Teaming
Takes you Further
Amy C. Edmondson
Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School
In 2011, Professor Edmondson was listed in the
Thinkers50 list of management thinkers, published every two years. She is
internationally acclaimed for her work on teams and “teaming,” the process by
which a fluid arrangement of personnel work collaboratively across
organizational boundaries. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Edmondson served as
director of research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she designed and
implemented organizational-change programs for Fortune 100 Companies.
1. Much
of your work focuses on creating a learning organization. How would you define
such an organization? What are its salient characteristics? How do they vary
across cultures, if at all?
A learning
organization is one that is capable of detecting changes in its environment and
responding appropriately to continuously improve and innovate as needed. It is
an organization that is able to withstand the ever-present reality of change in
any business environment. I realize this is a very abstract notion, and one
might think it is either impossible or widespread, depending on how you
interpret the abstract idea. I am going to suggest that it is neither
impossible nor widespread. In fact, most organizations are not learning
organizations. But the few that are tend to experience extraordinary success
over time, over the longer term, in a variety of different industries. It is an
aspiration. It is also not dichotomous, you either are or are not. It is a set
of capabilities one can improve, as well.
I do not have
expertise in cross-cultural comparison other than my own experience traveling,
studying, and writing cases on organizations in a variety of cultures, but not
systematically. My sense is, not really. There are, of course, differences
across cultures, but the meaning of a learning organization and the possibility
of achieving one does not have to be a culturally distinctive or variable
phenomenon.
2. In
your work Teaming, you assert that companies that form flexible collaborative
teams are more likely to succeed in today’s turbulent business environment, but
also note that hierarchical status, as well as cultural and geographic
distance, prevent formation of such teams. Can you elaborate on each of these
impediments to teaming, citing examples of how successful companies have
overcome them?
In a sense, my book is about two things. One is the need for
flexible, dynamic, on-the-spot forms of coordination and collaboration, as
opposed to the kind of coordination that can be scripted and structured in
advance (when we understand the work well enough to do that). When we cannot
understand or predict the work in advance, say, a busy hospital emergency room
or a product-innovation company, or firefighters, or any number of environments
where the work is quite fluid, and the different kinds of collaboration are
needed at different times in the work, I call that teaming. I’d say that it’s easy to understand in a logical way the
need for that kind of flexibility, yet the human psychology can make it
challenging to do it that way, for two major reasons.
First, it is difficult for people just to speak up to people
they don’t know well and / or people above them in the hierarchy, especially
with any kind of content that they fear will be unwelcome. I call it psychological safety when work
environments have found ways to overcome that natural fear. Another way of
thinking about that natural fear is as interpersonal risk. We’re not talking
about workplace risk or physical safety. We are talking, instead, about
interpersonal risk: the kind of risk that is at play when I am thinking, “I don’t want you to think
badly of me.” In that case, I am more likely to hold back—not approach you, not
ask you questions, not offer my ideas—than I am to do all those things. We need
an environment of psychological safety so people don’t hold back, so they bring
their full self to the work. In sum, the first major hurdle is the lack of
psychological safety that characterizes most workplaces unless something is
done to create it.
The second major hurdle is the logistical challenges of
figuring out whom I need to coordinate with at what time. This obstacle can be
overcome with clarity about the goals, clarity about the clients—those who will
receive the work—and a great deal of social
capital in the organization, which means learning as much as I possibly can
about who knows what; who’s good at what; who has what skills. This way, I can
find them, whether through an electronic knowledge-management system or,
depending on the nature of the work, a more local, informal system where I just
know who people are and am more easily able to go to them. So there are
psychological and logistical impediments.
Successful companies that overcome these two hurdles do it in
a variety of ways partly dependent on the type of work, but I can say many
organizations are recognizing this need. For example, in Teaming, I talk about Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, in the U.S. I talk about the chief operating officer. The first
thing she did was put in a new policy called blame-free reporting to make it
safer for people to speak up about errors and potentially risky features of the
patient-care environment. That’s sort of a policy move, but the other thing
people do is train managers in the kinds of inclusive leadership behavior I
have previously described.
To overcome the logistical challenges, Danone, a global
company headquartered in Paris, creates many what they call “knowledge market
places” to help people share their knowledge in a very playful and engaging
setting, and let people know who they are and what they are doing so that these
people come back. Using market places, Danone lowers the logistical and
interpersonal challenges to finding each other in order to learn from one
another.
The Danone example is in the book. Chapter 6, I believe. The
knowledge-boundary chapter. It’s just a small case example, but they did a lot
of creative things to increase the informal knowledge sharing, lowering both psychological
and logistical hurdles to doing so. I have a longer case study on them in the
Harvard system.
