Trust your team, and send it hard: Developing a culture to maximize team effectiveness

 This is part 4 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 (Introduction)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 2 (Find your Mountain!)

Strategy and Mountaineering: Part 3 (Build your team)

Simply having good people and the right tools aren’t sufficient to maximize success on the difficult road to the objective. The company’s interpersonal fabric – comprised of culture, organizational structure, and trust – needs to be aligned with taking decisive steps in a dynamic and uncertain environment.

As Professor Powell rightly notes, the hallmark of the contemporary business environment is uncertainty. The technology revolution has increased the pace of innovation, and online customers increasingly have access to a wider range of information and products both locally and from around the world. These factors compound to make it far more difficult for companies to reach a chosen strategic objective than it is to see and select a desired objective on the horizon.

The norms of the organization and the implementation culture must empower the team to make and carry out sound micro-decisions as the external environment changes and develops.

The micro-decisions are the ones that make or break a team’s success implementing a bold strategic plan. Highly functioning teams are ones that make better micro-decisions and then lean the team’s full weight toward enacting those decisions successfully. Each micro-decision is a microcosm of the larger process, where implementing requires as much thought, effort, and ability as making the decision.

Keys to team effectiveness

Improving team effectiveness is in vouge at the moment, with several studies coming out in the past few years trying to isolate the factors that are the biggest determinants of success. Arguably the most famous – and incidentally I think among the best – studied teams across Google’s business units. The TL;DR summary identifies 5 areas of importance: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work.

Of these, the last three should help guide objective selection, goal setting, success criteria development, and communication of the strategy (see Part 1). The other two are cultural aspects, and need to be central during implementation team formation. Ideally every team in your business already has psychological safety and dependability built into their fabric, but where it doesn’t exist or where new teams are being created, this cultural underpinning must get emphasis.

Psychological safety relates to risk tolerance; every team member must trust that when they take a risk – either when speaking up with a contradictory idea or in undertaking a risky action – that the other members of the group will be supportive, and will prioritize the decided objective, goals, and success criteria appropriately.

Dependability is simply that each team member can believe the others will take the actions assigned to them and help the team make progress toward its goals. This is a demonstrated feature, closely tied with trust between team members. If team members can trust each other to act with the best intentions and fullest effort toward the common goal, they won’t have to spend any effort doubting each other’s work, instead bringing their full capability toward forward progress.

Trust is the pillar that binds teams together; absent trust, a team will always underperform its potential.

Team efficiency is also strongly influenced by natural team chemistry, which should be consistently evaluated during both team selection and preparation.

Our Denali team had a team skills training in the months leading up to the climb to test team chemistry and to start to build common skills and knowledge of each other’s dependability. And it was fortunate that we did, both for the team and for me personally. One of the original team members showed himself to not fit in the fabric of the rest of the team, and was subsequently asked to step down. This opened a spot for one of the named alternate team members: me.

We would wind up with two more drops, meaning our attempt only had 5 climbers. In the end, this benefitted us even though expertise was lost in the process. With fewer people, and with everyone more culturally aligned, we were able to function more smoothly as a team and largely avoided unproductive conflict. Our strong cultural fabric allowed us to make bold decisions and implement them with determination, and ultimately enabled our success.

One bad apple can destroy trust much faster than the best team can build it. People who aren’t aligned with team norms and goals should not be allowed on the team no matter how skilled they are otherwise.

When forced to choose, it’s better to have the right team culture than the best people.

That said, conflict is an essential part of making good decisions – and there can be a fine line between productive conflict and unproductive conflict. Where a team falls depends on the factors discussed above. Psychological safety gives people the confidence to voice a disagreement, while trust and dependability ensure those on the receiving end take it as a valid concern and not a personal attack. Good team chemistry and experience working together provides and environment where disagreements are assessed through a rational lens, and appreciation of teammates builds empathy that softens disagreements. Trust and dependability also allow time-constrained discussions to conclude in a decision without resentment, even if the original disagreement hasn’t fully been assuaged.

Teams that are open to debate and disagreement, while not getting bogged down in indecision or infighting, will improve their decision-making and achieve greater success.

Summit day on Denali proved to be a quintessential moment of team culture proving to be the difference maker in success. At 17,000 feet, Camp 5 in an unforgiving place. It’s rarely above 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and by volume there’s the same amount of atmosphere above you as below you. The body struggles to get enough oxygen to rest and recuperate, and so slowly starts breaking down. We had a full “rest” day at camp 5 after a marathon 16-hour push from Camp 4, and woke up on May 31 hoping for good weather – our summit window was a mere 3 days.

We were greeted with gusty wind and swirling clouds, but by 9am, they seemed to be lifting. It was trending toward clear and calm skies, but conditions still weren’t ideal and could quickly turn dangerous.

We needed to make a decision. On the one hand, we were as strong as we were going to be, and the weather seemed to be moving in the right direction. On the other, snow conditions and wind speeds higher up the mountain were hard to gauge, and you only have the energy, time, and weather for so many shots at the summit. And if we took too much longer assessing conditions we would risk having to summit during the coldest part of the day, where wind chills at the summit can easily reach as low as minus-50.

By this point, we’d been living, working, and making decisions together for nearly three weeks, 24/7. We trusted each other’s opinions and knew everyone’s capabilities. We also were able to anticipate and feed off each other to build the momentum required to make and implement a bold decision in a dynamic environment.

It was go time.

In the end, our decision benefited from a little luck. The weather did in fact continue to improve, and we were one of only 5 teams attempting to summit that day and thus avoided being stuck behind scores of other teams trudging toward the summit. But even if things had turned out differently, we all agreed that we used the right process to make a tough decision – and this was founded upon the people we had, the tools we brought with us, and the culture of the team.

NEXT IN THE SERIES

Part 5: Climb!