This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Teaming" by Amy C. Edmondson. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you want to improve the way your teams work in the office? How can you get complete strangers to work together effectively?
Working with teams today in a constantly changing environment demands a flexible approach that traditional teamwork can’t provide. In Teaming, Amy C. Edmondson offers a solution: dynamic collaboration that brings together diverse expertise without requiring years of shared work history.
Read more in our overview of Teaming.
Overview of Teaming by Amy C. Edmondson
In Teaming, Amy C. Edmondson introduces an adaptive approach to collaboration in the workplace. Edmondson contends that rather than organizing people into traditional, static teams, leaders should practice a dynamic alternative called teaming. Teaming involves bringing people together in temporary groups that can collaborate effectively and flexibly, even without an extensive shared work history, and integrate their specialized expertise to solve emerging problems.
Edmondson has more than 20 years of research experience as a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. Her expertise in organizational learning comes from studying collaboration in diverse settings from hospitals and factories to NASA’s Space Shuttle program. She contends that in the modern knowledge economy, organizations face unprecedented complexity, specialization, and change. Traditional team structures—where stable groups work together for years—can’t respond quickly enough to emerging challenges. Teaming addresses this challenge by providing a framework for effective collaboration across boundaries, enabling organizations to learn, innovate, and compete.
In this guide, we’ll explore what teaming is and how it differs from traditional teamwork, explaining Edmondson’s perspective on why dynamic collaboration is essential in modern organizations. Next, we’ll examine the core principles that make teaming effective: open communication, collaborative knowledge sharing, and boundary bridging. Finally, we’ll detail the leadership practices that enable successful teaming. Throughout, we’ll draw connections to a range of examples that show how Edmondson’s framework applies across different fields—from ancient Easter Island craftsmen to Manhattan Project physicists, from physicians practicing narrative medicine to neuroscientists revolutionizing our understanding of the brain.
What Is Teaming?
Edmondson intentionally uses the word “team” as a verb. She explains that while a “team” is traditionally a static entity—a set group of people with a common goal—teaming is an active, dynamic process where people with different backgrounds coordinate their efforts to accomplish tasks together.
In many industries, the knowledge needed to solve problems is constantly evolving. Think about fields like medicine, where new treatments and technologies emerge every month, or software development, where engineers continually update programming languages and frameworks. In fields like these, organizations need specialized professionals who keep up with developments in their areas—whether that’s artificial intelligence, cardiovascular surgery, or sustainable manufacturing processes.
Edmondson explains that at the same time, many significant workplace challenges require combining specialized skills. No single person can master everything needed to develop a new vaccine, launch a successful app, or redesign a manufacturing plant. This is where teaming becomes essential: It allows you to quickly bring together the right mix of experts for each challenge, and then reassemble different groups as new projects arise. Unlike traditional teams that might work together for years, teaming creates temporary groups focused on specific issues. This approach helps your organization become more nimble and responsive, allowing you to pull together exactly the people you need when you need them.
The beauty of effective teaming is that it doesn’t require people to have worked together for months to collaborate well. Edmondson explains that instead of relying on rigid management that tells everyone exactly what to do and how to do it, teaming creates an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, and combining their knowledge to solve problems together. It’s less about following established procedures and more about pooling your collective brainpower to tackle whatever comes your way.
How Does Teaming Differ From Traditional Teamwork?
Teaming offers a fresh alternative to the way most of us are used to working. Edmondson explains that while traditional teams have their place, they’re often too rigid for today’s fast-changing environment. Let’s look at the key differences that make teaming particularly valuable when you need to solve complex problems:
Teams Come and Go (Instead of Staying Put for Years)
Traditional teams—like your company’s accounting department or sales team—typically remain stable for years. People get comfortable working with the same colleagues on similar projects over and over. With teaming, you assemble groups on the fly for specific projects. Once they complete their work, these groups often disband, with members flowing to other projects where their skills are needed.
Process Trumps Relationships (So You Can Skip the Trust-Building Retreats)
Traditional teams rely on deep relationships and established routines that develop over years of working together. Edmondson points out that by contrast, teaming creates processes that help people collaborate effectively even when they’ve just met each other. In other words, you don’t need months of team-building exercises to get work done: Teaming creates an environment where people can communicate openly and work effectively together from day one.
Boundaries Become Permeable (Making Silos a Thing of the Past)
Traditional teams have clear, fixed boundaries: Marketing stays in marketing, engineering stays in engineering, and executives rarely mix with frontline staff. Edmondson explains that teaming deliberately crosses departmental, disciplinary, and hierarchical divides to bring together the right people for each challenge. Picture the difference by thinking about the Scranton branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company from the sitcom The Office. In that workplace, Angela, Oscar, and Kevin stay in Accounting, while Jim, Dwight, and Phyllis remain in Sales. They do the same jobs quarter after quarter, rarely venturing beyond their territory.
