An exercise I run in a first session, usually in the second hour, when the presenting problem has been described and neither of us quite believes it is the problem.
Open your calendar for the last eight weeks. Count the hours. Group them however you like: by function, by person, by what was actually being decided. Then put the strategy next to it.
In four years of doing this, the two documents have matched twice.
Stated strategy and revealed strategy
Every organisation has two. The stated strategy is on the slides. The revealed strategy is what the senior people actually spend their hours on, and it is the one the company runs on, because it is the one everybody can see.
Your team does not read the deck for signal. They read your diary. They know who gets an hour a week and who gets rescheduled twice. They know which meetings you arrive at prepared and which you take from a taxi. None of this is subtle and all of it is being interpreted, continuously, by people whose own priorities are set by what they conclude.
So when the stated strategy says the new market is the priority and your calendar says the legacy business consumed sixty percent of your hours, the company is working on the legacy business. Whatever anyone said in the offsite.
You do not set priorities by naming them. You set them by what you are willing to be interrupted for.
The three patterns
The mismatch is almost never laziness. It is usually one of three things, and they have different fixes.
The first is gravity. The old business generates the escalations, so it generates the meetings. It pulls your hours in without ever appearing on a decision log. This is the most common and it needs a structural answer, not a discipline answer: someone else has to own the escalations, with the authority to actually resolve them.
The second is comfort. The hours cluster where you are still good, which is usually where you were good five years ago. This one is worth examining honestly, because it is pleasant and it looks like work. If the part of the week you look forward to is the part your predecessor's job description would have covered, that is information.
The third is avoidance, and it is the one people notice last. The diary fills with everything except the conversation that would change something. There is always enough legitimate work available to make this look accidental.
What to do with the finding
Do not immediately redesign the week. That fails within a fortnight and produces nothing except a sense of having failed at something.
Pick one number and move it. If the new market is genuinely the priority and it currently gets four percent of your hours, take it to fifteen and defend that for a quarter. One number, one quarter, defended in public so that the organisation can see the reallocation happen.
Then run the count again in twelve weeks. Not because measurement is virtuous, but because the diary will have drifted back and you will want to know how far, and by which of the three routes.