31 Jul You Can See the Mountain. That Was Never the Hard Part.
A leader who is clear on where the organisation has to go is not, by that fact alone, a leader who is leading.
Clarity in your own head is a private asset. It becomes a leadership asset only once someone else can repeat it back to you, in their own words, and act on it when you are not in the room.
That distinction — between knowing and transmitting — is where most vision work fails.
“Clarity of vision was never what you know. It is what others can act on without you.”
It is not about having a vision as a leader.
Has the vision actually left the leader’s head and taken up residence in someone else’s?
Twenty years of this data across 13 industries shows the same pattern on repeat: leaders consistently rate their own clarity higher than their teams experience it. Not because the leader is lying to themselves. Because clarity that lives only in one person’s certainty is invisible to everyone standing outside it.
When the Vision Doesn’t Sell — and What It Costs
Two recent, very public examples hit home for me, because they show this failure at the highest possible altitude, where the cost is measured in market value and tenure, not just morale.
Starbucks brought in Laxman Narasimhan in 2023 with a clear strategic direction for the company’s next chapter. Seventeen months later, he was gone. The company’s founder publicly questioned the strategy. Activist investors moved in. Baristas picketed. If clarity existed at the top, it never became shared conviction further down — and when sales slid for two consecutive quarters, there was no reservoir of belief left to draw on. The board replaced him within days of losing confidence.
Intel’s Pat Gelsinger tells a similar story from a different angle. He returned to the company with a genuinely ambitious turnaround plan and pursued it with visible conviction for nearly four years. But conviction within the leader is not the same as confidence in the room. By late 2024, the board had lost faith that the plan’s pace matched the crisis Intel was in, and he was given a choice: retire, or be removed. He chose the former. The vision may have been right. It was not, in the end, sold.
Neither of these leaders lacked clarity. What both cases suggest, from the outside, is a gap between what the leader could see and what the people around them — boards, founders, employees — had actually been brought to see, and to believe. That gap is rarely closed by better slides or a sharper strategy document. It is closed, or not, in the quality of the relationship between the leader and the people whose buy-in the vision depends on.
The Loneliness of Being the Clear One
I am working with a leader at the moment who is, by any honest measure, clear. He knows where the organisation needs to go. He can articulate it cleanly, under pressure, without notes. And he is in real pain — because his fellow leaders are not there with him, and he cannot seem to close the gap no matter how many times he restates the case.
This is not a communication failure in the usual sense. He is not unclear. He may, in fact, be too far ahead — clear in a way that has outpaced the shared sensemaking his peers still need to do. Vision sold too early, before others have been part of building it, tends to be experienced as an instruction rather than an invitation.
The pain he is feeling is real, and it is also information: clarity that cannot yet be shared is not failed leadership. It is leadership that has skipped a step.
“The leaders who suffer most from their own clarity are often the ones who forgot to bring anyone with them while they found it.”
The work, in that kind of situation, is rarely to restate the vision more forcefully. It is to go back and build the shared understanding that clarity was meant to rest on — slower than feels necessary, and with people, not at them.
If you suspect there is distance between what you see and what your organisation has actually been brought to see, that distance is measurable — and closeable.
I would like to connect, if this is where you find yourself.