Teaming

"Amy Edmondson's Teaming is an instant classic-a brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, and highly informative guide to the critical but often mismanaged process of collaboration. Whether in hospitals, factories, or space shuttles, she shows how rapid adjustment and learning produce success, and why failure is just a step along the way." -Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor, Harvard Business School; author, Confidence and SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profit, Growth, and Social Good "Health care is in transition from a hierarchical, industrial age model centered on appointments with physicians to the information age where inputs are more complex and people are more connected. In order to create patient-focused, information-enabled solutions, we need to be guided by Edmondson's teachings about learning, collaboration, and teaming." -Jack Cochran, executive director, Kaiser Permanente, The Permanente Federation, LLC "As hierarchical decision making breaks down in the on-demand information age, I believe enlightened team leadership is the key to success. Edmondson understands this and offers compelling new paradigms for team performance in the 21st century." -Douglas R. Conant, retired CEO, Campbell Soup Company; author, New York Times bestseller, TouchPoints "I have admired Amy Edmondson and her work for over two decades. Now it is your turn. Her clarity about how we work when we work at our best, her simple yet penetrating ways to show the how as well as the what-the method as well as the magic-together beautifully evoke and explain what human beings can actually accomplish together. As our problems get more complex and urgent, few domains will be more important than teaming." -Peter Senge, founding chairperson, SoL; senior lecturer, MIT; author, The Fifth Discipline, Presence, and The Necessary Revolution "Amy Edmondson has created the most complete and compelling book I've ever read on what makes great teams tick-and how to build and sustain them." -Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University; author, New York Times bestseller, Good Boss, Bad Boss

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches courses in leadership, organizational learning, and operations management in the MBA and Executive Education programs.

Foreword by Edgar H. Schein xi Introduction 1 part one teaming 1 A New Way of Working 11 Teaming Is a Verb 12 Organizing to Execute 15 The Learning Imperative 19 Learning to Team, Teaming to Learn 24 Organizing to Learn 26 Execution-as-Learning 30 The Process Knowledge Spectrum 32 A New Way of Leading 38 Leadership Summary 42 Lessons and Actions 42 2 Teaming to Learn, Innovate, and Compete 45 The Teaming Process 50 Four Pillars of Effective Teaming 51 The Benefits of Teaming 56 Social and Cognitive Barriers to Teaming 60 When Conflict Heats Up 67 Leadership Actions That Promote Teaming 75 Leadership Summary 78 Lessons and Actions 79 part two organizing to learn 3 The Power of Framing 83 Cognitive Frames 84 Framing a Change Project 89 The Leader's Role 93 Team Members' Roles 96 The Project Purpose 99 A Learning Frame Versus an Execution Frame 102 Changing Frames 104 Leadership Summary 111 Lessons and Actions 112 4 Making It Safe to Team 115 Trust and Respect 118 Psychological Safety for Teaming and Learning 125 The Effect of Hierarchy on Psychological Safety 131 Cultivating Psychological Safety 135 Leadership Summary 145 Lessons and Actions 146 5 Failing Better to Succeed Faster 149 The Inevitability of Failure 150 The Importance of Small Failures 151 Why It's Difficult to Learn from Failure 154 Failure across the Process Knowledge Spectrum 160 Matching Failure Cause and Context 164 Developing a Learning Approach to Failure 168 Strategies for Learning from Failures 170 Leadership Summary 182 Lessons and Actions 183 6 Teaming Across Boundaries 185 Teaming Despite Boundaries 191 Visible and Invisible Boundaries 193 Three Types of Boundaries 197 Teaming Across Common Boundaries 201 Leading Communication across Boundaries 212 Leadership Summary 215 Lessons and Actions 216 part three execution-as-learning 7 Putting Teaming and Learning to Work 221 Execution-as-Learning 222 Using the Process Knowledge Spectrum 229 Facing a Shifting Context at Telco 234 Learning That Never Ends 240 Keeping Learning Alive 252 Leadership Summary 254 Lessons and Actions 256 8 Leadership Makes It Happen 257 Leading Teaming in Routine Production at Simmons 258 Leading Teaming in Complex Operations at Children's Hospital 265 Leading Teaming for Innovation at IDEO 276 Leadership Summary 283 Moving Forward 285 Notes 289 Acknowledgments 309 About the Author 313 Index 315