No one would pay for the obvious advice that strategic initiatives need the best possible teams. Yet, many strategic initiatives don’t get them. And even when the team is, on paper, the best possible one, often it cannot perform at its best level. Let’s face it: as obvious as the advice may sound, following it is a serious challenge for highly effective, more-of-the-same organizations – those that precisely need strategic initiatives to get “out of their box.”

There are some frequent pitfalls that make your strategic initiatives end up with crippled teams, in spite of all the good intentions. Avoiding these pitfalls has to do with senior-management attention, more than with who is on the team.

Treat team selection as a critical, top-management decision
Some senior teams don’t seem to believe that who is on their strategic-initiative teams deserves much of their attention. They are just shying away from a complex decision, with significant domino effects in organizations focused on short term efficiency.

So, the decision as to who is on the team is delegated to human resources. This is also “safe” because poaching the best people from the business units clearly goes against HR’s genetic code. And you end up with some team members who are less than adequate for the task, but are easily available. 

• Top management must make the final decision. An assignment to a strategic-initiative team must be seen as an assignment to a key job – one that top management would absolutely want to be making. 
• Then decide who you are looking for. There is a chance that these people don’t fit your organization’s definition of “best people” – probably focused on the steady-state performers. So, find the resourceful “out of the box” maneuverers. 
• And make sure that this selection is supported by forward-looking HR processes: talent management, career planning, succession planning

Free the time
If you manage to get the best people, chances are that they are already overloaded. But, in our heroic workplaces, this is hardly a consideration: if you are good you’ll manage, and if you want to be good you can’t admit that it may be too much.

For your best people to be able to perform at their best level, you need first to face reality. A good performer is fully occupied. If she takes on something new, something else will no longer be done. 

• Make an explicit decision on what each team member will no longer be doing and decide who else will do it, or decide that it will no longer be done. Hoping for the best, as is often done, is not an option.

Align performance management
Team members will often find themselves caught between conflicting performance-management measures. In plain language, success of the initiative will hurt their bonuses.

Example: the purpose of the initiative was to build a new corporate business unit, bringing together activities that were performed in different silos. The team was formed from the specialists of this activity in the best-performing countries. The fact that the countries’ P&L would lose the corresponding revenues was well understood. But the fact that this would often result in bonus cuts for the best team members was simply overlooked. As strange as it may sound, this is not an isolated example.

Performance management processes prove to be generally difficult to adapt and they are often focused on the previous battle, rather than on the next one. 

• Build the necessary flexibility in the performance management processes. They are generally able to adapt to job changes. They should be able to adapt also to strategic initiatives assignments, even on short notice. 
• Performance management on the initiative must be agreed before the work starts. And the existing performance indicators of each team member must be reviewed so that likely conflicts are resolved.

Don’t underestimate the sponsor’s job
A major execution challenge will be to bring people on board from across the organization. Their cooperation is needed for resources and to execute the expected changes. A thorough understanding of the chemistry of the various silo perspectives is required to bring all ingredients together. 

• The sponsor needs to guide the team through this highly transactional process otherwise, the team will probably retrench to handling execution as a purely technical issue. It might get done, but nothing will change.

Another execution challenge is the fact that, in a constantly changing environment, the expected outcome of the initiative cannot be precisely defined. So the route to get there will have many options to be chosen from in due time. 

• The sponsor needs to steer this journey to a meaningful destination. It is not automatic-pilot, more-of-the-same execution.

So, make sure that the sponsor you select has:

• Personal stakes in the success of the initiative 
• A cross-silo perspective and know-how 
• Time to work with the team, hands-on.

Strategic initiatives are not for amateurs
It is risky for an organization to improvise its way into strategic initiatives. The risk is to end-up with a mismatch team, unable to perform optimally, and with an aloof sponsor. Organizations that are entirely focused on doing more of the same, better and better, will find it difficult to avoid these pitfalls, even though it is obvious that strategic initiatives require the best possible teams. 

• Your strategic-initiative teams require top-management attention or else, a lot of energy will be wasted.

This article is drawn from "Smarter Execution: Seven steps to getting results", by Xavier Gilbert, Bettina Büchel, and Rhoda Davidson.

Professor Bettina Büchel is Director of the Orchestrating Winning Performance program, and Professor Gilbert teaches on this program.