Teaming: Turning Strangers into Collaborators
Overview: In a complex and fast-moving economy, on-the-fly teaming is required to solve our toughest problems. We must gather experts, focus them, and develop solutions to remain competitive as an organization and as a country. Command-and-control leadership, which works in more predictable ways in manufacturing-based cultures, falls far short in a knowledge-based and adaptive culture. Teaming and collaboration that combine different talents, points of view, and perspectives capture value more readily in this more complex environment. The fundamentals of teaming—like taking risks, embracing failure, and crossing boundaries—feel unnatural to command-and-control cultures but are necessary if we are to compete successfully.
1.?????A Way of Knowing. What is Teaming? Typically, a fixed team is a group of specific people with interdependent goals and in pursuit of a common goal. However, many teams—in healthcare, law enforcement, military, business—don’t have the fixed-team luxury but must “team” on the fly. Thus, teaming isn’t fixed or bounded—rather, dynamic and adaptive. However, teaming still relies on trust and collaborative skills. Some history: Moving from a farming culture to an industrial one turned people from independent farmers into cogs on assembly lines in Detroit. At the core of Frederick Taylor’s management science process sits fear and adherence to rules. Productivity and efficiency thrive, but creativity and engagement die. However, in a complex, fast-moving and adaptive system, success depends on self-regulation based on feedback loops.
2.?????Teaming to Learn. How does the teaming process work? Teaming requires people willing to speak up—to speak the truth. It’s too easy for people to remain silent and avoid the elephant in the room. Good teaming requires four key behaviors:?Speaking up, collaboration, experimentation, and reflection. However, cognitive, psychological, interpersonal and organizational factors can get in the way. Embracing, not avoiding, differences makes the difference between failure and success. Thus, leaders need skills that moderate, negotiate and coordinate differing points of view to build thriving environments of trust and respect. The benefits that make teaming worthwhile are better organizational performance and more engaging environments. The four elements of a teaming-to-learn approach are framing, psychological safety, boundary spanning, and cultural boundaries.
3.?????The Power of Framing. How do you frame issues? Our thinking shapes our behavior, which shapes our results. Leaders are powerful framers for organizations and can help people see their individual purpose and connection within larger company goals and objectives. Assuming a learning frame of mind allows people to see value in differences. Three critical behaviors of good leaders include emphasizing the following: the team’s interdependence and collaboration (including the leader), the hand-picked nature of participants, and the compelling purpose for the group. This framing creates team buy-in and has profound impact on performance. Establishing a teaming-to-learn frame requires enrollment, preparation, trial and reflection. To hammer the frame home, leaders use and reward framing language, symbols and behaviors (see loc 1876 table). Stages to establish a teaming-to-learn frame: Enrollment: why, role, expectation; Preparation: off-site team session; Trial: doing work as an experiment; and Reflection: thinking and observing the process.
4.?????Creating Safety for the Team. How do you make it safe to team? The 4 risks that inhibit people from speaking up: The fear of being viewed as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. Psychological safety creates an atmosphere allowing the truth to be told without negative repercussions.?Such safety can vary within organizations, even within small groups. In fact, research shows that we prefer warmth and trustworthiness over competence. The benefits of psychological safety: Encourages people to speak up, enables clarity of thought, supports productive conflict, mitigates failure, promotes innovation, removes obstacles to success, and increases accountability. The leader’s role is to create psychological safety by being approachable, showing limits of his/her knowledge, displaying fallibility, inviting participation, noting failures as learning, using direct language, setting boundaries, holding people accountable for transgressions.
5.?????Failing and Succeeding Faster. Why is it good to fail? Everyone and every organization has failures along the way. Teaming is no different. However, we’re not organized to analyze failure or to incentivize risk taking to the extent we can adapt quickly to ever-changing environments. Winning organizations embrace failure as learning and have systems to encourage people to speak up and processes that capture the learning. Experimenting, failing, reflecting, and learning is what great scientists do and what great organizations do.
6.?????Teaming Across Boundaries. Why does it pay to span boundaries? Companies and organizations that embrace failure as learning experiment more and innovate faster than the competition. Leaders need to create a safe environment to fail in and avoid the tendency to blame and show strong disapproval—rather to create a culture of inquiry, discovery, reflection, and experimentation. Leaders need to adopt a failure-to-learning process composed of curiosity, patience and a tolerance for ambiguity.
7.?????Applying Teaming. How do we use teaming at work? When companies organize to only execute better and not to adapt and learn, the outcomes are starkly different—especially when confronting complex situations in a competitive environment. Thus, execution as efficiency is less adaptive and vulnerable than execution as learning—the four stages of which are: Diagnose, Design, Act, and Reflect.
Leadership and Teaming. What does teaming look like in different settings? Crossing boundaries will be required to solve our most vexing problems like transportation, education, energy and others. Shortsightedness can get in the way of long-term solutions using learning as execution. Organizations like Intermountain Healthcare and IDEO work with competitors to solve larger societal problems:?“Teaming across distance, knowledge, and status boundaries is increasingly vital, as old models (economic, political, organizational), old technologies, and old mindsets prove cumbersome in the face of new challenges.”
Watch Amy Edmondson's TED Talk
Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in a Knowledge Economy?by Amy Edmondson (Wiley, 2012), reviewed by Steve Gladis.