How to Stop Doing Work That Does Not Fit Your Strategy

If you don’t stop doing work that doesn’t fit your strategy, you pay for it every week: scattered effort, slow execution, and teams who stay busy without winning. In this article, Jef Menguin shares a practical way to review what people actually do—then connect it to what the organization says it wants to win in. Apply it once and share it with your leadership team so you cut the noise, protect focus, and move faster with fewer meetings.

Let me start with a conversation I’ve heard more than once.

A mayor sits in his office, frustrated.

“People in city hall don’t seem to know what to do,” he says. “They lack critical thinking. Department heads need to be told everything. And when I ask why they’re doing something, they say, ‘We’ve been doing this for the last fifteen years.’”

Then he remembers last year’s strategic planning.

They spent two days in a hotel. The department heads and a few key people joined. There was a workshop. There were group presentations. They produced a document called “Strategic Plan 2027.”

“How is it,” he asks, “that we presented a good ‘strategy’ in that session—and a few months later, it’s like it was never discussed?”

If you’ve ever felt that gap between the strategy you talked about and the work people actually do, this article is for you.

The Hidden Problem: Work Without Strategy

In many organizations—public and private—strategic planning is a yearly event.

People go offsite. They talk about vision, mission, and goals. They write pillars and priorities. They assign someone to put everything in a nice document. Then they go back to work.

But most employees were never in that room.

They only know that they must come in at eight, leave at five, and finish whatever is on their desk. In government, they know the mandate. They know the forms. They know the standard operating procedure. But if you ask, “What is our strategy to achieve this mandate in the next three to five years?”, many cannot answer.

It is not because they are weak. It is because no one really showed them.

Often, only a small group is involved in strategic planning. The output is written in language that sounds good in a hotel ballroom, but not in a frontline office. The “cascading” is one town hall, one slide deck, one memo. After that, people are left to guess.

So they do what they have always done.

They process papers. They file reports. They follow forms.

The work continues. But it is disconnected from any living strategy.

Work becomes transactional: “This is my job. I do it.” Strategy becomes ceremonial: “We talk about it once a year.”

That is where the hurt starts.

When Strategy Is Real, Work Must Change

In Strategy First, Plan Second, we said that strategy is not the document. Strategy decides the game.

In 5 Strategy Questions for Leaders Who Play to Win, we said strategy is a set of choices: how you define winning, where you will play, how you will stand out, what you will be very good at, and what systems will support you.

Choices set priorities. And when priorities change, the way you work must change too.

If you say your city will now focus on becoming the safest place for children to walk to school, that choice should affect what engineers prioritize, what police focus on, how barangays plan, how budgets move.

If you say your company will now win by being the easiest provider to deal with for a specific group of customers, that choice should affect how sales handles leads, how operations solves problems, how customer service responds.

If work does not change when “strategy” changes, then strategy was just a speech.

The people who feel this most are often the mayors, governors, CEOs, and heads of agencies. They see a gap between what was promised in the planning session and what happens on Monday morning.

The question is not, “Why are people so hard-headed?” The question is, “Have we really connected their work to the choices we made?”

Why Doing the Same Work No Longer Keeps You Safe

For a long time, people believed a simple rule:

“If you keep on doing the same things, you’ll get the same results.”

It sounded fair. It encouraged consistency and discipline.

Today, it is dangerous to believe that.

If you keep on doing the same things, it is very likely you will not get the same results.

Customers change what they value. Citizens change what they expect. Technology changes how things can be done. Competitors change what they offer.

If your work stays the same while the world shifts, you don’t stay in place. You fall behind.

This is why connecting work to strategy is not a luxury. It is survival.

If your strategy says you will win in a new way, but your people are still doing the same work in the same way “because that’s how we’ve always done it,” then you don’t have a strategy problem. You have a work problem.

And behind that work problem is a communication problem.

“We’ve Been Doing This for 15 Years”

Go back to the mayor in Bulacan.

When he asked some department heads why certain programs still existed, they answered, “We’ve been doing this for the last fifteen years.”

They were not trying to be difficult. In their minds, they were being faithful. They were protecting what they knew. They had never been clearly told which work still fits the new priorities and which work must change or end.

This happens in companies too.

