Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy – Amy C. Edmondson
This book focuses on how organizations learn and innovate in the knowledge economy and provides an in-depth look at how teams work, how they learn, and how they can be more effective.
The book covers topics such as team formation, team dynamics, team-based problem solving, and team-based decision making. It also provides guidance on how to develop high-performing teams and how to create an environment in which teams can be most successful.
The Power of Framing
Frames are interpretations that individuals rely on to sense and understand their environment. Most of the time, framing occurs automatically. Reframing is a powerful leadership tool for shifting behaviors and enrolling people in change. How people working in an organization, especially those in leadership positions, frame a project can determine the difference between success and failure.
Successfully framing a new initiative that calls for both teaming and learning is about roles and goals: the leader’s role, team members’ roles, and the teaming effort’s goal or purpose. In framing their role, leaders must explicitly communicate their interdependence and express both their own fallibility and the need for collaboration.
Organize to learn
Organizing to learn is a way of leading that encourages speaking up, asking questions, and sharing ideas so as to promote collective learning. Execution-as-learning is a way of operating that folds continuous learning into the day-by-day work process.
Execution-as-learning usually happens in teams and is supported by the leadership practices of organizing to learn.
Communication is Key
Establishing a superordinate goal, fostering curiosity, and providing process guidelines are important leadership actions for promoting good communication across boundaries.
To overcome geographic boundaries, group members should make periodic visits to other sites, pay close attention to unique local knowledge, and contribute to knowledge repositories and exchanges.
Defining roles
In defining team members’ roles, leaders need to emphasize that they have picked skilled people who are vital to the success of the project. To inspire and unite team members, leaders must communicate a clear and compelling purpose. Establishing a learning frame involves four iterative steps: enrollment, preparation, trial, and reflection.
Psychological safety: Making It Safe to Team
Psychological safety describes individuals’ perceptions regarding the consequences of interpersonal risks in their work environment. Four specific image risks that people face at work are being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In psychologically safe environments, characterized by both trust and respect, people believe that if they make a mistake or ask for help, others will not penalize them.
Because psychological safety encourages self-expression and productive discussion, it’s essential to teaming and organizational learning. Psychological safety is not about being nice or about lowering performance standards. Instead, psychological safety allows groups to set high goals and work toward them through collaboration and collective learning.
A New Way of Working
Success in today’s complex and volatile business environment requires flexibility, coordination, and collaboration. Teaming is a dynamic way of working that provides the necessary coordination and collaboration without the luxury (or rigidity) of stable team structures.
Teaming and its associated interpersonal behaviors support organizational learning, and require the right leadership mindset to optimize outcomes. This way of working allows employees to grow personally and professionally, whereas traditional top-down and assembly-line models treated workers like children who must be told what to do.
Teaming to Learn, Innovate, and Compete
Although teaming is imperative in today’s organizations, neither teams nor organizations naturally do it well.
Successful teaming requires four behaviors: speaking up, collaboration, experimentation, and reflection. These behaviors are enacted in iterative cycles. Each new cycle is informed by the results of the previous cycle. Cycles continue until desired outcomes are achieved.
Managing conflict
To moderate conflict, leaders should identify the nature of the conflict, model good communication, identify shared goals, and encourage difficult conversations. Due to the challenges of teaming, particular attention should be paid to the role of leadership. The mindset and practices of organizing to learn enable both teaming and learning.
Successfully implementing an organizing-to-learn mindset involves four actions: framing for learning, making it psychologically safe, learning to learn from failure, and spanning occupational and cultural boundaries.
Benefits of psychological safety
Research reveals seven specific benefits provided by psychological safety: it encourages speaking up, enables clarity of thought, supports productive conflict, mitigates failure, promotes innovation, moderates the relationship between goals and performance, and increases employee accountability.
Hierarchy and the fear it creates negatively affect psychological safety.
Lower-status team members generally feel less safe than higher-status members. Leaders play crucial roles in promoting a psychologically safe organization. But psychological safety cannot be simply authorized or mandated. Instead, it requires specific leadership actions.
Psychological safety and the role of leaders
To cultivate a psychologically safe environment, leaders should be accessible and approachable, acknowledge the limits of current knowledge, be willing to display fallibility, invite participation, refrain from penalizing failure, use direct language, set boundaries, and hold people accountable.
The emphasis should be on the group’s tasks, how they’re changing, and what’s needed to do them well. This makes the need for psychological safety a conclusion that people can discover for themselves.
Better results
To achieve better teaming or learning results, experiment with the following individual tactics: Tell yourself that the project presents an exciting opportunity; see yourself as critical to a successful outcome; tell yourself that others are important to a successful outcome; and communicate with others as if the preceding three points are true.
Failing better to succeed faster
When bringing together people with different perspectives and skills, failure is inevitable because of both technical and interpersonal challenges. Failures provide valuable information that allows organizations to be more productive, innovative, and successful. But due to strong psychological and social reactions to failing, most of us see failure as unacceptable.
Logically, we can see that many failures in organizations cannot be prevented, but emotionally, it’s hard to separate failure from blame. This leads to the types of punitive reactions that cause many failures to go unreported or misdiagnosed.
Teaming Across Boundaries
People teaming in today’s workplaces are unlikely to be homogenous in beliefs, attitudes, or opinions. When not managed consciously and carefully, these differences can inhibit collaboration. The term boundaries refers to both visible and invisible divisions between people, including gender, occupation, or nationality.
Boundaries exist based on the taken-for-granted assumptions and diverse mindsets that people hold in different groups.
The Benefits
There are several benefits to teaming. These benefits fall into two categories: better organizational performance and more engaging and satisfying work environments.
The collaborative behaviors required by teaming, however, create group tensions and conflict. Leaders who do not grasp the concept that conflict is desirable to teaming and who do not learn the skills necessary to confront conflict are destined to fail.
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