- 07 Oct 2024
- The Parlor Room
Amy Edmondson on Building High-Performing Teams
As mentioned in Poets&Quants, The Parlor Room's second season kicks off with Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson joining host Chris Linnane to discuss how organizations can foster teaming through clear communication, psychological safety, and intelligent failure.
Guest
Amy Edmondson, CLIMB Faculty Chair, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management
Resources
Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, HBS Online's most comprehensive offering featuring Edmondson's Dynamic Teaming course (https://hbs.me/2p9c3mvf)
Professor Edmondson's books (https://hbs.me/yjcw5e7v)
Related HBS Online blog posts:
- CLIMB Program Q&A With HBS Professor and Faculty Chair Amy Edmondson (https://hbs.me/4dnne2ct)
- CORe vs. CLIMB: Which HBS Online Credential Program Is Right for You? (https://hbs.me/b25beasp)
- What Is Dynamic Teaming & Why Is It Important? (https://hbs.me/2p8khvn5)
- How To Build a Psychologically Safe Workplace (https://hbs.me/yp7t66h5)
- 4 Characteristics of an Effective Team (https://hbs.me/cfjjprmh)
Transcript
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file.
Chris Linnane:
The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.
Amy Edmondson:
One of the things that happens when you engage in teaming is failure. And of course, that sounds terrible, I don't want to fail, but I think what most people don't fully understand is that failure comes in multiple categories and not all failures are bad. In fact, some failures are very good.
Chris Linnane:
Welcome to The Parlor Room where business concepts come to life. My name is Chris Linnane and I'm the creative director at Harvard Business School online. On today's show, we're diving into two critical concepts for building high-performing teams: teaming and psychological safety. I'm thrilled to be joined by HBS Professor Amy Edmondson. Professor Edmondson is a leading expert on team dynamics and organizational learning. In our discussion, she'll explain why concepts like teaming and psychological safety are so important for collaboration and innovation. We'll also discuss real-world examples from her research and teaching. Professor Edmondson teaches two courses in our CLIMB program, which stands for the Credential of Leadership Impact and Management in Business. So let's get started. I hope you'll find our conversation both insightful and practical for your own work. So your concept of teaming, what is it and how does it differ from traditional definitions of teamwork?
Amy Edmondson:
Teaming is an idea that I introduce simply to make clear the flexibility and fluidity of today's teams. So long ago, it would be much more likely that you'd be in a team at work, and the membership of that team would be fairly stable over time. So a lot of the advice for great teamwork was about how do you set the team up, who needs to be on the team, make sure they have a clear goal, make sure they have a clear line of sight on the work they have to do. And if you give them the right structures and the right support and the right resources and the right members, then the team will be very likely to perform well. Now that's great if the membership of your teams is going to be stable, but in today's work environment, it's far more likely that you're on multiple teams, that any team or teamwork that you're doing will be short-lived, and that there's a lot of fluidity and flexibility of membership of teams. So I thought it was better to describe that just to call our attention to this phenomenon as teaming, to put the lens squarely on the processes and activities of teamwork rather than the structures of teamwork.
Chris Linnane:
Great. And what led you to this framework? How did you develop the framework?
Amy Edmondson:
Honestly, it was from research. I had done early in my career field research in hospitals, and I was in there to study teams and I wanted to study team performance, and I wanted to study team learning. And I kept asking everybody, tell me about your team. Who's your team? And they would say, well, which team? And I began to realize nearly everyone I spoke with was on more than one team. And there were teams that were based on their specialty. There were teams that were based on the particular group of patients that they're seeing at a given time. There are teams that are based on shift. So the word team didn't quite capture it. And then I'd say, okay, well let's talk about the group of patients in the ICU right now, that team, well, which shift of that team? You'd be working with different people at different times of the day. The shift structure isn't everybody eight to three and then shift and everybody else comes in. It's much more fluid and flexible than that. And yet the quality of care that was given to those patients was utterly dependent on the excellence of the coordination among caregivers. So teamwork mattered immensely, but teams weren't the right way to understand it. And then as time goes on, I began to realize that many of these same dynamics were playing out in other kinds of businesses as well, whether that's tech or fast-moving consumer goods, you name it. People were far more likely to be experiencing fluid teamwork rather than the stable teams of yesterday.
Chris Linnane:
Now, in your example of the medical field, I know from emergency room visits, if that's not organized, that's absolute chaos.