An HR department keeps running a training program “because we’ve always done it.” A unit keeps producing a monthly report nobody reads “because top management might need it.” A committee keeps meeting “because this group has always existed.”

People are working. They are busy. They are sincere. But their work is no longer connected to how the organization says it wants to win.

No one has sat down with them to say, “Because our strategy has changed, some of our work must change too.”

So they keep walking the old road, while leaders are imagining a new destination.

From Transactional Work to Transformational Work

Let’s put this in simple terms.

Work without strategy is about tasks and compliance. You do it because it is there. You fill the form. You send the file. You meet the quota.

Work connected to strategy is about contribution. You do it because it pushes the organization toward a clear win. You can see the line between your effort and the impact on customers, citizens, or patients.

The first feels like “just a job.” The second feels like “part of something.”

Winning is not just about hitting numbers. Real winning is transformational. It changes how people live. It changes how communities grow. It even changes how employees see themselves.

But for people to work in a transformational way, someone has to help them see:

what we are really trying to achieve now,
what choices we have made, and
what that means for their daily work.

That includes the hard part: telling them which work no longer fits.

A Different Kind of Conversation With Your Team

So how do you begin, if most people were not part of the strategic planning?

You do not have to show them the whole document. You do not have to drown them in pillars and frameworks.

You can start with a simple conversation.

With your leadership team or department heads, you might say:

“Last year, we spent time deciding how we want to win. We said these are our priorities. If these are truly our priorities, some of the work we have always done must change. Let’s look at that together.”

Then you look at the real work.

You list the major activities people spend time on, not as a spreadsheet, but as a story. “We still do this program.” “We still require this report.” “We still follow this process.”

For each one, you ask in plain language:

“Does this help us win in the way we agreed?”
“If we stopped doing this, would it hurt what we are trying to achieve now—or would it mostly hurt our comfort and habit?”

You will discover three types of work:

Some work clearly fits your current strategy. You keep it and maybe strengthen it.

Some work could fit if you change how it is done. You redesign it.

Some work quietly belongs to the past. You can let it go.

This is not about blame. It is about being honest that strategies are choices, choices set priorities, and priorities must shape how people spend their day.

Helping People See Their Work in the Strategy

Once your leadership team is clearer, the next step is to help employees see themselves in the story.

Instead of telling them, “Here is the new strategy, here are the twenty targets,” start with the why:

“This is what we are trying to achieve now. This is how the world around us has changed. This is the game we chose to play.”

Then connect it to their work:

“This is why some of the things we’ve done for years will change or stop. This is not because they were bad. It’s because we are now focusing on a different way of winning. Here is how your work will help us get there.”

When people understand this, dropping an old report, changing a routine, or ending a long-running program feels less like loss and more like progress.

They still come in at eight and go home at five. But now they know why their eight-to-five matters.

Keeping the Link Alive

Stopping work that does not fit your strategy is not a one-time clean-up. It is part of how you keep your organization honest.

Every time you review your strategy or your game plan, you can ask:

“What are we doing today that made sense three or five years ago, but no longer fits the way we want to win now?”

Every time you approve a new initiative, you can ask:

“If we say yes to this, what old work will we stop or change?”

Those questions keep you from slipping back into “do everything” mode.

They also remind everyone that strategy is not just for people in a hotel once a year. Strategy is a living set of choices that should shape what people do on an ordinary Tuesday.

When You’re Ready to Go Deeper

You can start with one honest conversation with your team and one small decision to stop work that no longer fits.

But if you want to build a culture where people don’t just work—they work in a way that clearly supports how you plan to win—you need the whole path:

Strategy First, Plan Second to separate deciding the game from filling the document.
5 Strategy Questions for Leaders Who Play to Win to make a few clear choices.
Turning Strategy Into a Game Plan Your Managers Understand to turn those choices into plays they can act on.
And this article, to remind you that when strategy changes, work must change too.

Because in the end, the real test is simple:

Do people in your organization know how their daily work connects to how you plan to win—or are they just doing what they’ve always done and hoping it’s still enough?

Meta description: Most strategies end as files in a folder while managers go back to the same OKRs and KPIs—even as customers and competitors change. Learn how to turn your strategy into a clear game plan your managers can understand and own, with a few focused plays that help you keep winning in a changing Philippines.