The Reasonable Objection
Ask most boards whether they need a Strategy Director and the answer is no. Their reasoning holds together. Strategy belongs to the CEO to set. Divisional directors are closest to their part of the business and should be left to run it without central interference. Most people who have spent time inside larger organisations have encountered, or at least heard of, the strategy department that turned into an isolated function, producing elegant frameworks with no contact with how the business operated.
That picture is accurate. A Strategy Director whose job is to generate ideas, define the direction, and hand it down to be implemented would be a mistake. It would be an expensive one that would confirm every suspicion the board held at the outset.
The argument therefore stands or falls on the model behind it, and the model needs testing before the role is dismissed along with it. What a Strategy Director actually does is narrower and more specific.
The Ownership Confusion
The confusion starts here: the Strategy Director doesn't own the strategy. The CEO owns the strategy. The Strategy Director owns the strategic process. These are different things, and conflating them is what makes the role appear either redundant or threatening, depending on which version of it a board has encountered.
What the CEO owns is direction and final accountability. In practice that means setting a path and checking, periodically, that it is still being followed. The sustained discipline that keeps strategy in contact with reality isn't something any CEO can maintain alongside everything else the job demands.
Functional directors own their domains: sales, finance, operations, marketing. Their involvement in strategic decision-making isn't optional. They hold the information about what is actually happening inside the business, and a strategy formed without them is a strategy disconnected from its delivery. This is where the traditional strategy department model fails: it extracts strategic thinking from the people who most need to participate in it.
What nobody owns, in most organisations, is the connective work between all of it. This includes whether the initiatives still add up to the stated direction, whether two departments are pulling in opposite directions without either realising it, whether an objective agreed in January still makes sense in June given what has happened in the intervening months, and whether anyone has noticed that reality and the plan have parted company.
"Strategy is everyone's job" works well enough as a statement of values. As an allocation of accountability, it is catastrophic. Responsibility distributed across everyone is responsibility owned by no one. The function exists in every organisation. The question is whether anyone is doing it.
The Strategy Director directs the strategy. They own the process by which it stays true1.
How Engagement Erodes
A strategy underperforms when the leadership team stops being engaged with it, and the cause is usually structural: nothing exists that compels the engagement.
Objectives and initiatives are set in good faith at the start of the year, then left to sit alongside one another without being checked against each other. Nobody monitors them with any rigour. The leadership team, each occupied with their domain, doesn't drift away from the strategy by choice. The mechanism that would have kept them engaged was never built.
A strategic process converts strategy from an annual event into a regular discipline. Reviews happen at a set cadence, often combined with operational reviews where the two overlap. The consequence is that the question of whether the business is still doing what it said it would do gets asked before divergence becomes a crisis, not after.
Which strategic process a business follows matters far less than whether it has one at all. SMEs aren't choosing badly between frameworks. They have no framework at all, and no person whose job it is to run one. What accumulates in that absence is what a previous Mantage article calls Strategy Debt4: the compounding cost of a direction left untended, producing the residue of short-term decisions made without a working filter. The article is worth reading in full; the concept isn't re-explained here.
A process with nobody driving it is no better than no process at all.
The Role in Practice
The work is stewardship of the strategic conversation over time, which is a different thing from strategic thinking and from execution management. In practice, this breaks down into five recurring tasks.
Running the rhythm: reviews that actually happen, at a cadence the business can sustain. The annual planning session that produces a document and then goes unreviewed for eleven months gives way to an operating discipline, with strategy sitting alongside delivery.
Mapping dependencies: knowing which initiatives rely on which others, and where a delay in one affects another, requires someone who holds the whole portfolio in view. Individual leads know their own projects. Without an explicit function, nobody holds the map of how everything relates to everything else.
Convening trade-off conversations: the conversations that get avoided are almost always the ones that require someone to lose something. A peer with a stake in the outcome can't weigh decisions neutrally. Someone outside the competition between functions, and senior enough to be heard, can.
Surfacing divergence: naming the point at which the plan and reality have parted company, before it becomes a quarterly surprise, requires someone whose attention is on the gap. This is an early-warning function, and it only works if someone is watching for it.
Holding the conversation when momentum stalls: asking the questions nobody else is positioned to ask. This is where the seniority requirement becomes non-negotiable.
The role sits at the intersection of strategic and operational contexts, translating between them without being claimed by either. This is the generalist capability described in The Case for Generalists5: holding the connective tissue across domains, where a specialist goes deep into one. The Mind the Gap series2, 3 describes what that translation requires in practice. The function this role provides is what those pieces identify as the missing element in most organisations that struggle to turn strategy into delivery.
A purely strategic operator produces the ivory tower the original objection rightly fears. A purely operational one runs the meetings without ever challenging the direction. The role needs someone who can engage credibly at board level and is equally willing to get into the detail.