Amy Edmondson:
It's absolute chaos, and it contributes to long wait times and it contributes to sometimes poor outcomes. In fact, in one study of teaming that I did with Melissa Valentine, who's now a professor at Stanford, but was a PhD student here, we studied a hospital, an urban tertiary care hospital that introduced a kind of very light and simple change to their teaming, and it made a world of difference. And so that change was, instead of just allowing everyone to figure out who they needed at what time and hope it goes well, they decided to assign pods, which is like a team when you came to work, but it wouldn't be a stable team. It would just be your pod would be pod A or B or C or D. Today, based on when you came in, we'd quickly assign you to a pod. That would be the pod you'd be in for the rest of the shift. But meanwhile, other people would come and go in that pod. So the teamwork was still fluid as it almost has to be, but it was more stable than undermanaged. So these pods created a kind of scaffolding that allowed people to know more quickly. If I'm looking for a physician to team up with right now, and I'm a nurse, I know my physician, it's the physician in the same pod that I'm in, that brought throughput times or wait times down by a few hours and improved the quality of care.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, I would think the quality of care would go way up. But speed is.
Amy Edmondson:
Also, yeah, I mean, nobody wants to wait in an emergency room for eight hours.
Chris Linnane:
No one of the worst experiences you can have. What are the key characteristics of someone that would become or organization that would become good at teaming? How do you develop those characteristics?
Amy Edmondson:
Well, I like to think of them as the hardware and the software and the hardware is sort of as much clarity as we can have about goals, about resources, about tasks and timelines, and then communicating those clearly early and often. And then the software is really the interpersonal skill to have genuine curiosity in what others bring. So if I'm working with new people all the time, I need to get up to speed on what they bring and what they're up against. And I don't need their whole life story, but I need to know enough about them to be able to work together effectively toward these tasks and goals that we're responsible for carrying out.
Chris Linnane:
So I think I did some teaming earlier in my career. Can I tell you what it was and you tell me if you think it was actually teaming or just dumb luck? So it wasn't really my career. Late in college, I was on a maintenance crew at an apartment complex. It was like a condo complex. It was so big, Amy, that there had its own zip code. That's how big it was. And a lot of older people there, a lot of just all kinds of people there. But my job was to do things like roofing and siding and stuff like that. And there was this one guy named Jimmy who wouldn't stop talking. All he did was talk. He had every AC DC album cover tattooed on his stomach. It's pretty odd, I think. But he would talk so much. It would drive me crazy that I thought, I'm going to push this guy off the roof. I never did it. I really wouldn't.
Amy Edmondson:
Do that. Glad to hear it.
Chris Linnane:
But I noticed also in this development, there'd be people who would just kind of come out and talk to you the whole time, and that's fine. But there are areas I'd call lonely zones where people would just wait for us and you'd see them wander out of their house talk. We couldn't get anything done, and it hit me. I could just push Jimmy around to these different places to kind of occupy these people because they're happy and he's happy, he loves to do it.
Amy Edmondson:
We're getting work done. So maybe it wasn't really a pod, but I used him in a way that was useful. Well…
Chris Linnane:
You identified his skills…
Amy Edmondson:
And…
Chris Linnane:
What he loved to do, and you saw a need and that allowed you then to get your work done. So I think it is teaming now. My question is, did he actually have a job he was responsible for?
Chris Linnane:
He had the same job I had, which was, he's supposed to be roofing and siding and mowing lawns and stuff, but he wasn't doing, he liked talk so much more.
Amy Edmondson:
Right. So you found a better job for him.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, we basically distributed him to lonely zones.
Amy Edmondson:
I love that.
Chris Linnane:
And worked out well. Alright, so I did it. It wasn't just luck.
Amy Edmondson:
I'll label that it's teamwork on the fly. You didn't see that coming or you didn't know this guy was going to show up and just sort of get in the way of you really getting work done or make you crazy. But once you saw this connection, you could make that connection.
Chris Linnane:
How does an organization's leadership or culture affect its ability to actually implement teaming? What can they do to make it more successful?
Amy Edmondson:
I think it really, it starts at the top. It starts with organizations having clarity about the value they provide to customers. So when they have that clarity and they communicate it widely, it helps everyone get on the same page. So we know where we're trying to go, we know what we're trying to do. And then that dramatically increases the chances that people are looking around to see who is here that they need to work with to sort of get their job done and related to clarity about the value we provide. And the reason why it matters that our company exists is the ability to bring in the right people, the right resources, the right technology, and all of the infrastructure that allows us to execute on that promise. And again, it's very hard to team effectively if you're wildly under-resourced or if you don't know where you're trying to get to or if you have no way to easily connect with and figure out who your colleagues are and who you're supposed to be working with and who might be available. So it's that kind of clarity that allows people to coordinate their efforts in pursuit of performance and to do it in a dynamic, flexible way. And so I think that's kind of the most important thing. I do think it matters, and particularly for teaming, to give people training, to give people training and interpersonal skills in management, in giving people feedback, in asking for help. The art of asking a good question is not something that necessarily everybody comes to their first job knowing how to do well. So there are skills and training that organizations can provide to make it easier for people to do this.
