Teaming

By: Amy C. Edmondson

Narrated by: Vanessa Hart

Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's Summary

New breakthrough thinking in organizational learning, leadership, and change.

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming.

Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, groupthink, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure.

• Presents a clear explanation of practical management concepts for increasing learning capability for business results
• Introduces a framework that clarifies how learning processes must be altered for different kinds of work
• Explains how Collaborative Learning works, and gives tips for how to do it wel
• Includes case-study research on Intermountain healthcare, Prudential, GM, Toyota, IDEO, the IRS, and both Cincinnati and Minneapolis Children's Hospitals, among others

Based on years of research, this book shows how leaders can make organizational learning happen by building teams that learn.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Important content, very difficult to listen to.

I am a big fan of Edmondson's work, so this negative review is mainly for the narration. The narrator had many unusual speech mannerisms, such as inserting "um" before many syllables you're pronouncing words in atypical ways. Her voice also often became quite hoarse and gravelly, and was difficult to understand except when plugged into speakers. I found myself struggling to understand the narration so often that I frequently lost track of the content, and had to repeat portions of the book. Unfortunately I therefore cannot recommend this particular recording.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

great book, bad narration

The content was excellent. Maybe a little too rich for an audiobook though. Also the narration was really distracting.
Lots of pausing between words and starting every word off with an mmm sound.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Superb, deep and accessible.

Teaming is a fabulous tool for all sorts of leaders to learn the power of collaboration, creativity, diversity, and all else that comes from an ecosystem inspired approach

No Breakthrough Here

A reductionist approach to systems thinking just doesn't work. Pretty much all of the ideas in the book are spot on, but they are not necessarily new or presented in a new way. The stilted prose is too clinical to really allow you to connect to the material on an emotional level. The Storytelling of the author was too emotionally distant to really be compelling.

Worth the read

This is my second reading of this book. I realized several pages in that I'd read it before, but had no alternative available. A few chapters in and I realized that on second read, I was picking up on ideas is missed the forest time around. There is arguably little new or novel in this book when contrasted to the multitude of books on teams and learning organizations, but this is one of the first on the subjects that I'd recommend.