Build your team: Assembling what you need to implement your strategy

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on strategy and implementation. You can find the previous parts at the links below. The rest of the series will be released over the course of the coming weeks. Stay tuned for updates!

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 1 (From Oxford to Denali)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 2 (Find your Mountain)

If you’ve set your strategy well, you now have an ambitious objective, supporting but independent supplementary goals, and distinct criteria for measuring your success. Congratulations, you’re done with the easy part!

As Professor Powell rightly identifies, the difficulty in business doesn’t lie in deciding which move to make, but in actually making the move. Companies and expeditions both need to work hard before a single boot touches glacier to maximize their chances for success.

Preparing for strategy implementation comes down to three things: people, tools, and culture. And when done right, the process to select and develop these assets begins even before the objective is finalized.

Build your team

As the saying goes, your people are your best resource. While cliché, this adage holds more than a nugget of truth when trying to reach a difficult objective. But it’s not just about having good people.

Your team must have the right people in the right places to maximize its capability.

The expedition leader is a role akin to a Strategy Director. For Denali, Elyse took that mantle. During expedition planning, she administered a rigorous two-stage selection process to bring together the climbing team. It was her prerogative to make sure the people selected had the skills and experience to maximize our chances of success.

Mountaineering is dangerous business. Avalanches, crevasse falls, and unexpected storms can create fatal situations with little warning. Even still, most major accidents happen because a team member makes a poor decision – we call this the “human factor”. This risk can be mitigated by choosing team members that already have the baseline requisite skills to make well-analyzed decisions and implement them with established best practices. Not everyone needs to be an expert in the baseline skills – indeed, it’s important to include junior people with high potential to help drive their professional development. But everyone should have enough knowledge to not be a liability to the team’s ability to achieve its goals.

When every team member has relevant baseline knowledge and experience, both the frequency and severity of bad decisions will decline.

Mistakes and bad outcomes will still happen, but they are less likely to derail progress if everyone on the team knows the most important factors to consider. In your business, this means choosing people who know how to manage organizational change and are versed in seamless switching between the details of their part of the puzzle and the strategic big picture. On Denali, it meant everyone on the team needed experience in the mountains and knowledge of glacier travel safety systems.

But baseline knowledge will only get you so far; if every team member has the same skills, style, and implicit role, the team will never be more than the sum of its parts. Highly functioning teams complement each other. At NOLS, we talk about this through the need to balance leadership styles within a group. You need Analysts to consider all the available information, Drivers to push timely decision-making, Motivators to generate excitement for action, and Relationship Masters to keep a positive interpersonal environment.

In your business, the team must have diverse individual technical knowledge and complementary interpersonal strengths. More importantly, every impacted functional area must have representation on the strategy planning and implementation teams. An excellent model for this is the U.S. Army’s Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP). Detailing the full applicability of MDMP to business strategy could be its own longform article (which hopefully I’ll find time to write at some point), but for now the key feature worth highlighting is that the process requires a representative from each HR, intel, supply and logistics, and IT on top of the normal slate of operations and finance folks normally involved in planning. It’s essential to have a voice able to raise information and concerns from every respective foxhole.

Each team member should have unique attributes and skills they can apply when the situation needs that voice to improve decision-making and progress toward the goals.

In that vein, our Denali team was well balanced.

Elyse was our driver, bringing boundless energy and an obstinate desire to keep pushing. We would have stopped short of the summit had the rest of the team not been able to vicariously tap into her determination.

Ron’s asset was his relative inexperience; he was eager to learn and by asking pointed questions along the way, and in doing so made sure we avoided risky shortcuts that sometimes are attractive to experienced mountaineers. His quiet endurance in unfamiliar terrain was also a source of motivation as we pushed through 15-hour days each carrying 100+ pounds of gear up the mountain.

Dave loves to dig – and as a result we always had one of the most comfortable and most protected tent sites dug into the snow at each camp. This allowed us to maximize our recovery on rest days and contributed to our success. Dave’s superior experience in the high alpine – on K2, Everest, and several other Himalayan peaks – meant he also intuitively knew the most relevant factors to bring up when we were making difficult decisions.

Nick was our conscience. With several alpine rock climbing and mountaineering expeditions under his belt, and with a more conservative approach to risk, Nick ensured our actions were deliberate, measured, and safe – even when the conditions required us to push up the mountain faster than most teams.

As for me, I was calm under pressure – presenting a quiet competence that kept our heads cool when conditions were stressful.

We still made our fair share of sub-optimal decisions, and suffered some hardship along the way toward the summit; the human factor is impossible to eliminate completely.

The mark of a good team lies not in avoiding anything going wrong, but in recognizing the situation and recovering when things inevitably do.

Because of our baseline and complementary skills, we were able to lean on each other to fill the moment-by-moment needs of team and to elevate us beyond what each of us could accomplish on our own.

