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Teaming is today’s way of working. Teams too, but that’s a more formal structure so Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the term teaming to focus our attention on the process rather than specific groups such as sports teams, symphonies and our workplace equivalents.
“Teaming is a verb. It is a dynamic activity – not a bounded, static entity. It is largely determined by the mindset and practices of teamwork, not by the design and structures of effective teams. Teaming is teamwork on the fly. It involves co-ordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable team structures, because many operations, such as hospitals, power plants and military installations, require a level of staffing flexibility that makes stable team composition rare,” she writes in 90 Days to Level up Your Teamwork.
Teams can be short term, these days. She notes they get formed and dissolved fast. You could be working on one now but in a few days (or even a few minutes) move to another. Such fast-moving environments require people to know how to team, when called upon.
Teaming suggests collaboration, which is critical. But she stresses teaming in today’s world is about learning together – generating new ideas, finding answers and solving problems. That involves reciprocal interdependence, where back-and-forth communication gets things done.
Organizing ourselves to learn, she stresses, is different from organizing to execute, the pattern we have embraced for the past century, dating back to Henry Ford’s automotive assembly lines. In hiring, we no longer should be looking for conformists and rule followers but problem-solvers and experimenters. Training is not about learning before doing but learning from doing. “Did you get it right?” should no longer be the key question for measuring performance; instead, use “did we learn?”
Those assembly lines and much that followed involved separating out expertise for effectiveness; organizing to learn is about integrating expertise. Even water cooler conversations should change – from discussing the weather to discussing the work. The old, operating-to-execute system fit when the path forward was clear but organizing to learn – and the teaming approach – is meant for a period when the path forward is not clear.
She identifies four pillars for successful teaming: Speaking up, collaboration, experimentation and reflection about what is happening. Her research with University of Virginia professor Jim Detert found speaking up is less common than we think. Although most people they studied thought of themselves as straightforward, rather than hesitant or fearful, they still held back on potentially important ideas at work.
Silence is easier than speaking up. But silence stymies teamwork. “One way to minimize risk to one’s image is simply to avoid speaking up unless you’re sure you’re right, avoid admitting mistakes and, of course, never ask questions or raise tentative ideas that you’re not sure have merit. Although this approach may work for individuals – protecting them from being seen by others in an unfavourable light – it is clearly problematic for organizations and their customers,” she warns.
A prime antidote is psychological safety, a concept she has pioneered with her own research and writing. After nearly two decades of study, she has discovered four main responsibilities leaders have to set the stage for successful teaming:
- Frame the situation for learning: Leaders must encourage people to be active learners. In assigning work and projects, managers must find a way to position it as a chance to collaborate and learn. That involves empowerment and setting out aspirational purpose. She warns that the prevailing mindset in organizations currently revolves around self-protection, so that will be a challenge to reset.
- Make it psychologically safe to team: “Although it sounds simple, the ability to ask questions, seek help and tolerate mistakes while colleagues watch can be unexpectedly difficult. Because co-ordinating and integrating complex tasks requires people to ask questions, share thoughts openly and act without excessive concern about what others think of them, teaming flourishes with psychological safety and diminishes without it,” she says.
- Learn to learn from failure: Failures of all kinds – large and small – offer the chance to gain new insights into how to improve products, services and processes. But fear makes it difficult for many people to fully partake in the needed discussions. The secret for organizations, she says, is to figure out how to gather and act on, rather than ignore or suppress, such potentially valuable information.
- Span occupational and cultural boundaries: Today’s information technologies allow us to collaborate well beyond the organization’s conference table. Despite that, we still favour our own group, location, department or discipline rather than reaching out for the broadest possible learning.
She preaches the importance of “intelligent failure” for teaming and organizational progress. You should be willing to promote failure through small tests and other experimentation. Also, be alert to detect and analyze failure. Make it safe to report errors and problems; indeed, reward problem detection and even false alarms for their value in learning. These are all essential aspects of today’s teaming environment.
Cannonballs
- Some organizations are treating artificial intelligence agents as employees, adding them to the organization chart because they operate with some autonomy and execute tasks that used to be handled by somebody on that chart. But it can backfire. A randomized experiment found humanizing AI can shift accountability away from individuals, reduce review quality and erode professional identity and trust. It also doesn’t meaningfully increase people’s intent to adopt the technology and integrate it into workflows.
- HR blogger Mike Pearce says it’s not normal anymore to hand a new employee a stack of paperwork on their first morning and call it onboarding. Paperwork and credentials should happen a week to 10 days before they appear at the workplace so the first day can be spent learning and meeting people.
- Because trust is vital in marketing, consultant Shep Hyken recommends a Customer Confidence Score for your surveys, similar to the net promotor score: On a scale of one to 10, how much do you trust that we will always do what’s right for you as our customer? Anything below 10 is not good enough, he insists; customers either fully trust you or they don’t.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.