90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Week 4Breaking Through Barriers

Benchmark goal: Discover how to team across boundaries.

When teaming across boundaries works, the results can be awe-inspiring. Managing a complex rescue operation, launching a space shuttle, producing a big-budget movie, or delivering a large engineering and construction project are all examples of complex uncertain work that requires multiple areas of expertise, and even multiple organizations, for its completion. The problem is that all too often teaming is thwarted by communication failures that take place at the boundaries between professions, organizations, and other groups. People think they’re communicating, they participate in endless meetings, and they work hard, only to have their projects fail. Why? As individuals bring diverse expertise, skills, perspectives, and goals together in unique team configurations to accomplish challenging goals, they must overcome the hidden challenge of communicating across multiple types of boundaries. Some boundaries are obvious—like 2,000 feet of rock, or being in different countries with different time zones. Others are subtle, such as when two engineers working for the same company in different facilities unknowingly bring different taken-for-granted assumptions about how to carry out a particular technical procedure to a collaboration.

This week, I describe the boundaries that team members frequently must cross while working together on complex problems. After examining why boundaries matter, ...