Even still, our goals called for more than just our baseline and complementary skills; we required deep, specialized expertise to be successful both in our research goal and in our goal to provide compelling visual content for our expedition sponsors.

We leaned on Dave in both realms. As a Doctor of Osteopathy (and our Research Director) he had designed the study methodology, and he oversaw our actions to make sure we did things correctly to produce valid results. He later published the results after analyzing the data post-climb.

Additionally, prior to medical school, Dave had been an expeditionary photographer and filmmaker. He captured most of the most jaw-dropping photos that we brought back for our sponsors to use, lending his superior artistic eye (and professional-grade camera) to our efforts.

Our success is a testament to his ability to lend his expertise above and beyond the baseline and complementary skills that each of us brought to the expedition.

Identifying essential expertise and sourcing the requisite specialists for the team will magnify the its ability to achieve success across all the company’s goals.

Team selection is difficult, in large part because implementation is highly dependent on having the right people in the right places to navigate a difficult road. However, if these three skill sets are present in the team – baseline skills for every team member, complementary skills to create a team that is more than the sum of its parts, and specific expertise to drive success on technically specialized goals – strategic implementation gets easier.

Admittedly, it’s here that the mountaineering analogy starts to get stretched; a mountaineering expedition is rarely more than 8 or 10 people, while a business contemplating a strategic shift often numbers in the thousands. The implementation team in a business context is generally less about picking the single group who will carry out activities, and more about creating champions for the new strategic objective and underlying goals who can oversee implementation in each business area. So-called “team members” must communicate early to their functional areas, gather feedback to input into the planning process, and generate excitement and support among the key members of their respective areas of the business. For this reason, one of the necessary baseline skills for members of the implementation team is the ability to hold the trust of colleagues while driving difficult and potentially controversial strategic pursuits.

It's also helpful to remember that at every level of a strategy implementation, an individual manager’s team is not thousands, but their direct reports. Applying the concepts I’ve outlined at the micro level will help leaders across the organization focus on the most important job a leader has – building a team that can implement both by building good teams below them and by taking the correct actions where the rubber meets the road.

Gather your tools

When implementation starts, the team will need a tailored set of tools to attempt the objective. As a result, setting the gear list is among the most important processes on a mountaineering expedition, and one of the most difficult. Your tools are your lifeline in the mountains. A well-placed piece of gear at the right moment can mean the difference between success and failure, and at times the difference between life and death. But it’s difficult to know what circumstances will come up, or which tools will be useful and which will be essential. And since you have to carry everything you bring up the mountain, diligent selection is essential.

A great team is useless without the necessary tools to make the objective possible.

Experienced mountaineers have a sense of what can go wrong on the mountain – what the risks are. They build a gear list to target those risks that are high either because they are more likely to happen, or because the consequence is higher. (For more on likelihood and consequence in risk management, check out this resource.)

The same process should happen in a company once the strategy and implementation teams are chosen, with input from both. A company’s tools are not always physical assets in the traditional sense. The company might need to invest in building strength and talent in a certain business line as a tool to enable the company’s strategic aims. It might also need to take time to align divergent business units that need to be complementary. Or it might need to branch out the product portfolio to better reach the customer segment that is critical to success in the strategic initiative. And indeed it might need to invest in machinery, office space, or other traditional assets before launching the project.

A company’s tools are its capabilities, alignment, products, and assets.

But a company can’t invest in everything – it needs to be selective with how it invests its financial, human, and temporal capital. The strategy and implementation team should be counted on to have the requisite expertise to guide the company’s tool selection process. Sometimes that can be disruptive, but it’s always important, for expeditionary success and business success.

This past summer, I took a contract working for NOLS in Alaska – one month in the backcountry with 15 students and two other instructors. The day before I arrived, I found out I’d been switched to a different team. The program management team had realized that their tools (i.e. instructor teams) were out of balance. The course that I was moved to had a plan to cross the Jacksina River in the Wrangell St-Elias National Park – a classic, big, angry, glacier-fed Alaskan river – and traverse across a bare glacier. I had experience both working in Alaska and mountaineering; my abilities were more useful on the course with a plan that called for them.

Our instructor team prep time was dominated by discussions about the gear we would take and when we needed it; both river and glacier crossings required specialized equipment in addition to our team’s knowledge and experience. In the end, we decided to bring pack rafts and life jackets for the river crossing, and a basic crevasse rescue setup for the glacier crossing – the bare minimum we needed to be safe.

We didn’t end up making it across the river – sometimes even when you are fully prepared, success is elusive. It’s a story for the upcoming article on implementation, but suffice to say we were glad to have spent the time to select and bring the tools we needed, even if they weren’t able to get us to where we thought we wanted to go.

NEXT IN THE SERIES: Part 4 (Prepare for the Unexpected)