Implementing Top-Level Decisions on the Ground

How to make decisions at the top actually understood (and executed) on the ground

Author

Regina Gerbeaux
June 29, 2025 • Reading Time: 13 minutes

Hi! Welcome to another issue of Force Multipliers, your weekly briefing from Regina Gerbeaux, where Silicon Valley's behind-the-scenes operators get battle-tested frameworks for their toughest challenges, from putting out chaotic fires to managing strong personalities.

Preface

You've been there: Leadership announces an exciting new direction. Big changes are coming. Everyone gets pumped during the all-hands. There might even be a buzz in the air.

And then ... nothing really happens.

The energy dissipates. Teams go back to their day-to-day work. The big initiative slowly fades into the background, as if it never happened to begin with.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. One of the most difficult challenges for any growing organization is translating high-level strategic decisions into ground-level execution that actually works and has waterfall effects.

The gap between decision and action is where most companies get stuck. And it costs you in wasted energy, diffused focus, frustrated teams, and ultimately, in missed opportunities to serve your customers better.

Let’s talk about how to prevent energy from fizzling out, by actually implementing top-level decisions effectively.

The Playbook on Implementing Top-Level Decisions

Step 1: Communicate clearly about the decision.

The foundation you can’t skip if you want effective implementation for top-level decisions is clear communication about the decision itself.

Without this, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Every significant decision needs to follow the IPS format (Issue and Proposed Solution.)

Once a decision is made, it should be visible to as many people as possible, addressing these key points:

  1. What was the issue? People need to understand the problem you're trying to solve.

  2. What solutions were discussed? Transparency about the options considered builds trust and helps teams understand why certain paths weren't taken.

  3. What was eventually decided and why? The decision itself, with a clear rationale that connects to your company's mission and values.

  4. What risks are we accepting? Being honest about potential downsides demonstrates thoughtfulness and prepares teams for possible challenges.

  5. How will we measure success? Clear metrics create accountability and provide a north star for teams executing the work.

  6. Who was part of the decision-making process? This establishes ownership and accountability at the leadership level.

Step 2: Present a united front.

For implementation to be successful, each person on your leadership team who was part of the decision needs to go back to their teams with a united front. Even if they initially disagreed but ultimately committed to the direction, the "commit" part means presenting a "one team" ethos as part of leadership.

Therefore, make sure that everyone involved in the decision understands what the narrative is, why the decision was made, and agrees to support it when sharing with their team.

This isn't about suppressing dissent. Rather, this is your opportunity to demonstrate trust in your collective decision-making process and as a leadership team.

When you show skepticism to your team about a leadership decision, you're communicating that:

  • The leadership team doesn't function well together.

  • The decision might not be worth fully investing in.

  • The company lacks a coherent direction.

In other words, you aren’t being an effective leader and manager by sowing distrust and skepticism amongst your ICs.

Step 3: Frame a narrative around why it’s meaningful.

For significant decisions that impact the entire company, your CEO needs to address it directly during an all-hands meeting. The Chief of Staff should prepare a concise, compelling presentation that connects this decision to the company's broader mission.

Ideally, every major decision can be explicitly tied to your company's larger mission. When people understand how their work contributes to something bigger, motivation follows naturally.

CEOs in particular should clearly articulate:

  • How this decision advances the company's mission.

  • What each team needs to contribute.

  • Who needs to collaborate with whom in the execution process.

👉️ By explicitly calling out cross-functional collaboration requirements, you signal that silos won't cut it. This isn't a nice-to-have; it's an expectation and requirement for a high-performing team.

Step 4: Enforce.

Communication sets the stage, but how do you ensure the decision translates to action?

Here are five things you need to do to get the action you want to see out of your team.

Be customer-obsessed 😍 

This should be obvious, but it's astonishing how often it gets overlooked in favor of bureaucratic enforcement.

Tie back any decisions that have been made and actions that have to be done to a tangible way the customer benefits. If your team truly cares about customers (and they should!), making this connection tangible dramatically increases the likelihood your team will follow through on executing.

Constantly demonstrate how the work being done directly impacts the people you're building for. Share customer feedback. Highlight success stories. Make the human impact of the work visible.

In fact, I recommend having a dedicated Slack channel for customer love. Also, create a section in your weekly All Hands Meeting where you highlight how the work your team is doing is translating to your customer’s happiness level.

When teams can visualize a real person benefiting from their efforts, shipping becomes purposeful rather than just another task to complete.

Use performance reviews ✅ 

If you want people to prioritize company-level objectives, you need to align your performance reviews accordingly. Quarterly assessments should explicitly evaluate how individuals contributed to moving these major initiatives forward.

Rather than viewing this as belittling punishment, I’d recommend reframing this as showing your team what really matters. Companies measure what matters. Therefore, if completing projects that tie back to high-level decisions matter, measure your team on this metric!

When team members know they'll be evaluated on their contributions to key strategic initiatives, those initiatives naturally become priorities.

Push for visibility 👀 

Use weekly memo templates that clearly track deliverables and ownership. Who owes what by when? Make this visible to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

If someone consistently misses deliverables, address it quickly and directly. The longer you let execution gaps linger, the more the entire initiative risks derailing.

