Where Great ESOP Strategies Go to Die. (And Nobody Notices.)
Two weeks ago, we sat in a bright conference room of a manufacturing ESOP. The leadership team shared an impressive strategy document. Three pages. Good financial targets. Defined priorities. By the standards of what we typically see, 90-page PowerPoint decks full of “jargon monoxide”, this was a masterpiece.
The leadership team was rightfully proud.
So we did something they didn’t expect. We opened the company’s website and pulled up three recent job postings.
We’ve been on both sides of passionate conversations about “alignment” and “engagement” in ESOPs, as embedded coaches and as employee-owners ourselves. What we rarely hear is the most practical question of all: does your strategy actually live in the daily work of the people hired to execute it?
Job postings are where you find out.
In sixty seconds, here’s what we found. Three job descriptions. Between twelve and eighteen “key” responsibilities. Eight to ten required skills. Zero clearly defined outcomes.
A crisp, elegant strategy document and job descriptions that read as if they were written by a committee that had never seen it.
This is how shiny ESOP strategies die. This is one of the main reasons “alignment” and “engagement” seem so elusive.
It doesn’t happen in the boardroom. It happens in the gap between what leadership believes is alignment and what lands in the hands of the person hired to execute it. Most job descriptions are written by HR using templates that haven’t changed in a decade. These templates are designed to check legal boxes, not communicate strategic priorities.
A job description that passes the strategy test has three things:
Top three responsibilities with authority. Defining responsibility without authority is like asking someone to deliver results but requiring permission to buy paper clips. Without explicitly defined scope of authority, accountability is hollow.
Top three outcomes. Don’t confuse outcomes with obligations. “Come to work on time” is an obligation. “Deliver 500 parts per hour” is an outcome. In an ESOP where every employee is an owner, the difference isn’t semantic. It’s everything. We define an outcome as a result you are expected to deliver in exchange for your salary.
Top three skills and attributes, separately. You can train someone to read an engineering drawing. It’s a skill. You can’t train humility. It is a personal attribute. Know the difference. Generally, your culture fit is defined by personal attributes.
And if your job description is longer than one page, you don’t have enough focus. At All Hands we say: “To get on one page, get it to one page.”
As you read this, you might be thinking about legal and compliance requirements for job descriptions. We respect that. But those requirements can live in separate documents; they shouldn’t obscure the essence of the job. What people read first shapes their understanding of your company. It should reflect your strategy, not your legal disclaimer dressed up as a job description.
Our main point is simple: every job description is a chance to tighten the link between strategy and execution. It is also a test of whether your hiring managers truly understand and align with the strategy or are just nodding along.
Back to the conference room. When we projected the job postings for the leadership team, the room went quiet.
Not defensive quiet. Thoughtfully quiet.
Then, someone said: “We never thought about these connections. And honestly, we hear complaints about this all the time. Our people say they don’t have clarity, that they don’t have authority to do what they’re being held accountable for.”
That quiet is what we encounter in conference room after conference room. Not resistance. Just the honest recognition that the gap between a beautiful strategy document and the daily reality of the people executing it is wider than anyone realized.
And closing that gap starts somewhere nobody expected. The job description.
