Introduction
Most people recognize that the knowledge-based, twenty-first-century organization depends on cross-disciplinary collaboration, flattened hierarchies, and continuous innovation. One reason for this is that expertise has narrowed and many fields have splintered into subfields. Unfortunately, the problems that need solving in the world haven’t narrowed accordingly. Instead, they’ve just become more complex. This means that many challenges must be approached by people working together across disciplines. Product design, patient care, strategy development, pharmaceutical research, and rescue operations are just a few of the activities that call for cross-disciplinary teamwork.
To succeed in a changing and competitive global economy, organizations must also be able to learn. Expertise in almost any field is a moving target. To keep up with developments in their field, people must become lifelong learners, and success will belong to those who can master new skills and envision novel possibilities. Employees must absorb, and sometimes create, new knowledge while executing. Because this process typically happens among individuals working together, collective learning—that is, learning in and by smaller groups—is regarded as the primary vehicle for organizational learning. Consequently, to excel in a complex and uncertain business environment, people need to both work and learn together. The implications of this new reality are enormous for leaders, professionals, and anyone working in an organization.
The recognition of this reality, however, doesn’t always produce a new way of working. Many organizations still rely on the top-down, command-and-control approaches that fueled growth and profitability in the industrial era. Some of the most basic tenets of this management style—ensuring control, eliminating variance, and rewarding conformance—inhibit collaboration and organizational learning. The result is that great companies, led by great managers, can fail when they confront overly complex or dynamic contexts. Most business leaders agree that their employees are important and profess the value of hearing their feedback. Such leaders welcome employee opinions and understand the importance of meeting to discuss how to improve production or create more innovative products. Yet these well-intentioned leaders often fail to reshape how work is really done. This book explores why this gap between recognition and practice persists and provides a leadership framework that can close it.
Teaming, coined deliberately to capture the activity of working together, presents a new, more flexible way for organizations to carry out interdependent tasks. Unlike the traditional concept of a team, teaming is an active process, not a static entity. Imagine a fluid network of interconnected individuals working in temporary teams on improvement, problem solving, and innovation. Teaming blends relating to people, listening to other points of view, coordinating actions, and making shared decisions. Effective teaming requires everyone to remain vigilantly aware of others’ needs, roles, and perspectives. This entails learning to relate to others better and learning to make decisions based on the integration of different perspectives. Therefore, teaming calls for developing both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills. Enabled by distributed leadership, the purpose of teaming is to expand knowledge and expertise so that organizations and their customers can capture the value.
Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy describes the basic activities and conditions that help organizations succeed through teaming. This includes how work gets done, how leaders help make it happen, and how a safe interpersonal environment frees up people to focus on innovation. The model and guidelines presented throughout the book provide readers with a supportive framework for understanding and responding to the dynamics of collective learning. I examine and describe the mindset required to successfully incorporate teaming within an organizational setting, provide a set of leadership practices that can help develop a team-based learning infrastructure, and supply specific strategies for successfully teaming across the most common boundaries that hinder collaboration. In addition, I examine group processes that systematically improve existing knowledge and explain how to effectively use this new collective knowledge to improve organizational routines.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve conducted a series of in-depth research studies on teaming and organizational learning in hospitals, factories, senior management teams, and on NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. Additionally, I’ve written over a dozen case studies in which the themes of teaming and learning are explored in industries as varied as manufacturing, financial services, product design, telecommunications, government, and construction. Cumulatively, this research shows how organizational cultures inhibit or enable teaming, learning, and innovation. It also supports a new definition of what successful execution looks like in the knowledge economy and shows how the best organizations are able to learn quickly while maintaining high performance standards.
While studying organizational learning, I’ve met some extraordinary leaders who have found ways to make their organizations more responsive and competitive. You’ll meet many of them in the chapters that follow. Not all of the leaders I’ve studied were CEOs or heads of major agencies. Many were what I call leaders in the middle: those individuals who make a difference in their organizations by leading projects, instigating improvement, and helping other employees grow. In the course of these studies, I’ve also met individuals, perhaps no less remarkable, in large and multinational organizations who were stymied in their genuine desire to make a difference. In some cases, these leaders were simply thinking about their roles in the wrong way. They thought they needed to provide answers, when instead they needed to ask the right questions.
While contemplating flattened hierarchies and distributed leadership, readers might wonder if the need for strong leadership is fading. In fact, as the book argues throughout, the opposite is true. The activities of teaming—taking risks, confronting failure, and crossing boundaries—are anything but natural acts in large organizations. This means that leadership is now more needed than ever before in today’s complex, constantly changing landscape. This leadership can take two forms: the first is formal leadership, which I call leadership with a large L. Large-L leadership generally includes high-level executives and involves decisions and activities that influence everyone in the organization. This role is critical to effective teaming and usually includes developing organizational culture, direction setting, and the creation of goals.