Chris Linnane:
What excites you most about the prospect of teaming done right?
Amy Edmondson:
That's a great question. And my answer is I think it brings joy and satisfaction to the teamers. It's when you can leave work at the end of the day and say, wow, I had a great day today. You enjoyed the people you worked with. You felt good about what you accomplished. There weren't endless obstacles that made it impossible to get your job done, or you didn't have someone who was just disruptive all the time and wouldn't let you get your work done. And you had the opposite of that, right? You had people that you believe are capable, and you enjoy working with them and you feel like you got a lot done. So one of the things that happens when you engage in teaming is failure. And of course, that sounds terrible, I don't want to fail. But I think what most people don't fully understand is that failure comes in multiple categories and not all failures are bad. In fact, some failures are very good. So I want to tell you about my framework for describing the failure landscape. There are three kinds of failure: basic failures, complex failures, and intelligent failures. And so I'll define them one by one and give you the implications. So basic failures are failures caused by a single factor. Usually human error. We have a good process for getting the result we want, but someone made a mistake and we got a failure instead. There is an amazing story about a Citibank employee about three years ago who made a mistake and checked the wrong box in an online form and accidentally transferred $900 million to a group of lenders. Later, a judge made a very controversial finders keepers ruling that disallowed CitiBank from getting the money refunded. So that was a basic failure. And I only use that example because I want to be clear that basic doesn't mean small or large. Some basic failures are super small. I forget to plug in my cell phone and it goes dead. I miss an appointment. It's some are nine hundreds, not the end of the world, million dollars, history, but some are $900 million or worse, an airline accident and so on. So that's a basic failure. A complex failure, unlike a basic failure, has multiple causes. Any one of which on its own would not be sufficient to cause the failure. And so these are the perfect storms. These are the failures that happen because a whole handful of things line up in just the wrong way. And a supply chain breakdown during a global pandemic would be an example. It's not one thing. It's a few workers who are sick and can't come to work over here, some ports that therefore don't get emptied over there. And pretty soon you've got a complete stuck system, a failure. And both complex failures and basic failures are those that we want to work hard to avoid, and they happen in relatively familiar territory. They happen when we're doing the activities that we already know how to do. In contrast, the third type of failure is an intelligent failure, and it is the undesired result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. So this is really discovery. Intelligent failures are the results of experiments. You try something new, you think it could work, and alas, it doesn't work. Those are the failures we have to, in a sense, generate more of and learn to be very excited about. So what questions do you have about the categories or about the implications or anything else?
Chris Linnane:
So intelligent failures, how do we know that they're not just maybe a big waste of time?
Amy Edmondson:
It's a great question, and in fact, so I'll give you four criteria that define an intelligent failure. First, it's in new territory. You can't just look up the answer on the internet and use that, which we'd recommend otherwise. Number two, it's in pursuit of a goal. You're not just messing around, right? You're trying to get somewhere. And number three, you've done your homework. You have learned what you can enough to have a hypothesis that this action might work. And number four, and this may be the most important, it's as small as possible. Your experiment, your test, your uncertain action is no bigger than it has to be to get the new knowledge that you need. So that keeps it from being wasteful. It's still disappointing you wanted to succeed, not fail, but that failure, if you stick to those four criteria, brought you really useful knowledge and no one can call it a waste because we literally couldn't have gotten that knowledge any other way.
Chris Linnane:
So intelligent failure sounds so good, feels like a good t-shirt, an example of an intelligent failure that led to something big.
Amy Edmondson:
Well, in a laboratory setting or an R&D setting in organizations every day there are intelligent failures and they often will lead to something big. I mean, maybe a simple one from history would be Thomas Edison's pursuit of the light bulb apparently involved according to him, I'm sure it's an exaggeration. 10,000 intelligent failures along the way, right? There's no way to get something new, exciting, useful without many, many false starts. So it's oftentimes, and this I think is part of the concept, the intelligent failures that are bringing us great new drugs or technologies are happening behind closed doors. So we're not privy to those failures. We ultimately just are the recipients of the final successes. But in your life, let's say you're a young person or maybe not even a young person in pursuit of a life partner, you want to find someone to maybe spend the rest of your life with. An intelligent failure would be any blind date or setup that occurs. You had good reason to believe this person and I might be a great fit. And then you go out for a cup of coffee or something and you decide, no, but you didn't waste excess time. You had good reason to believe this might be a fit and you were in pursuit of a goal and so forth. So that's an intelligent failure that I think most of us have experienced in our lives at least once, if not many times.
