Designing a team strategy

Increasing your teams’ impact on the organisation

Kevin McCullagh

Published on LinkedIn15 Jan 2025

As we kick off 2025, many design and innovation leaders will be making plans for their teams or functions or at least tweaking existing ones. Here are four examples of situations I’ve helped with regarding team strategy:

An engineering-led manufacturing company which realised that experience design was critical to its growth and had decided to set up an internal design function
A healthcare innovation team challenged by the executive team to become more influential on the company’s strategy, ways of working and products
Two design teams wishing to join forces and collaborate more effectively following an acquisition, and
A global R&D team aiming to widen its remit and work together in a more integrated way.

In each case, leaders aimed to increase their teams’ impact on the organisation – to help it win. Dedicating time to building the strategy and planning how to communicate it proved time well spent.If it’s more than making a few mid-course corrections to existing plans, some dedicated focused time pays off. It helps to hover up from the weeds and make an insightful and objective assessment of the team’s situation. It allows time to gather the perspectives of stakeholders and advisors. The process should also enable existing assumptions to be challenged and a thorough thinking through of what to stop, start and sustain. Finally, new strategies need better communication – up, down and sideways – to set or re-set expectations.So, crafting a new strategy is an intensive endeavour that’s hard to do just in the corners of a day. It should be grounded in a clear and candid assessment of the situation and centred on a motivating ambition or North Star. It then needs to be activated by a coordinated set of actions focused on addressing the opportunities and challenges.

Five steps to your team strategy

Here are five steps I use to formulate team strategies:

1. Assess the situation

Prepare a review of the overarching context surrounding your team, including a frank assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Then look ahead to anticipate the external and internal dynamics you believe will shape your team’s future landscape and surface new openings and threats.

Involve senior leadership in this exercise. Listen to their insights and advice, and engage them in the process.

As you grapple with a complex and dynamic landscape, it’s OK for perspectives and opinions to differ at this early stage. These differences will also fuel more productive conversations than a premature consensus view of the situation. Also, encourage candid opinions on your challenges, their causes and how they might be addressed. As Richard Rumelt put it:

A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them…. Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems

The idea is to come away from this exercise with a sophisticated understanding of the stakeholders’ priorities, so that you can build a team strategy that really does help the organisation fulfil them.

You’re likely to discover that some of what your team does, which you take for granted, is highly valued. Equally, what you may think is truly impressive can be greeted with just a shrug. All helpful insights into where and how your team delivers value.

2. Define the team’s purpose and ambition

When you gather your leadership team together, clarifying the team’s purpose and ambition (or vision) is a good place to start. I find it helpful to distinguish between why your team exists (purpose) and what it aims to achieve in the future (ambition) while developing the strategy – even if I don’t always end up using both when communicating it. Obviously, both should align with the organisation’s strategy and priorities.

The team’s purpose (sometimes called ‘mission’) should crisply capture why the team exists, and be grounded in its values and scope of activities. To this end, if your team doesn’t have a set of core beliefs, spending time aligning on these often proves a valuable and cohering exercise.

An ambition should paint a vivid picture of the final destination and, ideally, a way to think about getting there – without providing a detailed map

A team ambition is a high-level inspirational and motivating goal or future state. While defining your team’s purpose involves clarifying the fundamentals of your team, defining its ambition is a much more creative process. The ambition should be grounded in a point of view on the future and how the team can best impact the company’s strategy. It should paint a vivid picture of the final destination and, ideally, a way to think about getting there without providing a detailed map – which is why it’s often referred to as a north star. A good ambition strikes a balance between being believable and making the team gulp! It should feel like an inspiring stretch goal.

Generate a range of options, then vote and align on a working ambition statement you can iterate on. A good initial test of the ambition is to break it down into 3-5 objectives. Think of them as steps to realising the ambition. These should be more concrete and measurable goals. Arriving at these five objectives usually prompts further clarification and crafting of the ambition statement.

3. Design the Team Value Proposition

With a clear direction in place, it’s time to define the team’s Value Proposition (TVP). That will articulate how it intends to deliver meaningful value to the organisation.

A Customer Value Proposition (CVP) defines the value a company creates for its customers and why they should choose its product or service over what its competitors offer. A TVP, by contrast, captures how a team will make more than a difference to the business. It defines the connection between the team and the rest of the organisation, and the benefits the team intends to supply to it.

Other internal teams, as well as external consultants, are available. So, your TVP is also an opportunity to reframe and underline your team’s value. Make sure you can summarise how it will drive company growth and profitability in a memorable and easily articulated manner. Evidence with case studies, stakeholder testimonials and credible measures.

Map out with your team how you currently deliver value to your stakeholders and how you want this to change. Be prepared to make hard choices about ‘where to play’ – and where not to play. It’s vital to focus your resources on areas that will really add value and move your team toward achieving its ambition.

Next, break down the TVP into two or three clear, concise, compelling elements that resonate with your critical stakeholders’ business priorities. There are no golden formulas, but one to try is: ‘We help our organisation to (X) by doing (Y)’.

Finally, in this stage: map your TVP against your purpose, ambition and objectives, and edit the whole thing for better alignment. Remember to use language that will resonate with your stakeholders. Then, find ways to informally test and refine your TVP with some of them, tailoring your narrative to individual stakeholders.

4. Flesh out the strategy

Now that you have clarified your strategic foundations and goals, it’s time to work out how you will deliver on them with a coordinated set of actions. When deciding where to focus the team’s time and resources, try to distil the changes into two or three major initiatives. These might include changes to your budgeting, structures, ways of working, capabilities, resourcing and metrics.

Now summarise your strategic headlines in an overview canvas to ensure they are comprehensive and mutually coherent.

A Team Value Proposition defines the connection between the team and the rest of the organisation, and the benefits the team intends to deliver to it

A pivotal question to start with is, who are your stakeholders, and how will you segment and prioritise them? Remember, you may decide later in the process to reduce the support you give some of these, or stop it altogether. Another: your company’s executive team is not duty-bound to fund your team to continue with all activities it pursues. It is likely to consider alternative sources for at least some of what your team does.

5. Develop an action plan

In this final stage, plot out the workstreams that will turn your strategy into action. Your objectives should provide the main workstreams, which can then be broken down into separate activities that can then be given owners, deadlines and resources.

One of the first workstreams should include crafting a strategic narrative and an ‘up, down and sideways’ communication plan. One of the last workstreams should include scheduling regular audits to review progress and remove obstacles.

When developing the strategic narrative, start at the end: What’s in it for our stakeholders? Why should it matter to them? How can you bring the future you hope for to life in a vivid way for them?

After that, go back to framing the pertinent elements of the strategic context facing your team – the context you discussed in Stage 1. Clarifying how they fit in with and assist company strategy. Next, outline the golden thread running throughout the narrative. Hang it on a logical structure and pepper it with supporting examples, images and data. Use clear, concise and compelling language that avoids buzzwords and clichés. And finally, end with a clear and specific request or next step.

With any luck, your strategy will drive focus and impact for a year or two. But stuff happens, you will be buffeted by events and need to course correct, if not make significant changes sooner or later. The advantage of having a documented strategy is that it makes revising it much easier, as you can assess which elements still hold and which need an upgrade.

Generally, the further you go back up the five-stage ladder I have outlined, the less you should need to change. If you understood and expressed them correctly, your purpose and ambition will tend to have the greatest longevity.

May all your 2025 plans come true!

Kevin

Kevin founded Plan in 2004. Before this, he was a director at product design consultancy…