But much of the time, what’s needed is what I call leadership with a small l. This type of leadership is exercised by people throughout the organization, not just at the top, and especially by those at the front lines where crucial work affecting customer experiences is carried out. This kind of leadership is about developing others’ skills and shaping effective processes. In small-l leadership, those in the thick of collaborative activity help ensure that teaming occurs effectively. Sometimes these leaders have formal responsibility for a project or a department; at other times, they’re simply the ones who see an opportunity to lead and act upon it. With teaming, the concept of leadership then becomes an activity that takes place both at the top ranks of the organization and at the front lines of operations.
As both a practical and research-based resource, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy is tailored to a wide audience that includes leaders of all types and levels, as well as future leaders. Practitioners need approaches that they can readily apply to their work environment. To this end, I provide ideas, solutions, and strategies appropriate for all types of private and public organizations. These are intended to help leaders who wish to study or promote teaming in support of performance improvement. Leaders include executives, managers, team and project leaders, and supervisors searching for ways to create an environment that encourages and supports teaming. The book also is intended to help human resource professionals in aiding collaboration, training people to team, and implementing organizational learning.
In addition, academics and students of business administration and organizational behavior will find the book to be a useful resource for course curricula and research. In conceptualizing teaming, I incorporate relevant scholarly material and empirical evidence. I synthesize many of the findings from my research, previously found only in academic journals, so as to bring this work to the attention of a broader audience. I also draw heavily on the pedagogical tools I’ve developed over the years to deepen students’ comprehension of business issues and to energize classroom discussion. In particular, students will find the three case studies presented in Chapter Eight useful in bridging the gap between theory and practical application.
The idea that an organization should be able to anticipate and respond to changes in its environment is as difficult to put into action as it is compelling. Many adults have to relearn how to learn, and everyone could use help learning how to team. For most individuals, truly engaging with others in a goal-oriented, open-minded, collaborative process requires letting go of some old habits. The human behaviors that make these valuable attributes possible must be painstakingly cultivated. This book explores these issues in three parts.
Part One focuses on teaming, describing the core activities that fuel teaming efforts and answering these questions: How does it work? What does it take for people to learn how to team? What do people do when teaming? How does teaming produce organizational learning? This section describes the challenges to teaming and shows what teaming looks like when it’s done well. Chapter One opens by defining teaming and examining why it’s so crucial in today’s complex organizations, and then presents a new framework for understanding learning and knowledge. In Chapter Two, I describe the step-by-step teaming process in more detail, reveal how easily teaming breaks down, and establish four leadership actions that enable teaming and learning.
Part Two examines these four leadership actions in much greater detail. The emphasis here is on the human side of teaming, with an up-close look at how people work together in a wide variety of organizational contexts. More specifically, Chapter Three explores the power of framing and what leaders can do through framing to promote effective collaboration and learning. In Chapter Four, I look at how psychological safety promotes the attitudes, skills, and behaviors necessary for successful teaming. I detail just how much fear there is in today’s workplace, despite rhetoric to the contrary, and how crippling this fear is for problem solving. Chapter Five shows why failure is an essential part of organizational learning and presents specific practices for overcoming the challenges that failure presents. Chapter Six follows with an examination of the importance, and challenge, of spanning boundaries between disciplines, departments, companies, or even countries—and shows what is possible when we do, starting with the story of the “impossible” rescue of 33 miners trapped under 2,000 feet of rock in the San Jose copper mine in Chile in 2010.
In Part Three, the emphasis shifts from individual and interpersonal behaviors to organizational implementation. Chapter Seven pulls together many of the lessons and strategies from the previous chapters to provide a new model for execution, which includes specific steps for diagnosing, designing, and implementing an iterative process that ensures continuous learning and improvement. I develop the characteristics and attributes of different contexts, based on the level of process knowledge, in more detail. A detailed case study reveals the risk of misdiagnosing process knowledge and the importance of experimentation. Chapter Eight offers three case studies that examine different potential learning outcomes, including process improvement, problem solving, and innovation. The first case study looks at leadership that inspires and empowers dramatic performance turnarounds in existing companies that have fallen behind. In the second case study, I describe leadership that engages people throughout an organization in working together to solve tough problems in complex operations. The third case study focuses on leadership that supports innovation, allowing the kind of teaming that gives rise to pioneering products and processes.
To help readers understand and use the ideas and frameworks, I’ve incorporated a number of special features throughout the book, including the following:
Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy is intended as an accessible resource for anyone trying to increase collaboration and promote long-term success. It is designed so practitioners can easily navigate each chapter and locate specific topics or strategies. This means readers can shift from chapter to chapter and pull out what they need, when they need it. But there’s also an advantage to reading the chapters in order: each chapter is clearly linked and the concepts presented build on each other to help readers develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between teaming, learning, and performance.
Regardless of how a reader chooses to use the book, however, my primary hope is that it will help improve organizational actions through the creation of a more optimistic, collective spirit. When leaders empower, rather than control; when they ask the right questions, rather than provide the right answers; and when they focus on flexibility, rather than insist on adherence, they move to a higher form of execution. When people know their ideas are welcome, they will offer innovative ways to lower costs and improve quality, thus laying a more solid foundation for meaningful work and organizational success.