Team vs. Teaming
In a previous essay, I wrote about my experiment with the first-year graduate students at Yale’s School of Architecture who are at a pivotal point in their program; they’re immersed in the Yale Building Project, a school tradition dating back to 1967.
The Building Project centers on the design and construction of a residential structure for a community-based client in the New Haven area. Many aspects of the BP mirror professional practice: dynamic client conversations, an active construction site, hands-on creating, scheduling pressures.
And, of course, working on a team.
In fact, students are organized into different teams multiple times over the course of the year as the project moves through different phases. It’s a powerful simulation of something most of us discover early in our careers: we don’t always get to choose who we work with or what we work on.
This is where things can get dicey.
Teams are comprised of people who are different because no two humans are exactly alike. Different kinds of experiences. Different communication styles. Different work habits. Different preferences. All of it creates tension, sometimes even conflict. But contrary to popular belief, the team itself is rarely the problem.
Teaming is.
In her book Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, Amy Edmondson makes an important distinction between being on a team and knowing how to work well together in evolving conditions.
That distinction is crucial.
Teaming is less about dividing up tasks to get things done and more about learning together, in real time, in order to execute better. It requires risk-taking, embracing failure, and asking questions when it would be more comfortable having the answers. As Edmondson points out, these are “anything but natural acts in large organizations.”
And yet these are exactly the capabilities today’s work demands.
Edmondson writes that “fast-moving environments need people who know how to team, people who have the skills and the flexibility to act in moments of potential collaboration when and where they appear.”
If that doesn’t describe the conditions most organizations operate in today, I don’t know what does.
The concept of teaming became my provocation to the Building Project students. Rather than focus on the structure or roles within their teams, we focused on the mindset and practices of collaboration - things that transcend whatever team they happen to be on today or in the future.
We explored what’s actually happening when conversations go sideways.
We practiced some specific skills that make teaming possible: self-awareness, advanced listening, productive inquiry.
And we looked at the anatomy of collaborative conversations themselves, because productive conversations have phases that need to be navigated.
Most formal education in the creative fields still defaults to solo projects and individual achievement. Studio culture amplifies strong voices, but it offers too few opportunities to build collaborative muscle. That’s changing, but not fast enough.
The bottom line is this: if you’re in charge of leadership development in your organization, there’s likely a teaming gap that needs to be filled.