentence, and who saw it?
• What does our sentence rule out — and has anyone two levels down ever used it to rule something out?
• Where am I still the only person who can explain why a priority matters?

Where to go next

Transfer is only one part of the job. The next article in this chapter, the leadership landscape, looks at the four pillars I use to hold the whole role — Choices, Create, Convince and Cause — and transfer lives mostly in the third. Once the picture has moved, goal setting successfully is how you turn it into a short scoreboard with owners. If the ladder audit shows your own read of the room is off, self and team awareness is the place to start, and my earlier field note on why transferring vision is the CEO’s job one gives a shorter playbook.

When the cliff sits inside your own executive team, that is usually team work rather than one-to-one work, which is what executive team coaching is for. If you want to look at your own ladder results with someone who has run companies through this, book a 30-minute strategy call.