PDF Summary:Teaming, by Amy C. Edmondson

Traditional teams worked well in the past when office environments remained stable—such as when accounting departments handled the same reports year after year, or factory teams manufactured identical products for decades. But working with teams today in a constantly changing environment demands a more flexible approach. In Teaming, Harvard leadership professor Amy C. Edmondson offers a solution: dynamic collaboration that brings together diverse expertise without requiring years of shared work history. Our guide unpacks Edmondson’s research-backed framework for creating environments where people communicate openly, share knowledge effectively, and transcend organizational boundaries.

Additionally, we connect these principles to a range of ideas—from ancient Easter Island craftsmen to Manhattan Project physicists, from physicians practicing narrative medicine to neuroscientists revolutionizing our understanding of the brain—that show how Edmondson’s framework applies across a variety of fields. Whether you’re leading a startup or navigating a corporate transformation, this guide offers practical strategies to turn workplace complexity into a competitive advantage.

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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.

From Grain Silos to Information Silos

Just as agricultural silos protect grain by isolating it, organizational silos compartmentalize knowledge—often to the detriment of collaboration.

Physical distance boundaries, which can silo knowledge in different locations, are currently undergoing a tech-enabled transformation as remote work has become common for knowledge workers. Furthermore, in The World Is Your Office, Prithwiraj Choudhury documents how even agriculture and manufacturing are overcoming physical boundaries through digital twin technology—virtual replicas of physical systems that allow remote monitoring and control. Factory workers and farmers can now operate equipment from anywhere, creating “sky-blue-collared workers” who bridge manual and knowledge work.

Status boundaries manifest as information asymmetry that silos knowledge between leadership and frontline workers. In Josh Ritter’s song “The Temptation of Adam,” missile silo operators remain isolated underground with limited knowledge of the world above, mirroring how Cold War missile site workers were given just enough information to perform their duties, but rarely the full strategic context. While most of us don’t work in a missile silo or operate Cold War-era technology, the same pattern persists in organizations where executives withhold critical information from employees, making it impossible for people to collaborate.

Knowledge boundaries present perhaps the most complex challenge, where specialized languages silo information by making it incomprehensible to people who don’t have the right vocabulary. The most extreme example may be nuclear waste storage facilities, where engineers are working to design warning systems expected to be comprehensible to humans 10,000 years in the future, despite inevitable changes to every language.

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

(Shortform note: Singer Matt Berninger of the rock band The National demonstrates how artists successfully work across boundaries. Berninger prioritizes shared goals by welcoming collaborators to reshape songs, as when Taylor Swift added melodies that transformed “The Alcott” into a track neither artist could have created alone. He also invites input regardless of status—and famously works with his wife Carin on lyrics. Technology enables his collaborations: Band members send him tracks digitally, creating a virtual workspace where creative ideas flow between locations. Most importantly, he highlights each of his collaborators’ unique value, emphasizing how bringing in other people pulls songs in new directions.)

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.

Beyond Boundaries: The Moral Dimension of Leadership

When leaders facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries, they face more than just logistical challenges—they must also navigate ethical considerations about the impact of their work. The Manhattan Project illustrates how leadership that breaks down silos can simultaneously raise critical questions about responsibility and human consequences.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s leadership at Los Alamos united diverse specialists toward a compelling shared goal—the invention of the atomic bomb in World War II. In managing the efforts of more than 500,000 people—Nobel Prize-winning physicists, military officials, engineers, and laborers—Oppenheimer created an environment that encouraged scientific debate and where expertise mattered more than hierarchy. He established clear communication between military and scientific personnel and cultivated an atmosphere where even junior team members could question senior scientists, demonstrating the curiosity and openness Edmondson emphasizes.

Yet Oppenheimer’s success came with a profound moral burden. According to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 226,000 people, Oppenheimer told President Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” This statement reveals an insight about boundary-spanning leadership: Creating connections across organizational divides isn’t ethically neutral. It carries responsibility for the human impact of collaborative work.

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

The Learning Organization: Lessons From the Rapa Nui

The Rapa Nui people who created Easter Island’s famous moai statues demonstrate that organizing work as a learning opportunity isn’t just a modern management concept—it’s a practice that has helped humans solve complex problems for centuries. Archaeological evidence combined with oral traditions reveals that successful ancient societies intuitively understood and applied these principles.

Purpose-driven selection and roles: Far from random assignments, Rapa Nui society carefully selected stoneworkers based on their skills. Carvers were considered honored specialists who received compensation through trade goods like sweet potatoes, chickens, and obsidian tools, and expert carvers received special status and compensation. The social status of stoneworkers was passed from father to son, creating intellectual and emotional commitment through recognition of their unique talents—precisely what Edmondson recommends in the first step of her process.

Collaborative planning and knowledge-sharing: Before carving began, Rapa Nui teams established quarrying sites and developed specialized tools like the toki (stone chisels made from the island’s hardest rock). Analysis shows these tools came primarily from a quarry called Rua Toki-Toki, suggesting deliberate coordination in resource gathering.

Experimentation, adaptation, and oral learning: The Rapa Nui continuously refined their statue-moving techniques through experimental approaches. When asked how their ancestors transported the massive statues, modern Rapa Nui guides often say “they walked,” reflecting oral traditions that use the term neke neke, meaning “walking without legs.” These oral histories weren’t merely fanciful—they contained practical knowledge that was eventually validated when researchers demonstrated how teams could “walk” the statues using ropes and rocking motions.

