How to Realign Their Focus

For many organisations, IT vendors are more than suppliers. They’re strategic partners who provide critical systems, services, and expertise. At least, that’s how it should be.

However most IT vendors aren’t built around your long-term success. They’re built around renewals. Retaining contracts, hitting sales targets, and maximising revenue often sit above helping you achieve your outcomes.

That misalignment leaves a gap, and it’s your responsibility as a leader to close it.

Why Vendors Default to Renewals

• Commercial incentives: Vendor account managers are often measured on renewal and upsell quotas, not on client success metrics. Bain research shows that despite increased investment in customer success, 75% of software firms saw declining net revenue retention, evidence that renewals often take priority over real value delivery.
• Short-term sales cycles: Their priority is to keep revenue flowing, which means focusing on contract dates instead of transformation outcomes.
• Resource constraints: Vendors allocate their best teams to winning new business. Existing clients are sometimes left with “maintenance mode” support.
• Asymmetry of information: Vendors understand your environment in detail, while many organisations lack the same depth of oversight, making it easier for vendors to control the narrative.

When renewals, not results, drive behaviour, you get check-the-box service, misaligned roadmaps, and technology that stagnates rather than scales.

The Risk of Vendor-Centric Thinking

If left unchecked, vendor behaviour can erode more than budgets.

• Stalled transformation: Projects are scoped for the renewal cycle, not long-term business goals.
• Escalating costs: You end up buying add-ons you don’t need while core challenges remain unresolved.
• Dependency without leverage: Vendors hold the knowledge, and you become reliant on them for direction.
• Frustrated teams: When solutions don’t deliver, internal stakeholders lose trust in both IT and leadership.

This isn’t partnership. It’s a transactional cycle where you pay more but achieve less.

How to Realign Vendor Focus

The good news: you don’t have to accept the renewal trap. With the right approach, you can redirect vendor energy toward your success.

1. Redefine Success Metrics
Build performance scorecards that measure outcomes aligned with your business objectives, not just uptime or response time. Tie these directly to contract reviews.

2. Link Renewals to Value Delivered
Shift renewal conversations from dates and pricing to impact. If a vendor wants a contract extension, they must demonstrate tangible business value achieved. West Monroe highlights that aligning renewals to commercial outcomes rather than sales quotas is essential for sustainable vendor relationships.

3. Demand Strategic Roadmaps
Push vendors to align their product evolution with your long-term vision. Insist on joint planning sessions where your goals shape their delivery priorities.

4. Create Governance Structures
Establish steering committees that include both internal leaders and vendor representatives. Make it clear that oversight goes beyond the sales team. The Customer Success Collective notes that nearly two-thirds of customer success teams are already tied to renewals, reinforcing why clear governance is critical.

5. Diversify Vendor Relationships
Avoid over-reliance. Bring competition into the mix so vendors understand that renewal is earned, not guaranteed.

6. Hold Them Accountable Publicly
Document commitments, publish results internally, and hold vendors to account in front of stakeholders. Transparency keeps everyone honest.

Shifting the Balance of Power

Vendors will always care about renewals. That’s their business model. But you can make renewals conditional on delivering value, not just surviving another cycle.

The organisations that thrive don’t accept vendor-defined success. They define it themselves and force their partners to align.

Closing Thought

Most IT vendors aren’t built to care about your success. But they will care if you make it the condition for their continued business.

Real partnerships emerge when value delivered is the price of renewal. Anything less is just a contract

It’s a trap many organisations fall into. A new software platform promises innovation, efficiency, and transformation. The vendor’s roadmap looks polished, ambitious, and exciting. Features are mapped out, updates are scheduled, and the glossy slide deck paints a vision of the future.

Your software vendor’s roadmap serves their future, not yours, and it is not your strategy..
Too many leaders conflate the two. They mistake a vendor’s product plan for a blueprint of their organisation’s future. Businesses then end up aligning themselves to someone else’s priorities rather than their own.

