Ensure your Strategic Priorities Translate into Measurable Results
Ask your leadership team how it’s performing. Then ask everyone else.
The distance between those two answers is where the most important leadership work happens.
This comes up with some frequency in the 360-degree feedback work I do with law firm leadership teams. Stakeholders describe uneven communication. Decisions circle back without resolution. Priorities shift, and nobody quite explains why. The conversations that matter seem to find their way to the hallway instead of the room where decisions are supposed to happen.
The research backs this up. McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, which draws on data from over 8 million survey responses across 2,600 organizations, consistently finds that the best predictor of long-term performance is how well organizations align around a common vision, execute their strategy, and renew themselves.[1] Which sounds straightforward until you try to do it with twelve leaders who each have a slightly different version of how to implement the decision they made together. One of the most valuable ways to measure that gap is 360-degree feedback for leadership teams. Done well, it shows leaders how they are actually experienced by the people around them.
Wageman, Nunes, Burruss and Hackman studied 120 senior leadership teams and found that most weren’t functioning as teams at all. Senior executives were focused more on their individual roles than on the team’s shared work.[2]Google’s Project Aristotle found the same thing. What separated high-performing teams wasn’t who was on them. It was how they worked together.[3]
Leadership teams tend to evaluate themselves on what happens in the room. Was the discussion good? Did we reach agreement? Those are necessary questions, but they are not the right ones to stop at.
What happens after the meeting is where it gets complicated. How strategies and plans are understood, communicated, and acted on matters more than most leaders realize. Are decisions understood the same way across practice groups? Are different leaders reinforcing the same priorities, or each doing their own interpretation? Is the alignment at the top actually felt by the people doing the work? In many cases the answers are inconsistent, and leadership has no real way of knowing because no one is giving them that feedback.
That’s exactly what 360-degree feedback is designed to surface. How the team is experienced in practice, across the firm and by the stakeholders who matter most. It identifies where leaders are aligned in how they communicate priorities, and where they are not. It makes visible the assumptions leaders are carrying about their own effectiveness that have never been tested against the experience of the people they lead. For most leaders, it’s the first time that gap becomes something they can actually see and do something about.
This matters more now than it ever has. The pace of change in the legal industry, from AI to structural shifts to evolving client expectations, means that misalignment at the top is no longer just an organizational inconvenience. It is a competitive liability. Leadership teams that can close the gap between what they decide and how it gets carried out across the firm will be far better positioned to grow, retain talent, and serve clients well.
[1]McKinsey & Company. Healthy Organizations Keep Winning, But the Rules Are Changing Fast. McKinsey Organizational Health Index, 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/healthy-organizations-keep-winning-but-the-rules-are-changing-fast
[2]Wageman, R., Nunes, D.A., Burruss, J.A., & Hackman, J.R. Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great. Harvard Business Review Press, 2008. https://store.hbr.org/product/senior-leadership-teams-what-it-takes-to-make-them-great/3366
[3]Google re:Work. Understand Team Effectiveness. https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness