HBR On Strategy · Harvard Business Review

A Middle Manager’s Guide to Executing Strategy

·47 min·8 clips

The episode starts with a familiar management problem. An executive team has announced a master plan for growing the business, and the mid-level manager has to turn it into day-to-day work. Amy Bernstein treats that as the real job, not a strategy exercise from far away. Managers are always deciding priorities, setting pace, and making sure people stay aligned on where they are headed. The conversation moves quickly to resistance. Andrea Belk Olson says pushback can come from past wins or past failures, fear of change, or worries about personal impact, including concerns about a job. From the outside, those reactions may look irrational. That does not make them easy to ignore. The point is to find the concern and answer it directly. A polite nod is not enough. A manager has to make concrete moves that show the concern was actually heard. The episode also draws a line between resistance and apathy. The hosts stress that a manager needs to understand where the objection is coming from before deciding what to do about it. Bernstein then asks a gendered question: do women feel extra pressure to sell strategy to their teams? Belk Olson answers from experience, including a stretch when she was the only woman on an all-male executive team. She says the expectation may come from old ideas about women being less assertive or more empathetic, and from the mistake of reading empathy as giving in to pushback. The deeper issue is trust. Teams want to know their manager will go to bat for them when the strategy gets uncomfortable. The episode originally aired on Women at Work in June 2024 as part of the How to Manage series, and it also features Gabriela Spatolisano and Jen Long from Harvard Business Publishing. The final point is plain: a manager does not need everyone to love the plan, but does need enough credibility to carry the team through it.

As heard by us

A grounded look at carrying strategy from the top down.

Amy Bernstein and Andrea Belk Olson keep the focus where it belongs: on the manager doing the work, not the executive playing strategy. The strongest part is the practical split they draw between real resistance, simple apathy, and fear of change.

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Why you'd press play

When you have to execute a plan you did not design.

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