The Crucial Role of Culture and Teams in Ski Area Leadership

As I mentioned in this month’s Bob’s Bits, I reviewed posts I have written over the last 10 years and noticed a trend. Initially, I wrote more about operations and solutions to operational challenges. Currently, I have written more about leadership and strategy and less about actual ski area issues.

This post is about culture and teams, a subject I have consistently written about and one that I believe ties into leadership, strategy, and ski area issues. One of the challenges a ski area faces is initiating and sustaining change if the leadership wants to change the culture and strengthen the teams within the ski area.

I have found some good input on this subject, which I think will resonate with you, ski area leaders, managers, and workers.

Let's talk about culture. The ski area's leader or leadership must commit to changing the culture. It will not happen overnight; commitment to the long haul is needed. Culture change depends on micro-interventions—minor adjustments to interpersonal interactions' structure, dynamics, or framing, applied consistently over time. An article in a McKinsey Newsletter put this in a simple context for me. I will paraphrase the article: Roger Martin, a CEO advisor and the professor emeritus of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, has been mulling the implementation of culture change for 30 years.   

In an interview, Martin often said they (leaders) attempt to change the culture through edicts. “They say something like, ‘I’m CEO, and this is a very bureaucratic organization. Everything takes too long. This will be a non-bureaucratic company because I say so.

Martin explains that the other commonly used approach relies on structural changes. “The CEO says, ‘This place is bureaucratic because the finance department is overbearing. So, the CFO will now report to the COO, and the COO has a mandate to keep finance from getting involved in things in which it shouldn’t get involved.”

Unfortunately, neither approach is powerful enough to change an organizational culture on its own successfully. “They don’t work because they don’t change the shared interpretations and norms within an organization,” says Martin. “The truth about culture is that the only way you can change it is by changing how individuals work with one another. If you can change that, you will find the culture has changed.”

To change the way people work together, Martin argues, leaders must model the behaviors they want to see. “Literally the only way that I’ve seen culture change in the 42 years is when a leader sets out to demonstrate a different kind of behavior and makes that behavior work. Other people take their cues from that behavior, and, slowly but surely, the culture changes,” he says.

A notable aspect of this approach is that it does not require a major initiative or investment. This is a key factor for ski areas. Some guidance may be necessary from the outside, but that investment will be negligible compared to the benefit.

To address Martin's comment, “the only way you can change it is by changing the way individuals work with one another,” you must also address how teams’ function at your ski area.

Creating effective teams relies on several factors, such as high levels of trust, communication, and a solid understanding of team context. I have explored effective teams in previous writings. Here is a link to an earlier post that outlines the steps for building teams: https://www.steepmanagement.com/blog/elevating-leadership-dynamics-in-ski-resorts-fostering-unity-and-organizational-health. Once again, this effort does not demand significant investment beyond time; however, the rewards are... priceless.

STEEP Management can point you in the right direction towards achieving a healthy culture and productive teams.