90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Week 10Coming Together

Benchmark goal: Team up: Learn the keys to teaming up for innovation.

Like it or not, innovation is a team sport. Few worthy innovations are accomplished alone or even by groups of people who have the same basic knowledge and expertise. This week I look at the second key factor for innovation: teaming up. I look at what it takes to team and explain why teaming is more challenging than it might first appear. I explore the crucial role of psychological safety—along with other enabling factors—in helping people team effectively. And because teaming across disciplinary lines is so vital to innovation, I pay particular attention to the types of boundaries people confront when teaming to innovate and how to bridge them effectively.

Sometimes a Team Calls for Strange Bedfellows

It is hard to imagine two more different thought worlds than Hollywood and the CIA. But what makes the story of the fate of six American hostages in Iran truly gripping is the teaming between these strange bedfellows and how it brought the hostages home. As you read this story, consider the types of boundaries between these players, the nature of the teaming that occurred, and the innovative solution itself. How did teaming up across boundaries produce innovation?

Early in the morning of November 4, 1979, at the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran’s capital city, a rapidly growing crowd of anti-American student protestors was demanding that ousted monarch (Shah) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ...