At 8 a.m. each winter morning at Showdown Montana, employees gather for a mandatory huddle. On a busy day, that can mean 175 people packed together in the lodge before the lifts turn.
They stretch for about 10 minutes. Then come the announcements: What is happening today? Which department is under pressure? Who needs help? Finally, the meeting ends with a 30-second dance party.
Showdown president Katie Boedecker sees no distinction between culture building and operations management.
The stretching, she said, has helped reduce employee injuries. The announcements align the team. The dance break is part of a broader commitment to employee emotional well-being that includes free counseling. And the huddle provides a workforce—in which some employees may perform five different jobs in a day—a shared picture of what the mountain needs.
Boedecker said the huddle, now part of the culture after four winters, helped keep employees focused through a particularly difficult snow year. Showdown also reports a very high employee retention rate. What began with some eye rolling has become a practice Boedecker said she will not give up.
The morning meeting reminds everyone they are working toward the same objective.
Five key pieces. Across interviews with ski areas large and small, independent and multi-resort, a common idea emerged: Interdepartmental cooperation does not happen because leaders tell people to “work as a team.” It improves when the organization is intentionally designed to make teamwork easier and more cohesive.
That can mean better communication among traditional departments, or cross-training employees so labor can move with the guest. At the far end of the continuum, it can mean questioning whether some departmental boundaries need to exist at all.
The approaches vary, but five practices repeatedly surfaced:
- break down unnecessary silos;
- build staffing around the guest rather than the department;
- make communication part of the daily operating rhythm;
- require leaders to model the behavior they expect;
- use cross-department work to develop future leaders, not to simply fill shifts.
BREAK THE SILOS, OR REMOVE THEM
Mountain Creek, N.J., offers perhaps the most aggressive example of silo breaking. The resort’s “trail” system organizes much of the frontline operation around the guest journey. Parking, ticketing, scanning, rentals and guest services are not isolated worlds. Employees can move as the guest moves, with supervisors covering broader portions of that journey.
Snow Partners chief people officer Kelly Brooks described the operational principle this way: “Wherever the guest is, that’s where the people go.”
With the implementation of the system, frontline employees have learned newfound respect for their teammates across previously siloed departments like ski school, parking, and rentals, said Mountain Creek general manager Evan Kovach.
The resort also cut seasonal headcount from roughly 1,900 to fewer than 900, reduced management layers, and reinvested part of the labor savings in higher hourly wages.
Midwest Family Ski Resorts has taken structural integration even further. Chief of resort operations and development Benjamin Bartz said the company, which operates Lutsen Mountains, Minn., Granite Peak, Wis., and Snowriver Mountain Resort, Mich., intentionally tries to minimize the number of departments that exist.
The philosophy has changed job descriptions and physical spaces. At some locations, for example, lodging check-in, lift ticket functions, and a coffee shop can share a common area, with guest service employees trained to handle multiple transactions.
Find the right mix. Cross-department collaboration does not necessarily require cross-department staffing. The appropriate point on that continuum—from interdepartmental communication to reorganization—will differ by resort. The useful question is the same: Are departmental boundaries helping people do their jobs?
BUILD A WORKFORCE THAT MOVES WITH THE GUEST
Cooperation at ski areas is especially valuable because demand moves throughout the day. The parking lot may need everyone at 8 a.m. Rentals may be overwhelmed at 9 a.m. By noon, food and beverage is buried. At 4 p.m., rental returns surge. Staffing each department for its individual peak can leave too many people standing around during the valleys.
Tony Cammarata, vice president of planning and development at Arapahoe Basin, Colo., calls the alternative “dynamic staffing.” Employees help follow the guest through the day, with departments soliciting help to drive a shuttle, park cars, bus tables, clear snow, etc.
A-Basin treats quick assistance casually, but if an employee spends most of a day in another department, the labor cost can be reassigned appropriately.
Colorado’s Wolf Creek Ski Area has built a more formal system around the same idea. President and CEO Davey Pitcher describes it as “triage.” Patrol can help snowmaking. Snow removal employees can assist base operations or drive buses. Ticket office employees can cashier in restaurants, while ski school staff can help with parking, deck snow removal, or food service before lessons.
Establishing guardrails. Flexibility without training creates risk. Wolf Creek uses Paylocity to assign multiple job codes and training modules in advance. A restaurant helper might initially be cleared only to bus tables or wash dishes, then complete additional food-safety training before doing more.
That is an important guardrail for any leader attracted to cross-deployment. Cooperation does not erase certifications, safety requirements or technical expertise. It works when employees know both where they can help and where they should not.
