The PowerPoint deck was a work of art.

Seriously. It was a masterpiece. Charts ascended beautifully from left to right. The synergy was palpable. The hockey-stick growth curve was so steep it was practically vertical. You and your leadership team spent a fortune at an off-site retreat with a fancy consulting firm to build it. You all nodded in unison, drank the expensive coffee, and agreed: this was the strategy that would change everything.

Then you brought it back to the office. And it died.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. It died in a thousand quiet, polite, soul-crushing meetings. It was nibbled to death by passive-aggressive emails. It was suffocated by the “Meeting After the Meeting,” you know the one—where everyone says what they actually think after smiling and nodding for an hour.

You’re convinced you have a strategy problem. An execution problem. A “people just don’t get the vision” problem.

I’m here to tell you, with the frankness of a friend who has seen this movie a hundred times, that you’re treating the wrong disease. Your company doesn’t have a strategy problem. It has a therapy problem.

The plan isn’t the issue. The issue is that your Head of Sales and Head of Marketing have been locked in a silent, bitter feud since 2018 over a perceived budget slight, and they will subconsciously sabotage any initiative that requires them to collaborate.

The issue is that your brilliant-but-abrasive CTO terrifies junior employees into silence, so no one tells him his pet project—the one the entire strategy hinges on—has a fatal flaw.

The issue is that your leadership team suffers from a terminal case of “weaponized politeness,” where everyone is so afraid of conflict that bad ideas are allowed to wander the hallways like zombies until they inevitably bite someone.

These are not business problems. These are human problems. They are issues of ego, fear, insecurity, and unresolved conflict. And no amount of strategic frameworks or Gantt charts will fix them. You can’t put a Band-Aid on a Freudian wound.

For years, I’ve sat in the rooms where the stakes are highest—political war rooms, startup boardrooms, brand crisis meetings. And I’ve learned that the success of any plan has less to do with its intellectual rigor and more to do with the psychological health of the team tasked with executing it.

So, what’s the prescription? Do you need to put your entire C-suite on a therapist’s couch? (Hilarious to imagine, but probably not practical.)

No. But you do need to start acting like a good therapist. You need to diagnose and treat the underlying human dynamics.

1. Name the Elephant in the Room. A therapist’s first job is to make the unspoken, spoken. Your job is the same. You have to be the one with the courage to say, “I’ve noticed some tension between Sales and Marketing. Let’s talk about it.” The silence is what’s killing you. Addressing the elephant, even awkwardly, is the first step to getting it out of the room.
2. Listen to What Isn’t Being Said. Pay attention to the body language, the hesitations, the topics everyone studiously avoids. That’s where the real data is. The most important feedback is the feedback you have to drag out of people. Create the psychological safety for them to give it to you.
3. Focus on Behaviors, Not Just Results. When a project fails, don’t just ask what went wrong. Ask how the team worked together. Who dominated the conversation? Who was silent? How were disagreements handled? The process is the problem. Fix the human process, and the business results will follow.

The most brilliant strategy in the world is a fragile, delicate thing. It cannot survive contact with a dysfunctional human system. As a leader, your most important job isn’t just being the chief strategist. It’s being the chief therapist. It’s creating a team that is healthy, honest, and resilient enough to bring that beautiful PowerPoint deck to life.