Why This Happens
Software is no longer a back-office utility. It’s the nervous system of modern business. Vendors know this, and they build roadmaps to keep customers invested in their platforms.

But these roadmaps are designed with one objective: the vendor’s success.

• They prioritise what helps the vendor capture market share.
• They showcase features that strengthen the vendor’s positioning.
• They lock customers into ecosystems that deepen dependency.

That doesn’t make vendors bad actors. It makes them smart businesses. But it does mean leaders must draw a hard line between a vendor’s commercial roadmap and their organisation’s strategic direction.

The Risk of Mistaking Roadmaps for Strategy
When businesses confuse roadmaps with strategy, three risks emerge:

1. Strategic Drift
   Your organisation begins following vendor priorities rather than its own. Instead of shaping technology to serve your vision, you reshape your vision to fit someone else’s technology.
2. Innovation Blindness
   A vendor roadmap highlights their next release, but what about emerging tools, disruptive startups, or cross-industry innovations they won’t show you? Anchoring strategy to one roadmap blinds you to wider opportunities.
3. Locked-In Dependency
   Over-reliance on a single vendor means your agility is compromised. If the roadmap changes, or slips, your business is left exposed.

A genuinely business-driven roadmap avoids these pitfalls. As Rimini Street highlights, successful IT roadmaps are defined by autonomy, strategic alignment, and independence from vendor lock-in, ensuring IT leaders remain in control of direction rather than outsourcing it to a supplier.

How to Take Back Control
The solution isn’t to ignore vendor roadmaps, it’s to reframe how you use them. Roadmaps are inputs, not instructions. They inform decisions, but they do not dictate them.

Here’s how leaders can ensure their business strategy remains firmly in their own hands:

1. Anchor Strategy in Business Outcomes
Define what success looks like for your organisation, growth, resilience, efficiency, customer experience, independent of any vendor. Only then evaluate how vendor offerings align to those outcomes.

2. Use Roadmaps as Indicators, Not Instructions
A roadmap is valuable for trend-spotting. It tells you what the vendor thinks the market wants. Use it as one data point among many, not as the foundation of your strategy.

Tempo makes the distinction clear: strategy must come first. Your roadmap should serve as a tactical expression of strategic goals, not a substitute for them. Confusing the two leads to misalignment and stagnation.

3. Diversify Your Technology Ecosystem
Don’t build your business future on a single product. Create a flexible architecture that allows you to adapt, integrate, and pivot if a vendor changes course.

4. Challenge and Influence the Roadmap
The best vendors will listen. Use your purchasing power and influence to push for features that serve your strategic objectives, not just theirs.

5. Keep Ownership of the Vision
Your IT and business leaders must stay in the driver’s seat. Vendors are partners, not pilots. The role of leadership is to ensure technology aligns with strategy, not the other way around.

The Role of Leadership
This is a leadership issue, not just a technology one. Too often, executives delegate roadmap alignment to IT teams, assuming it equates to strategy. It doesn’t.

Leaders must ask:

• Are we shaping technology around our business goals?
• Or are we bending our business goals to fit a vendor’s technology?

Your strategy should dictate the tools you use, not be dictated by them.

Closing Thoughts
A vendor’s roadmap is designed to serve their future. Your business strategy is designed to secure yours. When leaders fail to distinguish between the two, they risk building someone else’s vision instead of their own.

The best organisations treat vendor roadmaps as useful insights, but never as marching orders. They use them to inform, not define.

Because at the end of the day, your competitive advantage doesn’t come from following a software vendor’s plan.

It comes from executing your own.

Every leader wants team players. It’s one of the most celebrated phrases in recruitment and performance reviews. In healthy cultures, it represents collaboration, accountability, and shared success. But in toxic work environments, the phrase takes on a darker meaning.