Dealing with school groups. Pats Peak, N.H., offers another example of staffing around the guest journey. Its weekday learn to ski and ride program serves roughly 8,000 students from more than 100 schools, requiring coordination across nearly every resort department. “A large school group is not just a snowsports issue,” said marketing director Lori Rowell. From bus arrival through rentals, lessons, and meals, she said, guests “see one Pats Peak experience.”
Hiring for versatility. Mt. La Crosse, Wis., takes a related approach in hiring. General manager Darcie Breidel said the area increasingly looks for people who can be fluid rather than filling narrowly defined lanes. Most managers can cover at least two other departments.
Boyne Mountain, Mich., has formalized that capability through a Flex Service Team. Cross-trained employees may move among lift operations, housekeeping, the adventure center, and the indoor water park as seasonal demand changes. Some flex positions carry additional pay or incentives. Every new employee completes a full-day immersive first-day training program that includes safety, Boyne culture, and a tour of the resort.
Marketing director Kari Roder said this shows employees “the full picture of what’s going on here so that you can understand what every department is working towards and what the whole resort is working towards.” Once employees understand the destination, moving between departments becomes more than filling a hole in the schedule.
MAKE COMMUNICATION AN OPERATING RHYTHM
Communication is the most common prescription for breaking silos, and perhaps the least useful if it remains abstract. At Granby Ranch, Colo., general manager Roxanne Hoover uses two words repeatedly: intentional and disciplined. Collaboration requires getting the right people at the table before decisions are made and then holding one another accountable for following through. “We are too small to be siloed,” said Hoover.
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Wyo., vice president of operations Tim Mason said the resort’s collaborative culture is strengthened by face-to-face relationships. Mountain operations teams work in close physical proximity, making it easier to walk into someone’s office or meet on the mountain and solve problems directly rather than relying on texts and emails.
Keep talking … Boyne Mountain uses monthly town halls, weekly senior leadership meetings, and daily departmental standups to create multiple layers of cross-department communication, while the platform UKG acts as a digital hub for HR information, scheduling, communication and labor management.
At Waterville Valley, N.H., a planning team of roughly 11 directors meets daily, while an action team of about 30 frontline managers meets weekly on Microsoft Teams and in person monthly, according to marketing director Jamie Cobbett. That network was tested when Waterville agreed to host a Mogul World Cup with only about four weeks’ notice last December. The event required departments across the resort to shift resources and solve problems together. “Without that interdepartmental cooperation, we would have never gotten the event,” Cobbett said.
… and listening. Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta, Canada, offers an example of a guest-facing outcome of effective collaboration: a redesigned trail map.
Guest services staff and the resort’s Ski Friends volunteer guest hosts were hearing from visitors about where they became confused or stranded on the mountain. That information was shared with leaders in brand and visual communications, mountain operations and patrol, and led to a trail map redesign that divided the mountain into clearer zones, changed how terrain such as the West Bowl was described, and incorporated operational knowledge into the map and wayfinding.
The frontline employee who sees a problem may not have the authority to solve it. Cooperation creates the path between observation and action.
LEADERSHIP HAS TO GO FIRST
Cross-department cooperation flounders when employees hear one message from leadership but watch managers protect turf, labor budgets, or job descriptions.
Just do it. Sandia Peak, N.M., general manager Gary Forrest makes the expectation unmistakable. If an employee is asked to help and responds, “‘It’s not my job,’” Forrest said, “you fire them.”
That sounds severe, but Forrest pairs it with an equally strong expectation for leaders: Never ask employees to do something you would not do yourself. At Powder Ridge, Conn., general manager Layne Anderson added a twist on that: Leaders cannot tell frontline employees to cross departmental boundaries while treating their own boundaries as permanent.
Crossing boundaries is part of the job. Cooperative behavior can be institutionalized. Copper Mountain’s (Colo.) long-running Front Line Assist Program puts salaried leaders into at least five operational shifts each season, helping in areas such as parking, food and beverage, transportation, lift operations, and resort services.
The program handles peak staffing needs, but director of employee experience Kelly Renoux said the greater value is perspective. For example, after Copper changed lift-scanning systems, members of the IT team worked alongside ticket checkers managing lift lines. “Their ability to see impacts in real-time allowed us to quickly address issues,” Renoux said. IT staff came away understanding firsthand what lift operators were experiencing.
Hold leaders responsible. Killington and Pico, Vt., add another layer for their department leaders: accountability.
President and CEO Mike Solimano has put increasing emphasis on employee NPS scores. Departments review their results, including the bad news, develop action plans and present their plan at an annual retreat. Leadership evaluation is tied, in part, to those scores. The result, Solimano said, has been improved employee survey scores alongside better guest survey scores.
