Policy leader John J. McNamara says most leaders have the difficulty of their job reversed. “Strategy is easy. Execution is hard,” he says, because a policy inside a large organization does not execute itself. The people who carry it out have not internalized it, often do not understand why it exists, and sometimes hold incentives that pull against it.
McNamara led at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and he now advises policy leadership. He has seen initiatives fail because leaders mistook announcing a policy for achieving it. Alignment is not a state reached at launch; it is an energy level a leader has to keep raising, which makes internal execution far more like marketing than like issuing an order.
Humility Keeps Information Flowing Upward
McNamara names humility as the first requirement of leading a national policy team. A leader who projects total expertise causes staff to go quiet, and in complex policy work there can be no unstated thoughts. He illustrates it with a story from his years running the first fully automated branch of a large call center. When a technical expert explained a failure in dense jargon, McNamara watched his direct reports nod along knowingly and assumed they were far ahead of him. After the expert left, he asked them to explain it plainly. They admitted they had understood none of it.
A leader who projects certainty teaches everyone below to do the same, which severs the flow of honest information that the work depends on. Humility, paired with the courage to admit what one does not know, keeps that information moving. At the CFPB, McNamara turned this into a practice, walking into conversations with outside experts carrying what he called a bag of assumptions, and asking them to validate each one or knock it down.
Alignment Is Manufactured Continuously, Not Announced Once
The failure McNamara sees most often is the one-and-done rollout, where a policy is announced, declared changed, and left to run. It does not run, because nothing sustains the alignment after launch. He is especially wary of middle managers, who often sit outside the attention lavished on the front line and whose compensation incentives can pull them out of step with the organization’s goals.
His remedy is constant, low-pressure reinforcement, what he calls trickle training. Rather than overwhelming staff with a single rollout, a leader keeps the policy in everyone’s awareness through continuous small touches, a few questions at login, ongoing testing up and down the hierarchy. The discipline this demands is why McNamara admires the people who are best at execution. They are, in his words, execution freaks who enjoy the small details the way others enjoy a hobby. Devising a policy is easy. Checking, talking, and continuously assessing how it plays out in real life is the hard, unglamorous work that delivers it.
If You Cannot Market a Policy Internally, Reconsider It
When powerful stakeholders pull a policy in different directions, he treats alignment as an ongoing, multi-channel marketing campaign. Marketing raises the level of engagement an audience is willing to put in, and that is exactly what a policy needs from the people expected to carry it out. The questions are a marketer’s. How engaged are they? Have they internalized it? Do they understand what is in it for them?
Since engagement is present in specific channels, the campaign has to run across all of them and be built into the culture through the success stories and narratives that make a policy concrete. Then comes the test that follows from treating execution as marketing. If a leadership team cannot build a campaign to sell a policy internally, they should ask whether the policy is worth doing at all. An inability to market a change honestly may be the change itself signaling a problem. Where a difficult policy must move forward regardless, the campaign has to be direct and honest, with real channels where people know they are heard.
Leading a Depleted Workforce Means Re-Marketing the Work Itself
The same logic governs McNamara’s answer on the federal workforce, now at a 60-year low. He contrasts today’s reductions with the roughly 300,000-position drawdown under the Clinton administration, which was methodical, coordinated with Congress and unions, and managed to control the loss of institutional knowledge. The recent cuts lacked that discipline and bled hard-won expertise; the deep market knowledge of people who understood student lending, debt collection, or credit reporting from having worked in it. This is knowledge that no academic program can replicate.
Rebuilding starts with a knowledge-assessment inventory to find the gaps, then uses AI to absorb the mundane work, freeing scarce experts for judgment and creative thinking. Rather than assigning people to fill gaps by fiat, McNamara lets staff pivot into markets they cared about, because passion for the work produces faster growth and better performance than indifferent assignment. It is the marketing principle turned inward.
Precision in policy leadership comes not from sharper strategy but from the disciplined, continuous work of keeping people aligned, which looks far more like earning engagement than commanding it. To learn more about leading policy teams with precision, connect with John J. McNamara on LinkedIn or visit Avtal.