Reflection and knowledge preservation: The moai evolved significantly over centuries, with later statues incorporating new features like pukao (red stone topknots) and coral eyes, demonstrating how the Rapa Nui continuously improved their process based on previous experiences. This learning transcended statue-building and informed other adaptive practices, like creating innovative “manavai” stone-protected gardens to address environmental challenges.

While today’s organizations emphasize documenting lessons learned in reports and databases, the Rapa Nui remind us that some of the most vital knowledge is transmitted person-to-person through stories and apprenticeship. This insight is particularly relevant today as the Rapa Nui people work to preserve their endangered language, which is only spoken by 10% of Rapa Nui children. The language nests (Hōŋa’a Re’o) they’ve established for immersive language learning demonstrate their recognition that some types of knowledge—cultural values, traditional practices, and history—require immersion in a community where learning happens naturally through observation and participation.

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.

The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety isn’t just a workplace nicety—it’s the neurobiological foundation that allows diversity to flourish into genuine inclusion. Google’s Project Aristotle confirmed Edmondson’s assertion that psychological safety is the single most important factor in team success. When we experience judgment or threat, our amygdala triggers a fight-flight-freeze response that redirects blood flow away from our prefrontal cortex, impairing higher-order thinking, empathy, and creativity. This physiological reaction is particularly pronounced in individuals from marginalized groups who experience what psychologists call “belonging uncertainty.”

This uncertainty makes it difficult to take interpersonal risks like proposing an idea that might be rejected, so people often end up feeling (and being) left out. But psychological safety creates a virtuous cycle for inclusion: When people feel secure enough to be authentic, they contribute their unique perspectives. This increases the cognitive diversity that drives innovation—and invites further contributions. Researchers have found that successful teams demonstrate “equality in conversational turn-taking” and high “social sensitivity,” which ensure every voice matters. Contrary to concerns about lowering standards, psychological safety actually raises them by enabling the interpersonal risk-taking needed for growth.

The haute couture studios of Paris demonstrate psychological safety’s practical power. In these workshops, where a single garment might require 300 + hours of meticulous handwork, speaking up about potential problems isn’t just encouraged—it’s essential. The “premières” (workshop heads) cultivate environments where even apprentices feel safe to voice concerns about delicate beading techniques or suggest modifications to intricate embroidery. Psychological safety enables the constructive disagreement needed when clothing designers create garments worth tens of thousands of dollars—since perfection is the standard and mistakes can be catastrophically expensive.

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.

How Vulnerability, Trust, and Humility Give Us Space to Be Human

Creating psychological safety requires deliberate action from leaders. Harvard professor Jeff Polzer’s concept of the “vulnerability loop” explains why Edmondson’s first principle—showing your own vulnerability—is so powerful. When leaders acknowledge uncertainty or mistakes, they initiate a cycle that signals to others’ threat-detection systems that self-expression won’t lead to rejection. The critical moment comes when the listener responds by sharing their vulnerability, completing the loop and cementing mutual trust.

This exchange transforms team dynamics, particularly in high-stakes environments like health care. Historically, medicine maintained what physician-authors Atul Gawande (Being Mortal) and Pauline Chen (Final Exam) have described as a culture of perfection where mistakes were hidden or downplayed. When leaders respond positively to team members who speak up—Edmondson’s second principle—they reinforce that vulnerability is welcomed rather than punished. Similarly, actively seeking input from quieter voices (her third principle) becomes more effective when done within an established vulnerability loop, as team members feel their contributions are genuinely valued.

The balance between accountability and dignity (Edmondson’s fourth principle) is exemplified in what Rita Charon calls “vulnerable medicine”—an approach that enables honest conversations about failure while maintaining respect between doctors and patients. Chris Adrian’s fictional story “A Tiny Feast” illustrates this as fairy royals Titania and Oberon face their human child’s leukemia. Though medicine ultimately can’t save the child, the doctors achieve a different success: When they finally stop speaking about death through euphemisms and discuss end-of-life care directly, they initiate a vulnerability loop that helps even immortal beings confront mortality.

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.

Neuroplasticity’s Bumpy Path: The Power of Learning From Failure

Scientists have long understood what some organizations are only beginning to see: Failure is not just inevitable in innovation—it’s essential. The term “intelligent failure,” which Edmondson highlights as one of her three failure categories, has been a cornerstone of scientific discovery, often leading to our most transformative breakthroughs.

The history of neuroplasticity—our brain’s ability to reorganize itself—illustrates both the value of learning from failure and the cost of suppressing early problem identification. For nearly a century, the scientific community held firmly to the belief that adult brains were fixed and unchangeable after childhood. The community ridiculed and ostracized researchers and scientists who proposed different theories or presented findings that contradicted established knowledge.

The turning point came in the early 1970s when neuroscientist Michael Merzenich designed what became known as the “blind ferret experiment.” Merzenich intended to prove the brain’s fixed nature by surgically switching the eye and ear nerve endings in ferrets, expecting to confirm they would remain permanently disabled. When the ferrets began to see and hear again because their brains had reorganized their neural connections, the evidence was irrefutable. Rather than dismissing this surprising outcome, Merzenich investigated what had occurred, helping to launch a new field of neuroscience.

Today, scientists embrace Edmondson’s principles by actively distinguishing between different types of failures. Jennifer Heemstra of Emory University separates preventable mistakes (like using equipment incorrectly) from intelligent failures that occur during hypothesis testing. By creating an environment where good failures are celebrated, Heemstra fosters psychological safety that allows her team to take reasonable risks and thoroughly analyze unexpected results—precisely the approach Edmondson advocates for organizations seeking to innovate and improve.