3. How do you feel the factors affecting the formation and operation of collaborative teams vary across cultures?
One
of the fascinating aspects about this case study is that people in this company
initially resisted these programs because they thought they were very American.
That’s not true, but they were not French. I am going to say this again later:
There are cultural differences, of course. One of the most important cultural
differences that people have written about is power distance. In Scandinavian
countries, the power distance is thought to be quite low. It’s thought to be
low in America, too. In Asia, power distance is thought to be high. Yet my research
suggests that speaking up with bad news can be quite challenging in Denmark, and
people in Japan are quite able to do so if the right organizational culture is in place. In other words, a cultural tendency
can be overcome with excellent management. And a cultural tendency toward
silence can be exaggerated by bad management, too.
4. When
you and David Garvin were interviewed by harvardonline.org, he cited GE as an
example of a learning organization. Can you think of others? Would Google be
considered one? Can you think of some Japanese firms that are learning
organizations?
From
my point of view, the quintessential learning organization is Toyota. That is
the organization that showed us very early on what it means to be a learning
organization, what it means to build into the DNA of how the company works the
need for constant learning. The dominant image we have for the kind of learning
that Toyota has virtually perfected is the continuous improvement kind, kaizen, the ability to invite every
associate, no matter what job he or she does, to be constantly looking for
small indications that something is not yet perfect. And also bring ways to
make it better. Speaking up. People are invited in a literal way to speak up
through the mechanisms in place. In my mind, Toyota shows the power of building
organizational learning into the culture, into the work processes. The
organization experienced remarkable growth as a result: success, quality,
customer satisfaction virtually unparalleled in the market place. You do not
have to look terribly far in Japan to find this illustration.
5. You
define teaming as teamwork on the fly, collaborating with many colleagues,
often from multiple disciplines and cultures on multiple projects aimed at
fluid goals. Because of the nature of teaming, you note that the trust
essential to effective collaboration is difficult to establish. What can
managers do to facilitate trusting relationships? What can individual
contributors do?
One
thing that managers can do is bring people together in settings where the goal
is to make sure we understand three things about each other: 1. What are you
trying to get done? 2. What skills do you bring? and 3. What are you up
against? Just these three simple questions will go a long way toward building
mutual understanding.
Let’s start with what individual contributors can do. To build trusting relationships, I think people need to first show curiosity about the other person. We are all subject to the blindspot of failing to recognize that we are not omniscient. I can be talking to you, but not really know what you are trying to accomplish, what you brings and know, and what you are up against, the hurdles you face. What are the barriers you see that you are trying to overcome? Maybe I can help. I need to ask first, then explain second. Everyone needs to display their curiosity, then also be willing to share their knowledge.
Managers
can facilitate this sharing simply by creating formal and informal forums for
individuals to become acquainted. I’m not talking about deep friendships, just
the sharing of professional knowledge about who you are, what you know and
bring, and what you need. The degree to which I know you does two things. One,
it makes it easier for me to be myself around you. Two, it makes it easier for
me to both appreciate and access the contributions that you can make.
6. Do
you think there is a relationship between the extent and effectiveness of teaming
and office layout, U.S.-style, private offices / cubicles reducing it and
open-office, Japanese styles, where everyone sits in a row with the section
leader or manager at the head, increasing teaming? Have you ever conducted
research on the effect of office layout on teaming?
I do think that
there is a relationship. In both a visual and psychological way, private
offices increase the barriers to open, flexible communication and teaming.
Recently, I have been conducting research on the effects of office layout on
teaming though the research is not yet completed or published. I’m seeing a
great deal of experimentation on office layout in the U.S. It is quite
interesting, something a lot of people are thinking about right now. They are
experimenting with more open offices, more flexible, reconfigurable offices.
The challenge with teaming is, “I need to work with you today and someone else
tomorrow, and we need the hurdles to be low.” But while we are working
intensely on something complex, we also need some privacy, a place where we can
focus and do our jobs. It’s not a question with one answer, one perfect layout,
so the flexibility needs to be present.
I’m doing some research in two different companies on how they are addressing the need for very fluid teaming relationships through more open office environments. I think it’s quite fascinating. With Melissa Valentine, now assistant professor at Stanford, I have done research on how the physical layout in a hospital, emergency-room setting can make a huge difference. Keeping the whole area open, but having different physical domains where small groups of professionals—doctors, nurses, and the like—are working together at any one time, can improve coordination. We call this kind of structure a team scaffold. It’s not a formal team; it is far more fluid and flexible, but when individuals are working together during a particular day, they are in a particular physical domain of the large, open office space. The scaffold simplifies the teaming that they do to care for patients that day.
