Often, organizations throw a group of people together to work on a project and call them a “team.” But it’s not a team, it’s a work group.

Our clients frequently tell us:

The reality is that most organizations can’t just hire more people to work on important strategic initiatives. Often a small group of senior staff or designated project managers shoulder the burden of dozens of projects—drawing on the same specialized roles over and over, with the risk of burning out some of the organization’s most valuable people. The solution is to share the responsibility across more of the current workforce and create more teams to tackle strategic initiatives. The challenge is to build teams that are high-performing and able to succeed in their mission.  

There are important psychological processes that need to be nurtured to bond a group of people so they perform well together. SAS has spent the last 20 years developing a methodology for strategy execution based on concepts drawn from our long-standing partnership with some of the highest performing teams in the world—the U.S. Navy SEALs. We have combined lessons learned from how the SEALs rapidly form and develop exceptional teams with our own deep experience in proven organizational communication practices to develop the High Performance Teams (HPTs) Program for Strategy Execution.

Our High Performance Teams Methodology for Strategy Execution focuses on the following goals:

• Complete strategic initiatives and projects at a faster tempo
• Develop a bench of future leaders through the work of the team
• Increase collaboration and communication across traditional silos
• Engage employees at every level with the strategy
• Reinforce positive organizational culture attributes and values

Sure, we know it sounds like magic. Sometimes it even looks like magic.

But it’s not magic. It’s discipline and practice.

Or, as the SEALs would say:

“Simple. Not easy.”