90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Week 3Supporting Teaming as a Leader

Benchmark goal: Lead through teaming.

Teaming and learning do not happen automatically. Instead, they require coordination and some structure to ensure that insights are gained from members’ collective experience and used to guide subsequent action. As research demonstrates across varied cases and settings, teaming and learning both depend on the deliberate exercise of leadership. It takes leadership to understand and resolve conflict and to instigate thoughtful conversations about errors. It takes leadership to adhere to process discipline and to help people remember to explore and experiment. In short, leadership is needed to help groups build shared understanding and coordinate action.

In nearly two decades of research, I’ve discovered that leaders have four main responsibilities to set the stage for successful teaming:

• Frame the situation for learning.
• Make it psychologically safe to team.
• Learn to learn from failure.
• Span occupational and cultural boundaries.

These four actions are not solely practices intended for teaming and learning. In fact, these individual practices translate directly to improved leadership and performance under nearly any circumstance. Taken together, however, they form the foundation for leading a successful teaming effort and provide a path forward for integrating learning into everyday execution.

In addition, leaders play a key role in making sure that the team learns from those (inevitable) failures. ...