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
New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change
Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming.
Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure.
Presents a clear explanation of practical management concepts for increasing learning capability for business results
Introduces a framework that clarifies how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work
Explains how Collaborative Learning works, and gives tips for how to do it well
Includes case-study research on Intermountain healthcare, Prudential, GM, Toyota, IDEO, the IRS, and both Cincinnati and Minneapolis Children's Hospitals, among others
Based on years of research, this book shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn.
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.
