In Teaming, Amy C. Edmondson explains how the increasingly complex and demanding nature of the business world poses learning challenges for organizations. Those who form flexible and collaborative teams to achieve their goals have a better chance of success. However, such collaboration does not come naturally, and Edmondson examines how hierarchical status, cultural differences, and distance often prevent people from effectively teaming up. Leaders can overcome these barriers by recognizing them and modifying their leadership styles to support and facilitate teamwork. Learning is paramount in this process, and much of the most useful learning comes from conflict and failure, which can only occur when leaders foster an atmosphere of psychological safety.
Amy C. Edmondson offers readers the following advice:
• Teamwork is a dynamic activity, not a static and limited entity. It involves coordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable team structures, because many operations require a level of staff flexibility that makes stable team composition rare.
• The power of teamwork in complex operations is the ability to anticipate, solve and diagnose problems and reduce system risks to avoid consequential failures.
• In innovation operations, leadership is needed to create an environment that is receptive to exploration and experimentation. Teamwork is essential to generating new ideas, narrowing them down to the most viable options, testing and refining them, and ultimately producing innovative and useful new possibilities.
• Learning from failure is a crucial team skill. Unfortunately, most people view failure as unacceptable and therefore go to great lengths to avoid any association with it. This attitude is unfortunate, as many failures provide useful information on how to improve techniques or increase efficiency.
• To advance useful experimentation, leaders must reward both experimentation and failure, use verbiage that breaks intellectual boundaries to learn from failure, and make insightful experiments that breed smarter failures their motto.
• Essential learning in organizations does not occur through individuals working alone to classify and solve important problems, but through people working and learning collaboratively in flexible teams.
Teamwork by Amy C. Edmondson is written for executives, managers, project leaders, and supervisors who wish to study or promote the concept of teamwork to improve organizational performance. The book provides guidelines for establishing frameworks for understanding and responding to the fluidities of collective learning. It is written in a scholarly and well-researched style and contains numerous tables and exhibits. Most chapters conclude with sections titled “Leadership Summary” and “Lessons and Actions,” which highlight key points and essential performance considerations. It was written to allow readers to navigate between chapters to locate specific information as needed, but can also be read sequentially. Readers will find the book a useful aid in guiding colleagues and organizations through increasingly complex problems and challenges.
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