Instead of unity, it becomes a weapon, a way to silence dissent, enforce compliance, and pressure employees into carrying the weight of dysfunction. As Forbes notes, toxic workplaces often disguise themselves as “collaborative,” but underneath, they become silent career killers.

When ‘Team Player’ Turns into Manipulation

In toxic cultures, the phrase isn’t about teamwork at all. It’s about control.

• Covering for dysfunction: Employees are pressured to hide incompetence or absorb others’ failures under the banner of being “supportive.”
• Silencing dissent: Speaking up about unfairness, risks, or unethical practices gets reframed as “not being a team player.”
• Exploiting goodwill: The most committed employees are manipulated into extra hours, impossible deadlines, or thankless tasks because “the team needs you.”
• Gaslighting accountability: Those who question the culture are painted as selfish or disruptive, while those who comply are praised as model employees.

This dynamic often overlaps with what experts call weaponized incompetence, when individuals deliberately underperform or deflect responsibility, forcing others to pick up the slack. It’s a hallmark of dysfunctional teams and a key tactic in toxic cultures.

Here, “team player” doesn’t mean collaboration. It means complicity.

The Hidden Costs of Compliance

This cultural distortion doesn’t just hurt individuals, it corrodes the entire organisation.

• Moral erosion: Employees learn to compromise integrity to fit in, normalising behaviour they once knew was wrong.
• Fear-driven silence: Toxic cultures thrive on silence. When people are shamed into compliance, problems multiply unchecked.
• Toxic success: The business may still hit short-term targets, but the long-term cost is disengagement, turnover, and reputational damage.
• Loss of innovation: Compliance replaces creativity. Teams stop challenging the status quo for fear of standing out.
• Talent drain: The best people, the ones who care about fairness and standards, are often the first to leave.

Research from ASE Online shows that toxic work cultures are a direct driver of burnout, disengagement, and attrition, all of which quietly erode productivity and morale.

A culture built on fear and complicity may deliver numbers, but it’s a hollow success that can’t last.

Breaking the Cycle

The antidote is not abandoning teamwork, but reclaiming it.

1. Redefine the language
   Organisations must stop weaponising “team player” and start rewarding behaviours that genuinely strengthen collaboration, like problem-solving, honesty, and accountability.
2. Encourage healthy dissent
   Being a true team player sometimes means saying what others won’t. Leaders should create safe spaces for questioning, even when it’s uncomfortable. Harvard Business Review emphasises that leaders who shield their teams from organisational dysfunction help protect collaboration from becoming complicit silence.
3. Draw the line between support and exploitation
   Supporting your colleagues shouldn’t mean masking dysfunction or shouldering endless extra work. Boundaries are part of real collaboration.
4. Hold leaders accountable
   HR and governance must step in when leadership manipulates language to enforce compliance. MIT Sloan research suggests toxic cultures can be corrected when leaders actively reset norms, redesign work, and rebuild trust.
5. Reward contribution, not conformity
   Recognise those who bring creativity, challenge poor practices, and protect team wellbeing. That’s what real teamwork looks like.

Closing Thought

Being a team player in a healthy culture builds trust, resilience, and shared success. But in toxic cultures, the phrase is twisted into a tool of control and compliance.

If you find yourself in such an environment, remember: real teamwork isn’t about blind loyalty, it’s about integrity, fairness, and accountability.

The real question isn’t whether you’re a team player. It’s whether the culture you’re in deserves your loyalty in the first place.

Rethinking the Technology Narrative

For years, the loudest voices in technology promised a future where automation would take over everything, from production lines to executive decision-making. The story was clear: machines would replace people.

But that narrative was flawed. Now we know that the future isn’t about replacement. It’s about reinforcement. It’s not automation versus humans, it’s automation with humans.

The real opportunity lies in augmentation, using technology to amplify human strengths rather than erase them. As Harvard Business Review notes, the organisations that thrive are those where humans and AI join forces to achieve outcomes neither could deliver alone. This is a strategic imperative for forward-thinking leaders.

