2014-11-30 Harvard Business School Professor Amy C. Edmondson: "Teaming Takes You Further"

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.

Her recent book, Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), is a must-read.

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?

 Yes, I can think of other examples of learning organizations. I do believe that Google would be considered one. In fact, I recently read a new case study on Google by David Garvin explaining how they are learning how to better develop managers. In fact, I just read it yesterday. The case study is very good evidence of how they are developing a learning organization. Clearly, as an organization that has grown exponentially since its founding in 1998, the company has changed everything but the absolute core of their search engine. Google has changed how it runs itself, the additional products and services that it offers. It is an organization in a state of constant learning, and a good illustration of the power of learning. Another organization would be Southwest Airlines in the U.S. It has continually learned and improved its operational capability.

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.