The third factor for success requires that participants solve real problems and deliver real outcomes, thus ensuring the teaming experience is relevant and meaningful. For example, the retail business of a large energy company reversed stagnating nonfuel product sales by introducing environment-friendly petrol stations and expanding their product offering. A large financial institution overcame internal competition between business line managers by creating new collaborative formats and adapting a teaming vocabulary of cooperation and support.
What is behind the teaming effect? It boils down to three factors. The first is the task at hand. Teaming allows participants to solve unique, complex problems—a strong motivator in itself.
Although teaming is built on self-organization and lateral ties, leadership remains crucial. The role doesn’t come from any title but is situational and rotated among team members. We call it rolling, or 4E leadership, where leaders:
• Engage team members emotionally and intellectually by involving them in setting the course and the rules of the game
• Enable by fostering psychological safety, providing resources and creating a productive environment
• Encourage through feedback and praise, helping members learn and cope with challenges and failures
• Exit after preparing successors to take on the role
The most important element of the program is the project. Participants from different organizational units form groups to design and implement projects that directly contribute to the organization’s objectives. The projects range in scope, but all require cross-functional collaboration, out-of-the-box thinking, and intense collaboration.
Yet, most people and organizations fail to collaborate, preferring competition to cooperation. In business, up to 70% of strategic alliances fail, and more than half of joint ventures don’t survive to their 10th anniversary.
Why collaboration stumbles
These behaviors make effective collaboration problematic, even when individuals appreciate the need to work together.
The promise of teaming
Edmondson introduced the concept of a teaming super-goal that is important for each participant but can only be achieved through collaboration. An example would be the epic rescue of 33 Chilean miners in 2010.
For millennia, people have grown, learned, played, and worked in small groups. In modern times, as villages gave way to cities, and farms to factories, hierarchy became the way to organize and manage human and other resources. However, that fosters an individualistic, uncollaborative mindset characterized by distrust of strangers, unwillingness to share information, and a strong preference for working independently or with familiar others. It also leads to a focus on personal gains, avoidance of initiative and risk, and shifting of responsibility.
The goal of this stage is to spark organizational interest in teaming. Initiation can take on different forms; one of the most effective is an online teaming program.
Three factors make or break the initiation stage: participation and endorsement from the senior leadership, the scale of the program, and delivering meaningful outcomes. The first factor is self-evident. As for the second, the number of participants should be large enough to introduce the whole organization to teaming and produce visible change. Think of 50 participants for a 1,000-employee company, and 200 for a 10,000-strong organization, assuming participants are drawn from different departments and levels.
They came up with recommendations ranging from fresh cockpit designs to new training for pilots and traffic controllers. The 200-page report had a profound effect on the global aviation industry, which drastically improved its safety record during the following 20 years.
Achieving the teaming effect
During this early stage of the teaming journey, tangible results win over people and give teaming much-needed credibility.
Organizational structure and workplace design evolve to become more collaborative. Teaming allows for serious breakthroughs, solves organizational pains, and makes a noticeable contribution to the top and bottom lines. For example, a regional real estate developer we worked with improved EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) margins by 30% within two years of adopting teaming.
Our research shows that it needn’t be this way. Many companies demonstrate that effective collaboration is possible in large organizations. These companies embrace what Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson calls “teaming” or “collaboration on the fly.”
Institutionalization
Two factors critical to the success of the integration stage are a well-functioning teaming platform and what we call “rolling leadership.” Platforms, as outlined above, are best tailored to the organization’s activity, size, location, and culture. A good platform should be innovatively co-created by as many people as possible, rather than dictated by the top.
Integration
Feedback and attention to individuals are critical at this stage. Leaders must create effective communication channels that enable them to hear what the organization thinks about teaming and how it’s being implemented, and to make necessary changes if required. They should also ensure that every employee receives fair and comprehensive feedback about their progress in learning and applying teaming. Those who are struggling should be given help, such as extra training, individual coaching, or group support.
The program combines traditional learning tools such as videos, webinars, case studies, and self-assessments with a learning journal, a buddy group, and a project. In the learning journal, each participant documents their progress, the obstacles they face, the lessons they learn, and the questions they need to answer.
Today, the ability to effectively collaborate across boundaries is more critical than ever. Teaming offers a powerful framework for organizations seeking to harness the full potential of collective capabilities.
Teaming is both a philosophy and a practice that reflects the realities of the 21st century. It can be applied in different contexts among individuals, groups, and organizations. Unlike the agile approach, teaming isn’t limited to a specific project management methodology. It can be used in both traditional and nontraditional workplaces.
The goal of this ongoing stage is to entrench teaming as a shared philosophy and way of working across the organization. Teaming principles and new cultural norms become embedded in key organizational processes including recruitment, evaluation, remuneration, promotion, training, and communication.
The buddy group encourages participants to collectively reflect on their journeys, exchange feedback and feedforward, and support and challenge each other through regular online meetings initially facilitated by professional coaches.
The third factor is platforms. This refers to the workspace setup, rules, procedures, formats, and technologies that enable collaboration. GitLab, a software development company founded in 2014, supports 1,500 employees working from home across 70 countries with a nearly 3,000-page handbook that describes the company’s rules and procedures. Employees co-create these rules and invent various teaming formats, including specialized groups for problem-solving and interest-based communities. Platforms such as Slack, Dropbox, and Jira provide them with powerful tools for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.
How to implement teaming
The teaming program expands to many more participants. Graduates from the initiation stage become teaming ambassadors and coaches. Teaming protocols and standards emerge and spread throughout the organization. Key HR systems are adjusted to reflect the teaming philosophy, focusing on execution through learning, psychological safety, fluid teams, and enabling leadership.
In the complex, uncertain, and fast-changing world we live in, success and even survival require intensive collaboration among individuals, organizations, and countries. The outcomes of such collaboration can be breathtaking: Consider the growth of Netflix and Amazon, the rebirth of Microsoft and General Motors, or the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
There are good reasons that collaborations often falter: physical distance, time zone differences, and unequal access to information, to name a few. However, the biggest obstacles are psychological.
Teaming allows people and organizations to collaborate to learn. It transforms how they operate, solve problems, and experience the state of flow without having to build traditional teams or offer incentives.
NASA and the teaming effect
An example of the teaming effect comes from NASA. In 1979, the United States government, concerned about the increasing number of aviation incidents and fatalities, commissioned NASA to produce a report on how safety could be improved. The space agency assembled a team of 50 industry insiders as well as 20 astronauts, scientists, and psychologists. The group explored the challenge together before breaking into smaller groups to examine specific problems.
The second factor is people. Collaboration is easier when participants are aware of their own limitations and are proactive, tolerant, and open to new ideas and experiences. They’re also willing to share. While it goes without saying that team members should be experts in their professions, they should also possess behavioral skills such as effective listening and speaking, supporting, challenging, reflecting, and learning.
The second stage is about making teaming part of the organizational culture as well as the company’s operating system on a larger scale. During this phase, senior leaders articulate and reiterate their belief in teaming, explain what it means in the organization’s context, and set organization-wide goals and expectations for all employees.
Initiation
During the past 10 years, we’ve helped dozens of organizations embrace teaming in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, ranging from a giant financial institution to a midsized manufacturing company. We call our method, which is grounded in Kurt Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze social theory of change, also called the initiate-integrate-institutionalize model. Here’s how it works.
Published July 25, 2024, by INSEAD.