Business today is complex and unpredictable.
Competition is fierce, giving rise to a continual need for innovation,
which in turn, fuels the need for ever-greater collaboration
to bring that innovation to flower.
To better understand collaboration,
you need to distinguish between the traditional concept of teams and teaming.
By one common definition, a team is an established fixed group of people,
cooperating in pursuit of a common goal with a defined membership.
Sports teams are good examples of traditional teams.
For example, a baseball team
consists of nine players on the field at any given time
plus coaches, extra players, and support personnel
with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
The shared goal is to score more runs than the other team.
The pitcher, catcher, and other fielders work together,
to prevent the other team from scoring.
In turn, these same players, on offense, attempt to score runs of their own.
According to Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman,
well-designed teams have clear goals and distinct tasks.
Team members must have the right skill sets and expertise for the task,
adequate resources, and accessible coaching and support.
Per Dr. Hackman, if you get the design right,
the performance will take care of itself.
But while that may hold true for a sports team,
today's work environments are fast moving, uncertain, and dynamic.
Traditionally defined teams have difficulty keeping up.
The workplace now requires greater fluidity and flexibility.
So, instead of stable teams,
organizations are more and more looking for people with the skills
and the flexibility to jump into collaborative groups
and get up to speed quickly when the need for collaboration arises.
This is what teaming is about.
Teaming is the answer to today's complex business issues
and is essential to an organization's ability to respond to opportunities,
challenges, and to innovate.
Although Dr. Hackman was originally referring to composing
stable well design teams, his principles apply to both teams and teaming.
The difference with teaming is
that the team in question is not a permanent unit,
with people who know how to work together
because they learn to trust each other
and know each other's roles and responsibilities.
Teaming requires a different approach.
Organizations that use the teaming approach
have people working on multiple teams at once
with both core and peripheral members.
It involves people from a variety of teams with a variety of skills
working towards a shared goal in a shorter duration than fixed-member teams.
When a temporary, short-term collaborative group forms,
its members must work effectively together,
often without previous experience working together,
or in many cases even previously knowing one another.
According to teaming expert Amy C. Edmondson,
encouraging better teaming
requires focusing on relationships between members
and on the dynamics that occur among people working together
for shorter durations.
While even stable team members should be willing and able to offer ideas,
learn, and confront mistakes and failures in a thoughtful and productive way,
these skills are required to an even greater extent with teaming,
because goals have to be met
without the luxury of stable membership and relationships.
Teaming, requires people to excel at asking questions,
getting up to speed quickly, learning everyone's roles and responsibilities,
and finding out what each brings to the team.
Consider a large technology project
that requires contributions from a variety of departments across the company.
The CIO assembles the team consisting of a project manager
who keeps the project on plan and within scope,
systems designers from different functional areas
to create the wire frame of the application's look and feel and navigation,
and developers from several, different systems teams
work with the designers to add expertise to the logic required.
Teaming is about the ability to build working relationships on the fly,
getting up to speed quickly,
and recognizing what each team member brings
to resolve challenges and achieve the goal.
While long-term, stable teams will always have their place,
organizations that allow for support and focus on teaming,
foster successful collaboration, and with it,
increased potential for agility and innovation.