He also increasingly values leadership and interpersonal ability over narrow technical expertise when considering promotions. “The people who are getting promoted are the people who our team wants to work for and with,” Solimano said. “They’re a good boss, but they’re also a good peer.”
CROSS-TRAINING AS A LEADERSHIP PIPELINE
Flexibility is obviously the most immediate reason to cross-train employees. The longer-term payoff may be more important: grooming future leaders.
Familiarity breeds communication. Jackson Hole lift operations manager John Fournelle sees his department as a feeder for the rest of the resort. Employees who begin in lift operations are frequently hired into other departments. Instead of viewing those moves simply as losing good employees, the resort benefits from workers who already understand the mountain, know people across the organization, and carry those relationships into their next role.
That internal mobility is reflected in Jackson Hole’s leadership team, where many employees have more than 20 years with the company.
Broader perspectives. Copper Mountain sees a similar benefit. “It is easy to stay in a single department and harbor resentment of how another department is doing things,” Renoux said. “But when you know the people, when you have worked alongside them, and you understand the bigger picture, it makes all of us successful.”
Mountain Creek has seen a similar effect from its broadened trail job roles. Kovach said much of the resort operations leadership team came through frontline guide (trail manager) positions, bringing with them a wider understanding of the guest journey.
Do it with intention. Some leaders worry that cross-training simply means asking fewer people to do more work. Done poorly, it can. Done intentionally, it can create broader skills, more variety, stronger relationships, and clearer paths to advancement.
Back at Showdown, the morning huddle makes that distinction visible. Stretching says the employee’s body matters. Announcements say everyone deserves to know what is happening. Asking for help says departmental success is secondary to resort success. The dance party, however unconventional, says people should be able to enjoy being on the team.
For a ski area leader, this is where the five themes converge.
The bottom line. The goal is not to eliminate departments. Specialized expertise will always matter in lift maintenance, patrol, accounting, snowmaking and countless other areas. The goal is a resort where the organizational chart does not become more important than the mountain it is supposed to operate and the guests it is committed to serve.
When collaboration is built into the operating culture, cooperation stops being something employees are asked to do. It becomes how the ski area works.
SYSTEMATIZE IT
To foster collaboration, organizations need structures that make communication, shared decision-making and frontline feedback part of daily operations.
That’s the approach Hannah Barrego, executive vice president of strategy, operations and integration for Bear Den Partners (and formerly of Intrawest and Alterra Mountain Company), is taking as the company builds an operating model across Burke Mountain and Smugglers’ Notch, Vt., Berkshire East, Mass., and Catamount, N.Y. Rather than impose one corporate culture on four distinct ski areas, the goal is to create a framework that allows information and ideas to move across departments and levels of leadership across the portfolio while preserving each property’s identity.
Here are five building blocks.
1. Establish the Baseline
Before trying to improve collaboration, understand where each department or resort is starting. Barrego noted that properties—and departments within them—can be at very different stages when it comes to strategic planning, employee feedback, guest metrics, and key performance indicators. Establishing a common baseline gives managers something concrete to work from and creates a shared language for evaluating progress.
2. Build Communication in Both Directions
Frontline employees often see operational friction first: a confusing guest handoff, an inefficient process, or a change in one department that creates unintended consequences somewhere else. Barrego views that information as essential input into planning. “That feedback from the frontline is like starting point one,” she said.
Employee surveys, department conversations, and other feedback mechanisms can identify recurring pain points. Leadership can then bring the right people together to address them rather than dictating the solution from above.
3. Create Relationships Before You Need Them
Cross-functional collaboration becomes much easier when employees already know whom to call.
Bear Den is bringing leaders and functional experts from different resorts together to exchange ideas, compare practices, and build relationships. Barrego said the value is often less about the meeting agenda, rather, “You’re opening a line of communication. You’re building trust across teams.”
Those relationships encourage leaders to begin asking earlier: Who else will this affect? Who should be involved?
4. Make the Decision Process Visible
Collaboration doesn’t mean everyone gets the outcome they want. Bear Den is developing a capital planning framework that defines priorities, decision thresholds, and who participates in the process. Transparency makes the decision-making process understandable even when the answer is no.
The larger lesson applies well beyond capital projects: across departments, people are more likely to support difficult decisions when they understand how those decisions were made and had an opportunity to provide meaningful input.
5. Share the Whole Guest Journey
Barrego suggested onboarding should give frontline employees visibility into the complete guest experience—from researching and booking a visit through arrival, rentals, lessons, lifts, food service and departure. “You don’t know how you’re actually contributing and what impact it has along that guest journey until you know what that guest journey is,” she said.
Seeing the entire journey helps employees understand where they fit, introduces them to colleagues in other departments, and shows how one operational decision can ripple across the resort.