The Real Risk: When Tech Disconnects from Talent

Many executives have chased automation in pursuit of efficiency, only to find diminishing returns. Why?

Because automation without integration creates friction. It alienates employees, widens skill gaps, and strips away the very qualities, judgement, creativity, adaptability, that make organisations resilient.

MIT Sloan research shows that while AI is powerful, human oversight and judgement are critical. When people are removed entirely, businesses don’t just lose capacity. They lose context. And brittle systems break when confronted with real-world complexity.

The pain point is clear: automation without augmentation risks progress without people.

A Smarter Way Forward: Augmentation Over Automation

The goal shouldn’t be to replace your workforce. It should be to amplify them.

• AI that provides smarter insights instead of dictating decisions.
• Automation that removes repetitive noise but leaves space for creative work.
• Platforms that deliver context, not just raw data.

Augmentation empowers people to achieve more, with better tools. It makes teams faster, sharper, and more resilient, not redundant.

As McKinsey points out, hybrid intelligence, humans and machines working together, consistently outperforms either alone. Innovation should never come at the expense of human value. It should be anchored in it.

Five Reasons to Prioritise Augmentation in Your Strategy

1. Retain and Elevate Talent
Top performers want meaningful work. Augmentation removes low-value tasks so they can focus on creative, strategic contributions.

2. Drive Adoption and Engagement
People embrace tools that support them. Augmentation sparks collaboration, not resistance.

3. Build Organisational Resilience
Augmented teams combine machine precision with human adaptability, a critical advantage in volatile markets.

4. Unlock Hybrid Intelligence
Human intuition plus machine analysis produces insights and decisions neither could achieve alone.

5. Future-Proof Your Business
Companies that augment instead of automate build cultures of learning, agility, and innovation. They scale intelligently and stay relevant in the long run. A Washington Post analysis of over 700 professions confirms that AI is reshaping work more through augmentation than full automation.

Leading with Augmentation

The organisations that will thrive tomorrow are the ones investing in people-powered progress today.

Automation alone delivers output.

Augmentation delivers impact.

Executives, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders now face a choice: optimise for today, or elevate for tomorrow. The leaders who define the next decade won’t be the most automated. They’ll be the most augmented.

In business and in life, it’s easy to get caught up in comparisons. We look at colleagues who seem to climb faster, friends who appear more successful, or leaders who always seem two steps ahead. The temptation is to measure our worth by where others stand.

But your greatest competitor isn’t sitting across the table, it’s the version of you from last month or last year.

Why Competing With Others is a Trap

When you make external competition your focus, you hand over control of your progress. You tie your success to someone else’s journey, goals, and circumstances, things you can’t control.

• A colleague may have had different opportunities.
• A peer might have strengths you don’t share.
• Someone else’s success might not even align with your definition of fulfilment.

Comparisons don’t just drain your energy, they cloud your vision. You stop asking the right question: Am I better today than I was yesterday?

The Power of Competing With Yourself

Growth comes from measuring against your own benchmarks. When you look inward, the focus shifts from envy to improvement.

• Progress becomes personal. It’s about your skills, mindset, and resilience.
• Success becomes sustainable. You’re not sprinting against others, you’re building long-term growth.
• Learning becomes the metric. Mistakes aren’t failures, they’re lessons that fuel your next step forward.

Ask yourself:

• Have I grown since last year?
• Did I learn something new last month?
• Am I making choices today that my future self will thank me for?

If the answer is yes, then you’re winning, regardless of how anyone else is doing.