Strategy Delivery as Portfolio Management
Strategy delivery behaves like a portfolio: multiple initiatives running at once, priorities shifting as conditions change, dependencies between them, and the whole requiring active management rather than one-off planning.
This distinguishes the role from strategic consulting, which supplies analysis and then departs, and from project delivery, which executes a defined scope. The Strategy Director sits between the two: the consultant leaves once the thinking is done; the project manager stays within the boundary of their work. The Strategy Director holds the picture that spans both.
The portfolio framing also explains why the work can't be done once a year. Portfolios managed only at inception and then left alone drift. An annual planning cycle that produces a document and is then set aside isn't portfolio management. It is filing.
Two initiatives can each be individually well run, on time and within budget, and collectively incoherent: drawing on the same resource pool in incompatible ways, heading toward objectives that can't both be true, or succeeding on their own terms while producing an outcome the business never intended. Without someone holding the portfolio view, these failures are invisible until they collide.
Two recent client engagements show what this looks like. One SME defined two initiatives in isolation, both drawing on the time of the same subject-matter expert. Neither team found out until the expert raised it in a performance review, by which point neither initiative would meet its goal. Another ran two initiatives aimed at the same goal, customer retention, from different directions: one to improve product reliability, the other to add features. Neither team discovered the conflict until both were ready to launch, when each turned out to undermine what the other had built.
Planning is an event; managing a portfolio is a habit.
Recognising the Gap
The function exists in every organisation, whether or not anyone has been appointed to do it. The diagnostic question is who is currently doing it in yours, and how well.
Start with these five questions.
When did your leadership team last review the strategy as a whole, rather than reviewing departmental performance against individual objectives?
Who noticed the last time reality diverged from your plan, and how long did it take them?
Could any two members of your leadership team independently name the top three strategic trade-offs facing the business right now?
Which of your current initiatives depend on which others, and who holds that map?
When two of your priorities conflict, who convenes the conversation that resolves it?
If the answer to several of these is the CEO, you have a bottleneck where a process should be.
Most leaders working through these questions find this work is being done partially, reactively, and by whoever happens to have capacity at the time.
Sizing the Role
In a smaller business, this is a part-time function. Treating it as a full-time appointment is the mechanism by which most SMEs talk themselves out of it.
The realistic range in an SME is somewhere between a day a month and a day or two a week1. At the lower end, this is more accurately described as strategy consultancy than a Strategy Director function, because the rhythm is too thin to sustain ownership. A day a month is enough to review and advise; it isn't enough to drive the process over time.
Scale follows from the number of live initiatives and the rate at which the environment is changing, which headcount tracks only loosely. A business with five interdependent strategic priorities operating in a shifting market needs more continuity than one running two stable programmes in a predictable sector.
Seniority matters more than hours. The role requires someone who can challenge the CEO and be heard. A capable but junior appointment will run the meetings and change nothing.
This only works where the CEO wants the challenge. Where the appointment is made to produce the appearance of governance rather than the substance of it, the role quickly becomes administrative.
The cost question is the wrong place to start. Better to ask whether the function is currently being done by nobody, or by the CEO in the margins of everything else they handle.
The Unavoidable Choice
Every organisation with a strategy has a strategic process, even if that process amounts to writing the strategy down in January and looking at it again in December. The only choice is whether it is designed or accidental, and whether anyone is accountable for running it.
The important distinction is between owning the strategic process and leaving it unowned, and it has little to do with whether anyone carries the title. The title describes a role. The stewardship is what matters.
Organisations that leave it unowned don't fail immediately: direction drifts; the gap between the strategy on paper and the work being done widens, without anyone deciding that it should. By the time the divergence becomes impossible to miss, the cost of addressing it is higher than maintaining the process would have been.
A board, certain at the outset that it doesn't need a Strategy Director, may well reach the same conclusion at the end, and that is defensible. The function remains either way: running the rhythm, mapping the dependencies, convening the trade-offs, surfacing the divergence. Either someone owns it or nobody does. If nobody does, that is a choice the organisation is making, whether it knows it or not.
References
- John Courtney, "Why You Need a Part-time Strategy Director", Boardroom Advisors.
- Mind the Gap: Why Strategy Gets Lost in Execution.
- Mind the Gap: How to Translate Strategy into Execution.
- Strategy Debt.
- The Case for Generalists.
Ady Coles works with leadership teams to help strategy survive contact with reality. His focus is on strategy management and agile strategy delivery - designing the translation between intent and execution so that direction remains coherent as organisations move, grow, and adapt. He works as a fractional and advisory partner where clarity, judgement, and sustained alignment matter more than plans on paper.