7. In an
interview related to your 2011 HBR article, you have indicated that in order
for organizations to learn from failure, they must develop systematic skills
for detecting it, analyzing it, and paradoxically, creating it. Referring to
the last skill, why would an organization want to create failure? What
distinguishes failure that is a source of learning from failure that is not?
No organization wants failure. That’s clear. Yet the
fact is that no organization can innovate without encountering some failure
along the way. Why is that the case? Because innovation refers to something that is brand new, desirable and
useful in some market or setting. It’s virtually impossible, if not completely
impossible, to come up with something new, useful, sellable just by simply
waving a magic wand, and voila, there it is. Instead, innovation is created
through experimentation – through trial and failure, and improvement, testing,
focus groups and so forth. By the time you come up with something really new
and innovative that will be a success in the marketplace, there necessarily
have been failures along the way. The managerial trick is to have rapid failures—I
call them intelligent failures—fast
enough to innovate more quickly than the competition. If there were a way to
innovate, to do basic research without failure, I would be very enthusiastic
about that. But there isn’t, so we
have to embrace failure.
The kind of
failure that is a source of learning is the kind of failure where we have not
done it before. A previous failure repeated is not a source of learning; it’s a
source of waste. A failure that is a source of learning is first and foremost,
one that is novel. It’s on the front lines of what we know. It gives us new
information. That is the most useful type of failure for learning. However, any
failure is a source of learning. Even a failure in a context where we know
better and should be able to something perfectly is still a source of learning,
because we need to stop and understand how something went wrong in something we
should know how to do and ensure that the same failure does not reoccur.
If you divide
the world into routine operations; complex, customized operations; and
innovation operations, failures in any one of those contexts is a source of
learning. But you learn different things. In routine operations, you learn how
to make things even better so that we approach perfection. In complex
operations, we learn how to solve problems that come about in new ways, and in
innovation operations, we learn how to create something brand new and exciting
that the world wants.
8. Because
of the particular nature of start ups, my sense is that creating a learning
organization is even more important than in an incumbent firm, but also more
difficult to establish due to resource constraints and driving focus on growing
the business to a sustainable level. What suggestions can you make for helping
start ups overcome this dilemma?
I think you are
right. I believe learning is even more important for a small company. They face
a stark reality that you either learn or die, and of course, most start ups
die. They never make it to adulthood. That’s because you have a very major
learning challenge, which is to identify the unique success formula that will
allow you to find and serve customers in an operationally and economically
viable way. The start-up has to attract customers’ attention, offer them
something that they are willing to pay for, and it must be something that the
startup can do more capably than available alternatives. The learning is
literally both essential to success, and to a certain extent, more obvious to
everyone. What startups and entrepreneurial companies have going for them is
that they tend to recognize that they must learn, because they are hungry. They
need success. They need to sort it all out. On the one hand, the urgency of
learning is more real, but as you point out, they face resource constraints and
greater challenges recognizing their priorities than more mature organizations.
In a forthcoming
paper with Tiona Zuzul, who was one of my Ph.D. students and is now heading to the
London Business School as an assistant professor, we argue that one of the
major challenges for small, entrepreneurial firms is that they have to both
establish the legitimacy of the firm while also engaging in learning at the
same time. These dual mandates are somewhat in tension, in the same way
advocacy and inquiry are in tension. That is, the startup needs to both
convince the world of its value, and continue to establish and alter its value
at the same time. If the leaders spend too much time out there advocating how
great they are, they will spend less time and be less cognitively open to
improving and changing who they are and what they do. New firms must have both
the flexibility to keep changing and the clarity about the message at the same
time, two phenomena that are in tension. We argue that to overcome this
tension, you have to be very deliberate about it, very explicit because when
you are not explicit about it, you will get caught on the horns of the dilemma.
However, if you thoughtfully recognize this tension, there is a far greater
opportunity to overcome it.
9. Your
acclaimed book Teaming was published in 2012. Have you been working on another
since? If so, please tell us about it.
I have one other
book that is an offshoot of Teaming.
In 2013, Jossey-Bass published my book entitled Teaming to Innovate. It’s a short e-book, also available in
paperback. The book is like a long essay in a way, because it’s only about a
hundred pages. It’s five short chapters: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn
Fast, and Repeat. That book uses some of the examples in my 2012 book on
teaming, but also includes new examples. It’s derivative from the longer book,
but it’s exclusively about innovation, not about everything. That’s one book.
Currently, I am also working on a book in the smart / green-city space.
