Clarifying team missions at Salomon
Inside a Digital & IT leadership workshop: team missions, overlapping responsibilities and the work needed after the offsite.
A roadmap can show the projects ahead while leaving a practical question open: how does the work of one team depend on the others? That question guided the leadership workshop I designed and led with Salomon’s Digital & IT team in June 2024.
The wider engagement involved 15 Digital & IT teams supporting a three-year roadmap of more than 30 initiatives. During the workshop, we worked on the team missions and ways of collaborating needed to support that programme.
Making the boundaries discussable
Each team’s mission prototype was the starting point. The session asked leaders to improve their draft, mark overlaps and unclear areas in blue, then present it for discussion. Looking at the missions together made the boundaries between teams part of the conversation.
This draws on the idea of common ground developed by Herbert Clark, a psycholinguist at Stanford University: the understanding people share and know they share. Hearing another team explain its mission gives us a chance to check our own assumptions about its contribution.
Planning what follows the workshop
The work also covered meeting routines and working agreements for a collaboration playbook. The workshop design explicitly left consolidation and validation for after the workshop, with an internal owner responsible for the follow-up. Those steps matter because a working draft still needs decisions and use in everyday work.
Salomon is a brand I have known since my first skis and technical boots. Working with its digital leaders gave that connection a different meaning. My contribution was to help them make the coordination required by their roadmap explicit.
When reviewing your own programme, put the team missions side by side. Ask each team to identify one responsibility that overlaps with another team, then discuss who will make the decision and what each team needs to contribute.
