In a Leadership IQ employee survey to analyze strategic awareness, we asked more than 30,000 employees if they could articulate their organization’s strategic goals. Something that is obviously foundational to success because if people don’t know where they’re supposed to be going, how the heck are they supposed to get there?

The results were disturbing:

Disturbing Fact #1: Only 34% of employees said they could articulate the strategic goals of their organization.

Disturbing Fact #2:  When we showed the results to these organization’s CEOs, their reaction was, “Really, 34%?  That’s better than I would’ve thought.”  Seriously, how low is our bar when we react positively to learning that two thirds of our employees can’t articulate our strategic goals?

Disturbing Fact #3: When we asked the 34% of employees who said they COULD articulate the strategic goals to ACTUALLY articulate them (i.e. you said you could do it, so now let’s see you do it), 51% got it wrong.

All told, this leaves roughly 17% of employees who can clearly articulate their organization’s strategic goals.

And what’s the root cause of this?  It’s not employees who are incapable of understanding our sophisticated goals.  Rather it’s communication failure, and our leaders are at fault.  Not just for failing to get critical information to the right people, but for issuing goals that fall flat.  Even the best communication techniques aren’t going to work when what is being communicating isn’t exciting or inspiring to those who most need to hear and act on it.