Ultimately, the leader at the top is responsible for ensuring their team members make every effort to deliver. This is a great way to create that accountability.

Embody the behavior you want your ICs to adopt 👯 

If you want engineers to be customer-obsessed, the CTO needs to demonstrate customer obsession first.

If you want product managers to collaborate effectively with marketing, the CPO and CMO need to model that collaboration themselves.

You get the gist … right?

Don’t be a hypocrite leader - do the stuff you want your team to do. Don’t make excuses on why you’re too busy to do it, either.

To this day, the CEO of DoorDash still makes deliveries as a driver, and he expects every person on the team to do deliveries at some point, too. If he’s not too busy to do deliveries, you’re not too busy to show your team through action what matters.

Leadership behavior sets the tone for the entire organization. Your teams are watching what you do far more closely than listening to what you say.

Celebrate progress publicly 🥳 

Create a dedicated channel for celebrating when people effectively execute on projects that originated from leadership decisions. Public recognition reinforces that these initiatives matter and acknowledges the effort required to bring them to life.

I’ve already written extensively about this here, so for more info on effective recognition strategies, see my write-up on Carrots and Sticks in Issue #3 of Force Multipliers: Why you feel like the babysitter on the leadership team.

The Execution Gap: A Case Study of Katerra

A striking real-world example of the gap between strategic decisions and execution comes from Katerra, a once-promising construction startup backed by SoftBank's Vision Fund.

Katerra set out with an ambitious mission: to revolutionize building construction through vertical integration. Leadership made the strategic decision to control every aspect of the process - from architectural design and component manufacturing to on-site assembly - aiming to streamline construction of apartments and offices.

On paper, the strategy made sense. By controlling the entire value chain, Katerra could theoretically eliminate inefficiencies, reduce costs, and deliver projects faster. Investors were convinced, pouring nearly $3 billion into the company.

But this grand vision was never effectively implemented due to critical execution failures:

  1. Despite growing through numerous acquisitions, Katerra "didn't vertically integrate [those] acquisitions" into a cohesive whole. Operations remained fragmented and siloed.

  2. Cross-functional collaboration - which was absolutely essential to their vertically integrated model - never materialized effectively. Design, manufacturing, and construction divisions struggled to work together seamlessly.

  3. The company attempted to do too much simultaneously without mastering any single aspect of construction first. As one analysis noted, they "never managed to do very well at all the aspects of construction it hoped to master."

  4. Their custom software platform, meant to be the connective tissue between divisions, fell behind schedule, undermining the efficiency gains leadership had promised.

  5. Projects experienced chronic delays and cost overruns - the very problems their strategy was designed to solve.

What went wrong? Katerra's leadership pressed ahead with an aggressive plan but failed to build the organizational cohesion and communication channels needed to realize it. The top-down directive to "disrupt" construction wasn't matched by effective on-the-ground execution or clear interim milestones.

The outcome was catastrophic. By mid-2021, Katerra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, wiping out nearly $3 billion of investor money, making it one of the largest startup failures in recent memory.

In post-mortems, analysts noted that Katerra's leadership failed to translate their grand vision into coordinated action. Their strategy of end-to-end control was simply too complex to execute quickly. Internal coordination was weak, and the execution approach was "too much, too fast."

Had Katerra's leadership applied the framework we've discussed - clear decision communication, united leadership voices, explicit collaboration requirements, tangible customer outcomes, and regular accountability - they might have identified execution gaps earlier and adjusted course.

Instead, they provide a cautionary tale of what happens when strategic decisions aren't effectively implemented on the ground.

TLDR

If you're struggling with implementing top-level decisions effectively, begin with these steps:

  1. Audit your last major decision. How was it communicated? Did all leaders present a united front? Were success metrics defined?

  2. Implement the IPS framework for all significant decisions moving forward.

  3. Create explicit collaboration maps for current initiatives - who needs to work with whom?

  4. Schedule regular check-ins specifically focused on strategic initiative progress.

  5. Find ways to make the customer impact of these initiatives visceral for every team involved.

Remember: The gap between decision and action is where most great strategies die. Close that gap, and you'll unlock your organization's true potential.

What's been your experience with implementing top-level decisions? I'd love to hear what's worked (or hasn't worked) for your team. Reply to this email to share your thoughts.

Until next time,

Resources Mentioned 📌 

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About Regina Gerbeaux

Regina Gerbeaux was the first Chief of Staff to an executive coach who worked with Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Sam Altman (OpenAI / Y Combinator), and Alexandr Wang (Scale).

Shortly after her role as Chief of Staff, then COO, she opened her own coaching practice, Coaching Founder, and has worked with outrageously talented operators on teams like Delphi AI, dYdX, Astronomer, Fanatics Live, and many more companies backed by funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Her open-sourced write-ups on Operational Excellence and how to run a scaling company can be found here and her templates can be found here.

She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner Lucas and dog Leia, and can be found frequenting 6:00AM Orangetheory classes or hiking trails nearby.

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