If Michael Scott, the manager on The Office, embraced teaming instead, the show’s workplace would transform. When a major client needed a comprehensive solution involving paper products, delivery logistics, and digital document management, Michael wouldn’t just hand it to the sales team. He’d pull together a temporary group that might include Dwight from sales, Darryl from the warehouse, and Oscar from accounting—combining their different perspectives to create a solution no individual department could develop alone. Once the project ended, they’d move on to new challenges with different combinations of colleagues, creating a workplace that’s more flexible, innovative, and capable of tackling complex problems.
What Are the Core Principles of Effective Teaming?
To make teaming work, Edmondson identifies three key principles that everyone needs to practice: open communication, collaborative knowledge sharing, and boundary bridging. Let’s explore what each of these looks like in action.
Principle 1: Open Communication Enables People to Speak Up Without Fear
The heart of effective teaming is creating a space where anyone can speak their mind without worrying about being judged or punished. Think about it: When you’re tackling a problem no one has solved before, the last thing you need is people holding back their ideas or concerns because they’re afraid of looking foolish. Edmondson points out that when team members withhold their thoughts—maybe they noticed a potential flaw or have an unconventional solution—the entire team misses out on insights that could prevent failures or spark breakthroughs. Open communication means you can raise questions, share half-baked ideas, and point out potential problems without fear of being shot down.
This openness creates an environment where people can learn from each other and experiment together. Edmondson observes that while individuals are constantly learning, this learning doesn’t automatically translate to organizational improvement. You’ve probably seen this yourself: Despite smart people working hard, many organizations repeat the same mistakes or fail to adapt to changing circumstances. Why? Because without open communication, individual workers’ insights stay trapped in their heads instead of becoming part of how the whole organization operates. For open communication to flourish in your team, everyone needs to practice these behaviors:
- Speaking up about problems or uncertainties rather than hoping someone else will notice
- Asking questions that might seem basic, but could reveal important assumptions
- Giving honest, constructive feedback to teammates
- Admitting mistakes and sharing what you learned from them
- Participating in ongoing cycles of discussion, decision-making, action, and reflection
Principle 2: Collaborative Knowledge-Sharing Pools Your Brain Power
The second key to effective teaming is to embrace collaboration by actively seeking different viewpoints, coordinating your efforts with others, and sharing what you know. As Edmondson points out, we’re living in an age of hyper-specialization: Most of us have become experts in increasingly narrow fields, yet the problems we need to solve haven’t gotten simpler.
Think about developing a new medical device. You’ll need experts in medicine, engineering, regulatory compliance, manufacturing, and user experience—and no single person could possibly master all these fields. Even the team leader won’t have all the answers. By bringing together people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, you can develop solutions that no one person or homogeneous group would discover on their own.
What makes teaming different from just putting specialists in a room together is how knowledge flows. Rather than information getting stuck in departmental silos or individual minds, teaming creates pathways for expertise to flow freely to where it’s needed most. To make this happen, everyone needs to practice:
- Forming teams based on who has the right knowledge for the problem at hand, not just who’s in your department
- Making decisions that genuinely incorporate different perspectives, not just consulting others as a formality
- Coordinating your actions with people who think differently than you do
- Staying aware of what others are contributing and how their work connects to yours
- Developing common language that bridges different specialty areas so everyone can understand key concepts
Principle 3: Boundary Bridging Helps You Cross Divides
The third principle of effective teaming involves breaking down the walls that typically separate people in organizations. Edmondson identifies three types of boundaries that can block successful teaming:
- Physical distance boundaries: When team members work in different locations, buildings, or time zones
- Status boundaries: The hierarchical divides between executives, managers, and frontline workers
- Knowledge boundaries: The gaps between different professional disciplines, educational backgrounds, or areas of expertise
These boundaries stop information from flowing and prevent people from working together effectively. When knowledge stays trapped, your organization can’t respond quickly to challenges or develop solutions that incorporate all the expertise you need. Consider a hospital emergency room: When a patient arrives, specialists from nursing, medicine, the laboratory, and surgery must quickly form a diagnosis and treatment plan—often for a patient presenting life-threatening symptoms they’ve never seen in quite the same combination before. To do so, they have to bridge the boundaries between their disciplines to provide effective care, even if they’ve never worked together previously.
