Teaming in the Twenty-First
Century
Today's teams are not well designed
for getting work done in the twenty-first century, argues Professor Amy C.
Edmondson. One starting point: learn the skill of "teaming."
Even as academic journals and
business sections of bookstores fill up with titles devoted to teams, teamwork,
and team players, Harvard Business School Professor Amy C. Edmondson wonders if
many might be barking up the wrong tree.
"I've begun to think that teams
are not the solution to getting the work done," says Edmondson, the
Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management.
“Teaming is the engine of organizational learning.”
The problem: Stable teams that plan
first and execute later are increasingly infeasible in the twenty-first century
workforce, she explains. Coordination and collaboration are essential, but they
happen in fluid arrangements, rather than in static teams.
In her new book, Teaming: How
Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy,
Edmondson says that surviving—and thriving—in today's economic climate requires
a seismic shift in how we think about and use teamwork.
Edmondson has been studying teamwork
for two decades. In that time, "we've seen fewer stable, well-designed,
well-composed teams, simply because of the nature of the work, which is more
uncertain and dynamic than before. As a means for getting the work done, we've
got to focus on the interpersonal processes and dynamics that occur among
people working together for shorter durations."
This means that people have to get
good at "teaming"—reaching out, getting up to speed, establishing
quickly who they are and what they bring, and trying to make progress without a
blueprint. The skill set involves interpersonal awareness, skillful inquiry,
and an ability to teach others what you know.
Teaming is very different from the
idea of building a high-performance team to fit a known task. It is dynamic;
learning and execution occur simultaneously."Teaming is the engine of
organizational learning," says Edmondson.
From
theory to practice
In the book, Edmondson makes the
case for managers to shift from holding a static view of teamwork to this
dynamic one. Real-world examples drawn from her research illustrate the
concept, and she offers strategies and solutions applicable to organizations of
all shapes and sizes to help them put effective teaming into practice.
The book synthesizes 20 years of
research. And unlike many authors, Edmondson did not find writing difficult.
"The hardest part was figuring out how to create a structure that
worked," she says. "When I think about my research, it doesn't
necessarily organize itself into a clear narrative from point A to point
B."
Edmondson's career hasn't followed a
clear narrative either. After earning her undergraduate degree in engineering
and design from Harvard, she went to work for Buckminster Fuller. "It's
what indirectly got me into this game in the first place," she explains.
"I began to understand part of a larger vision of using thoughtful design
to solve big problems in the world…and I became interested in how people come
together and work together to innovate, to problem-solve, to do better
things."
Edmondson cites her academic mentors
at Harvard—J. Richard Hackman, a leading thinker in team effectiveness, and
Chris Argyris, an organizational learning expert—as core influences. "This
[teaming] was a blending of two different ideas: my deep interest in
interpersonal dynamics that thwart learning and my growing interest in how work
takes place in the team and in the team context," she says.
Understanding the impact of
interpersonal dynamics is crucial. "There's a growing recognition that
most of today's truly important problems related to the environment, related to
smart cities, related to health care simply cannot be solved without
cross-disciplinary collaboration," says Edmondson.
To illustrate, she tells the story
of the execution of a CT scan, a process that took four days to unfold in one
hospital, but should have taken a couple of hours. Each member of the highly
trained staff involved with the scan performed his or her job well, but it was
the hospital's hierarchical and siloed structure—so common in health care—that
no longer worked.
The solution, according to
Edmondson, is a teaming process that includes a deep recognition among
individual players of the interdependency of their roles. This recognition
leads naturally to early and consistent communication among formerly separate
parties throughout their joint work. Once the task is completed, more
communication—this time in the form of reflection and feedback—must take place.
Edmondson is careful to point out
that conversations can be brief—but they need to happen. And the impetus for
having those conversations must come from the top. As a leader of a siloed,
specialized workforce, "your job is to see the bigger picture and create
the culture whereby skills and knowledge of the workforce are expressed,"
she says.
“The most counterproductive thing a manager can do is to
come down hard in a punitive manner on a well-intentioned failure.”
"There's a growing recognition
across all sectors about the importance of speaking up," Edmondson
continues. "The financial crisis can be tracked back to no small degree to
people's reluctance to speak up with concerns about models and products that
were likely to fail." It's up to leaders, she says, to foster the climate
of psychological safety required to overcome that reluctance.
But
getting
employees to speak up is
no easy task. "The reality of hierarchical social systems is that people hold deeply ingrained, taken-for-granted
beliefs that it's dangerous to speak up or disagree with those in power."
And management can be part of the
problem without even knowing it.
"People in positions of
relative power often inadvertently reinforce the very messages that are already
deeply ingrained in our mental models," she says. Combating this takes
conscious effort, including sending the message out that it is OK to fail.
"Very few people set out to
fail, to make mistakes," says Edmondson. "And in a dynamic,
unpredictable, and often ambiguous world, failures will happen." Managers
must accept their employees' failures as well as their own. "The most
counterproductive thing a manager can do is to come down hard in a punitive
manner on a well-intentioned failure."
But not coming down hard doesn't
mean coming down soft. "Psychological safety is not about being nice; it's
not about letting people off easy and being comfortable," Edmondson
stresses. "It's about the courage to be direct and holding high
expectations of each other, understanding that uncertainty and risk are part of
the work, as is the occasional failure." A leader's challenge is to set a
climate where psychological safety, accountability, and pressure to do the best
possible work exist together.
"We're in a new world, and our
old management models don't fit as well as we would like," she says.
"Those organizations that aren't harvesting and using the knowledge and
ideas and questions of their members are not going to remain viable compared to
competitors that do." In Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate,
and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, Edmondson provides the tools
organizations need to do this.
Maggie Starvish is a writer based in Somerville, Massachusetts.http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7122.html?wknews=09052012
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