Chris Linnane:
Definitely. Then if you're an organization or you're just an entrepreneur or something and you want to aim towards some intelligent failures to try new things, are there things you can do to put guardrails around it so you don't make that? You had mentioned not a big failure, but small. What are things you can do to set yourself up to potentially succeed?
Amy Edmondson:
Well, guardrails is a great term. And so let me back up and say the idea here. I think the way you set yourself up to have, let's say the right amount of intelligent failures and the right amount will depend on the context, and we can come back to that. But first you clarify the goal where we're heading, we're trying to come up with new products and services for this market. We don't know exactly yet what will work, but this is what we really want to do. We really want to serve their unmet needs. And then you give people time and space to experiment. You make clear that really the only way we think we can get there is through some rapid and smart experiments. You make sure that everybody feels absolutely psychologically safe to share what's working and what isn't. Because one of the wasteful things that can happen in organizations is that different employees are engaging in the same intelligent failures. They're not intelligent the second time around. So one of the rules is once you've learned that knowledge, share it widely because we don't want to repeat it. That's wasteful. So you're clear about the room to experiment. You're clear about how big this is your budget, this is your period of time, no bigger so that you're not, you're helping people understand where the boundaries are so that they can thoughtfully, smartly experiment within those boundaries.
Chris Linnane:
That's great. I have so many questions about that, but I'm going to limit this down a little bit. You just mentioned that two people can be making the same error at the same time, and that's…
Amy Edmondson:
Well, no. If it's at the same time, then there's nothing you could do about that.
Amy Edmondson:
But if you do something really thoughtful and smart and alas, it fails and then you don't tell me and next week or next month I do it, then my failure technically while still intelligent because you didn't tell me, wasn't intelligent from the perspective of the whole organization because our organization already paid for that lesson.
Chris Linnane:
So we're both still intelligent. We just both made a mistake at a different time.
Amy Edmondson:
You made the mistake of not sharing with me, or maybe I made a mistake of not sort of knocking on your door and asking you.
Chris Linnane:
You wouldn't have known that I did that. So it was my responsibility to tell you that you needed me.
Amy Edmondson:
You're absolutely right.
Chris Linnane:
Wow, that's an interesting way to look at. I didn't think about that as part of the mix too. So when someone makes an intelligent failure that potentially you can learn from what's maybe the first thing that they would do? What with that new information.
Amy Edmondson:
It depends on, we don't know much about the situation, but they need to tell people. So that could be in the form of a blast email. That could be in the form of let's have a brown bag lunch. We might have a routine ritual in an organization where we have lunch on Fridays and kind of share what we're up to, what's working, what isn't. Again, with the express goal of sharing our hard-earned knowledge with each other.
Chris Linnane:
And that's where I would've told you.
Amy Edmondson:
An you wouldn’t have repeated what happened, right? And I would've been like, great. So I was thinking of trying the same thing because almost as smart as you are, I'm almost as smart as me. So glad you told me that didn't work. How about I try X instead?
Chris Linnane:
That would've been a good idea. I'm sorry, I didn't do that. So if you're thinking of just a few takeaways for our listeners about this intelligent failure, are there two or three things that people should just think about in their head when they put this into work tomorrow when they go to work?
Amy Edmondson:
Well, I want to say first distinguish between the good kind and the not so good kind of failure in your mind and resolve to engage in more of the good kind of failure. What that really means is be willing to take risks, smart risks, be willing to experiment because it's the path toward innovation. And be super careful and thoughtful about using and applying the knowledge we already have in familiar territory and trying to do it with care and vigilance so that you don't make stupid mistakes that end up being costly. So that's one distinguish between the two types. Two is have the excitement and ambition to try new things. I could say fail more often, but what I really mean is take more risks and then probably third, master the art of a good apology and be willing to say, I'm so sorry that didn't work out, and I'm really excited about what we learned and where we go next.
Chris Linnane:
I've got the apology thing really good. I just have to come up with the intelligent mistakes in the first place. That leads us, I think, into some of the topics we have in some listener questions. Are you ready for those? Sure. So our first question comes from Alan. I'm a new team leader in my organization. How can I promote psychological safety inside of my team.