Edmondson explains that when you successfully bridge boundaries, knowledge flows freely to where it’s needed, enabling your team to develop innovative solutions and tackle complex challenges more effectively than traditional siloed approaches allow. To successfully bridge boundaries in your own teams, you need to:
- Keep everyone focused on shared goals that matter more than departmental territories
- Actively invite input from all team members, regardless of their title or status
- Use technology tools that make sharing information easy across locations and departments
- Help everyone understand the unique value that each person’s expertise brings to the table
How Can Leaders Enable Teaming?
Leaders aren’t just passengers in the teaming process—they’re essential architects of environments where collaboration thrives across traditional divides. As Edmondson emphasizes, your leadership approach can either strengthen or dissolve the boundaries that separate people in organizations.
She explains that when you’re leading a teaming effort, it’s important to focus on creating connections by establishing compelling goals that matter more than departmental turf wars. Cultivate genuine curiosity about different perspectives and model this openness yourself—after all, your team will follow your lead in how they respond to unfamiliar viewpoints. Provide clear guidelines for how people should work together across boundaries, reducing the anxiety that often comes with cross-functional collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, help everyone recognize the value in different ways of thinking and areas of expertise, creating an appreciation for the diverse mental models that each person brings to the table.
Edmondson recommends three essential leadership practices that set the stage for effective collaboration: framing work as a learning opportunity, creating psychological safety, and encouraging your team to learn from failure. Let’s explore how you can implement each of these approaches.
Frame Work as a Learning Journey (Not Just Task Execution)
The way you frame work—the assumptions and beliefs that shape how people interpret what they’re doing—influences how they approach it. Edmondson points out that traditional workplaces focus on execution: “We need to follow the established process as efficiently as possible.” This mindset stifles the experimentation and adaptation that teaming requires. Instead, you need to help your team see their work as a learning opportunity where the goal isn’t just completing tasks but discovering better ways to work together and solve problems. Edmondson outlines a four-step process for creating this learning mindset:
Step 1: Invite People to the Project Purposefully
Start by deliberately selecting and inviting people to join the project. Make it clear why you’ve chosen each person and what unique value they bring. This isn’t just about filling slots—it’s about building intellectual and emotional commitment from the beginning. When you tell someone, “I specifically chose you for this project because of your experience with similar challenges,” you’re signaling that their participation matters. This creates a positive initial impression and lays the foundation for genuine engagement throughout the project.
Step 2: Plan Together Before Diving In
Before jumping into the work, bring everyone together to explore what lies ahead. In addition to creating timelines, these planning sessions are about creating shared understanding and readiness for collaborative learning. Edmondson points out that these preliminary conversations serve multiple purposes:
- Team members discuss how they’ll work together effectively.
- The group anticipates potential challenges and brainstorms solutions.
- They begin building trust through collaborative planning.
- You establish team norms and identify what existing routines might need adjustment.
- Team members become mentally prepared to try new approaches and embrace uncertainty.
Step 3: Experiment and Adapt
Now it’s time for action, but with a crucial difference: Approach each activity as an experiment rather than a fixed solution. This experimental approach keeps the team nimble and responsive rather than rigidly attached to initial plans. In this phase, Edmondson recommends that:
- Team members try new approaches with an open mind.
- Everyone focuses on learning from outcomes rather than getting everything right immediately.
- The team pays close attention to results while maintaining curiosity.
- People remain open to adjusting their approach based on what happens.
- A mindset of continuous improvement takes root.
Step 4: Pause and Process What You’ve Learned
Finally, create deliberate opportunities to analyze results and extract insights. Edmonson emphasizes that these moments for reflection can transform your team’s experiences on one project into learning that can guide many future decisions and actions across different projects and goals. During these reflection sessions:
- Team members discuss what they did, what happened, and what it means.
- The group identifies specific lessons they learned.
- Everyone considers alternative approaches based on what they’ve learned.
- The team integrates these insights into their next actions.
- A culture of continuous improvement gets reinforced.
Beyond this structured approach, Edmondson explains that you can strengthen your team’s ability to approach work as a learning opportunity by:
- Defining roles to emphasize curiosity and cooperation rather than narrow responsibilities
- Connecting the work to a meaningful, aspirational purpose that energizes people
- Questioning your own assumptions about what makes an “ideal employee” (Hint: It’s not unquestioning conformity.)
