From the course: Leading and Working in Teams

Effective work requires teaming

From the course: Leading and Working in Teams

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Effective work requires teaming

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- Imagine you've been scheduled for open-heart surgery. A team of surgeons, nurses, and technicians will be coming together, maybe meeting each other for the first time, to coordinate their actions and expertise to produce a successful operation. Your outcome is utterly dependent on how well they work together. You start to think about the fact that they're only human, and you wonder what it will take for their teamwork to be exquisitely well-executed. In this course, I will explain the difference between teams and teaming, what it means to team, both from a team member perspective and a team leader perspective. I'll explain the challenges to teaming and the challenges to learning that you, no doubt, face in your organization. And along the way, I'll provide action steps that you can take to assure that your teams are both learning and succeeding. I'm Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. I've spent the last decade working with organizations and studying how people get complex work done. And what I've realized is that organizations are completely dependent on the work that's done by teams. And teams, as we have defined them, are increasingly being replaced by teaming. Now let's get started.

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