Practical Ways to Focus on Self-Competition

1. Set Personal BenchmarksDefine clear, measurable goals that reflect your own growth journey, not someone else’s milestones.
2. Track Your ProgressKeep a journal or digital tracker to see how your skills, habits, or mindset evolve over time.
3. Celebrate Incremental WinsSmall steps forward, a new skill learned, a challenge overcome, a habit built, compound into meaningful growth.
4. Reflect RegularlyTake time each week or month to ask: What did I learn? How did I grow? Where can I push myself further?
5. Redefine SuccessStop using someone else’s scoreboard. Define what growth, fulfilment, and success look like for you.

The Leadership Perspective

For leaders, this mindset is especially powerful. When teams stop competing against each other and start striving to improve themselves, collaboration flourishes. Instead of hoarding knowledge or chasing credit, people push to elevate their own performance, and, in turn, elevate the whole organisation.

Remember

The only person you need to outperform is the one you were yesterday. Growth is a lifelong race, but the lane you run in belongs to you alone.

Measure your progress by looking back, and ensuring you’ve moved forward.

Strategy often gets lost in the noise. Endless frameworks. Endless slides. Endless talk.
The reality is strategy that doesn’t lead to clarity and action is just decoration. The best leaders know strategy isn’t a “document.” It’s a way of thinking, and a way of moving ideas into action.

Why Strategy Often Fails
Too many teams start with solutions before they’ve even defined the problem. They spend weeks polishing presentations that look impressive but change nothing. They confuse activity with progress.

The result is this: Teams feel busy but directionless. Leaders lose credibility. Opportunities slip through the cracks.

A Better Way to Approach Strategy
Think of strategy as a progression, from raw idea to bold action. Done right, it flows like this:

1. Define the Problem Clearly
   Everything starts with a sharp definition of what you’re trying to solve. Without this, all energy is wasted.
2. Break It Down
   Decompose the challenge into manageable parts. Complexity becomes clarity when broken into pieces.
3. Analyse Deeply
   Gather data, test assumptions, and explore angles. Insight lives where analysis meets curiosity.
4. Craft the Insight
   Look for patterns and meaning. Ask: So what? Why does this matter?
5. Build the Narrative
   Turn the insight into a story people believe in. Strategy without narrative doesn’t travel.
6. Make the Decision
   Clarity requires commitment. Choose the path. Show your reasoning. Stand behind it.
7. Take Bold Action
   Strategy dies without execution. Build the roadmap, mobilise the team, and move.

The Leadership Mindset Behind Great Strategy
Frameworks alone don’t create strategy. Mindset does. The leaders who succeed bring three things to the table:

Courage: They commit even without perfect information. Waiting for certainty kills momentum.

Discipline: They filter distractions and stick to what matters.

Humility: They adapt when the facts change, instead of clinging to ego.

Without this mindset, even the best model collapses under pressure.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Skip problem definition, and you’ll solve the wrong challenge brilliantly, but waste months. Ignore execution, and your team will build slide decks no one remembers, instead of products or outcomes that matter. Fail to decide, and you’ll burn energy analysing forever, only to watch opportunities pass you by.

Strategy isn’t a luxury. Done badly, it’s a liability.

What Leaders Need to Remember
Strategy isn’t theory. It’s not “nice slides.” It’s not endless debate. It’s about: Turning chaos into clarity. Aligning people around a story. Making decisions others can rally behind. Driving action that sticks.

The leaders who succeed know how to transform an idea into insight, shape that insight into a narrative, turn the narrative into a decision, and drive the decision into action

The Leader’s Checklist
Before you call something strategy, ask yourself: Have we defined the problem clearly? Do we understand the “so what”? Is there a story that people will believe and follow? Have we committed to a decision, not just a discussion? Do we know the first three actions to execute now?

If you can’t answer yes to all five, you don’t have strategy yet.

Closing Thought
Strategy is only powerful when it lives in motion. The next time you’re faced with uncertainty, don’t obsess over frameworks or templates. Ask the hard questions. Build the story. Make the decision. Then move. Because in the end, strategy isn’t about knowing more. It’s about creating clarity where others only see chaos, and moving people forward with it.