- Consistently modeling a learning mindset by demonstrating openness to new ideas and approaches
Build Psychological Safety: Make It Safe to Speak Up
The second key leadership practice for teaming is establishing psychological safety—creating an environment where people believe they can speak up, ask questions, or admit mistakes without facing embarrassment, rejection, or punishment. When someone shares a half-formed idea or points out a potential problem, they’re taking an “interpersonal risk” by putting themselves in a vulnerable position where others might judge them negatively. Edmondson highlights three reasons why psychological safety is crucial for teaming:
1. It keeps brains in thinking mode, not panic mode. When you’re afraid of being judged or criticized, your brain’s threat response kicks in, diverting mental resources away from creativity and problem-solving. Psychological safety allows everyone to bring their full mental capacity to their work.
2. It makes productive disagreement possible. Innovation thrives when different perspectives collide constructively. In a psychologically safe environment, team members can express dissenting views and work through disagreements without fear that challenging others will damage relationships or harm their reputation.
3. It increases standards rather than lowering them. Contrary to what some might fear, psychological safety doesn’t mean accepting sloppy work or lowering expectations. Instead, it creates conditions where people feel secure enough to stretch themselves, take on challenges, and hold themselves and others accountable to high standards.
Edmondson explains that psychological safety isn’t something you can simply mandate, but she contends that there are specific actions you can take to cultivate it:
- Show your own vulnerability first. Acknowledge when you don’t know something or when you’ve made a mistake. When a leader says, “I missed something important in that analysis” or “I’m not sure what’s the best approach,” it signals that it’s OK for everyone to be human.
- Respond positively when people speak up. Your reaction when someone asks a question or offers a suggestion sets the tone for future interactions. Respond with interest and appreciation rather than dismissal or irritation, even if the timing isn’t perfect.
- Actively seek input, especially from quieter voices. Don’t just wait for people to speak up—explicitly invite their thoughts: “Sasha, you’ve worked with similar systems before. What are we missing here?” This signals that you value diverse perspectives.
- Hold people accountable while maintaining their dignity. Set clear expectations and address performance issues directly, but separate the person from the problem. Focus on the work, not character flaws or personal shortcomings.
For a contrast to psychological safety, consider Sterling Cooper, the fictional advertising agency from the TV series Mad Men. In the agency’s creative meetings, junior copywriters hesitate to voice ideas for fear of public humiliation. Women’s contributions are routinely dismissed, and disagreeing with superiors carries serious career risks. When a woman does speak up, it’s treated as an anomaly. The fictional firm’s culture of fear and intimidation illustrates why traditionally managed organizations often struggle with innovation: People withhold their ideas when speaking up feels dangerous. Effective teaming requires the opposite approach: creating conditions where everyone feels their voice matters, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.
Learn From Failure: Turn Setbacks Into Stepping Stones
Edmondson’s third essential leadership practice is to transform failures and setbacks into learning opportunities. She notes that innovation requires experimentation, and not all experiments succeed. The difference between organizations that evolve and those that stagnate often comes down to how they handle these failures. When failure leads to finger-pointing and blame, people naturally protect themselves by avoiding risks and hiding problems. But when leaders reframe failure as a rich source of learning, team members feel empowered to take reasonable risks and discuss mistakes openly. This transparency enables your entire organization to identify patterns, implement improvements, and avoid repeating the same errors.
Here’s how you can promote learning from failure:
Conduct blameless reviews. After something goes wrong, create a structured process to analyze what happened without assigning blame. Ask “what” and “how” questions rather than “who” questions: “What factors contributed to this outcome?” rather than “Who messed this up?” This approach encourages honesty and deeper analysis.
Recognize different types of failures. Edmondson identifies three distinct categories: preventable failures (which occur when established processes aren’t followed), complex failures (which happen in uncertain environments despite good intentions), and intelligent failures (which result from thoughtful experimentation in new territory). Each requires a different response.
Celebrate “good” failures. When a well-designed experiment doesn’t produce the expected results but generates valuable insights, acknowledge it publicly. You might say, “Kim’s team tested a promising approach that didn’t work as expected, but what they learned helped us avoid a major pitfall in our strategy.”
Reward early problem identification. Create incentives for surfacing issues when they’re small and manageable. Thank people who bring problems to attention instead of shooting the messenger. A small course correction at an early stage is far better than a crisis response later.
By implementing these leadership practices—framing work as a learning journey, building psychological safety, and learning from failure—you create an environment where teaming can flourish. These approaches reinforce each other: Psychological safety makes learning from failure possible, while the learning orientation creates a sense of purpose that transcends departmental boundaries. Together, they transform how people work together, enabling your organization to tackle complex challenges with agility and innovation.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Amy C. Edmondson's "Teaming" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Teaming summary:
- Why the traditional approach to working in teams doesn't work anymore
- Why teams should be dynamic and temporary, rather than static
- The four-step process for creating a learning mindset