Amy Edmondson:
It's a great question, Alan. I'll try to keep this short. I could talk to you all day about this. But it starts with the humility to sort of say to your team, I'm really excited about what we're doing and I think it's going to be hard or complex, or there's some novelty that we're going to have to be working on together. So what I call this stage setting, you're setting the stage with the kind of words, whatever comes naturally to you that make it clear to everyone. You literally need their voice. So it's just about the sort of intellectual rationale for why people should think they need to speak up. Number two, and most directly, ask good questions. And a good question is the kind of question that focuses us on the issue or the task and gives people room to respond and allows them to really share their thinking with you. For example, who has some ideas about how we can do this or what have you seen work in other organizations? Those kinds of questions that are sort of expansive. And then thirdly, master the pause. Learn to take a deep breath before you respond because you don't want to respond in a way that shuts someone down or that indicates that you think that was a really stupid question or a bad idea, or you're frustrated that they disagree with you. So take a deep breath and then say, thanks for that perspective. Here's how I think about it. Whatever, but be learning-oriented and be appreciative.
Chris Linnane:
It's outstanding. Great. Our next one comes from Suji. Some argue that psychological safety may come at the expense of performance in competitive contexts. How do you balance safety and drive results?
Amy Edmondson:
That's a great question, Suji. I don't see it as a balance. I see it as two incredibly important leadership responsibilities: the creation of psychological safety and the motivation toward high performance. And we can fill out four quadrants with those two dimensions. If you have neither psychological safety nor motivation to perform well, then you'll have people in what I call the apathy zone. If you have people with high psychological safety, but not much motivation, sure. That's where I think people don't want to be. That's where that sort of what lies behind that question. And if you have people who are very motivated but have no psychological safety, they work in the anxiety zone and it's a very hard place to produce excellence from. Finally, if you have people with high psychological safety and high motivation, that's where learning happens. That's where high performance happens. So I think you need to push back when people are saying that psychological safety comes at the expense of performance. The fact is, and the research is pretty clear, that psychological safety is a means toward performance in an uncertain, complex, interdependent world. The only way truly to achieve excellent performance is when people feel able to speak up candidly about what they see, what they worry about, and the ideas they have.
Chris Linnane:
I love that answer. That was great. Okay. This one is from Win. What are some ways to speak up with ideas or concerns in a respectful and constructive way?
Amy Edmondson:
The best way to speak up constructively and respectfully with concerns and ideas is to do just that. Pause. Slow yourself down and think about, how would I want to hear this if I was in the other person's shoes, what would show respect to me? Let's say I'm about to disagree with you. Or let's say, I'm about to say, I think this project is off the rails. How do you say that in a respectful way? You think about how you'd want to hear it if someone was saying it to you. I think respect, fundamentally will come naturally. If you're thinking about the other person as a valued colleague. If you think about them as sort of a pain in the neck, then you won't speak in a respectful way. So you've got to stop and pause and remind yourself that whether you were thinking this a second ago or not, that other person is a valued colleague. And what would you say to them if that's how you really thought about them, a valued colleague from whom you can learn and they can learn from you.
Chris Linnane:
Can I try pitching you a bad idea that you have to? Yes, sure. Okay. So this will be something that I'm going to, I'm a valued coworker or colleague of yours, and I've got a bad idea. Amy. I think we should spend a hundred million dollars on this idea of pants where one leg is very tight, and one leg is very loose.
Amy Edmondson:
Chris, I love your creativity. I really do. I think that when we take these sort of wild ideas and then kind of figure out what are they getting at, we then take 'em a step further. We ultimately get somewhere that's really new and exciting for our customers. I do have some concerns, and if you've got a moment, I'd love to share them with you. I think personally, maybe I'll just speak for myself. When my clothes are overly tight, I don't feel comfortable. So even if one leg is loose, I think it would still be quite uncomfortable, maybe unpopular to have the other tight. So I feel like that one won't work quite as is, but I think it might help us get somewhere more interesting.
Chris Linnane:
You brought up some great points and I felt respected the entire time. Good. So that's good. Thank you. Thank you for doing that with me.
Amy Edmondson:
I hope you didn't mind my laughing. It's just, it really was a funny idea.
Chris Linnane:
It's a horrible idea.
Amy Edmondson:
Yeah. Horrible but funny, right?
Chris Linnane:
It's like spontaneously funny.
Amy Edmondson:
Well, that's good. I'm glad I thought of it at that moment. I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing with you.
Chris Linnane:
No, I'm okay with being laughed at too. I can take both of those. If you'd like to learn more about Professor Edmondson or the CLIMB Program, please visit the TheParlorRoomPodcast.com. You can also follow HBS Online on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and X. My name is Chris Linnane. Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying The Parlor Room, please share the show with your friends and subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.