Foreword

It gives me great pleasure to write a foreword for this very important and timely book. I have known Amy’s work for more than a decade and am very pleased that she has now pulled together the main points that have emerged from her seminal research on the processes that underlie teamwork.

Let me comment first on why this work is important and why it is essential for leaders and managers in all kinds of organizations to absorb the lessons provided here. Even though our culture tends to accept groups and teams only when pragmatically necessary to win or to get a job done, teams and teamwork are at the very foundation of society and community. It is a tragedy of our organizational society that we joke about meetings being mostly a waste of time and groups being useless because they diffuse accountability. We have built all our incentive and promotion systems on individual performance to the point that even in team sports such as hockey, soccer, basketball, and football, it is the individual star on the team who gets the press and the big bucks. The result of this cultural bias is that most leaders are shockingly incompetent in running meetings or creating teams. Yet they are dependent on teamwork. This book’s emphasis on “teaming,” the processes that underlie effective collaboration, provides crucial insight and understanding on what is necessary for teamwork to work.

Why is this book timely? Because the world is becoming more complex and multicultural. Complexity is the result of the technological evolution of all the fields of science, engineering, management, and organization development. What this means is that to get anything accomplished in a technologically complex society requires the input of information and process sophistication from many fields. That, in turn, means that managers as individuals no longer know enough to make decisions and get things done. They are de facto increasingly dependent on all kinds of specialists. And that means they have to understand the processes of “teaming,” of bringing these specialists together and enabling them to work. Nowhere is this more evident than in health care, where everything from running a hospital or community health care system to doing a complex cardiac operation requires high levels of teaming.

Along with complexity we see the world becoming multicultural. And I mean this both in the ethnic sense of many more nations contributing to the occupational pools of most organizations and in the occupational sense that the specialization referred to above also leads to strong occupational cultures. Some of these cultures have been around for a long time and bedevil teaming efforts, such as the gulf that exists between doctors and nurses. Other such gulfs have arisen between the culture of information technology that feeds the egalitarianism and openness of the new generations and the traditional management culture of hierarchy and control. How do you get collaboration between a young engineer bred on total transparency and a manager who “knows” that information is power and must, therefore, be tightly controlled?

Add to this the problems of different languages and thought worlds of the many national cultures and you have the need for what this book emphasizes above all—the ability to learn. Teaming in today’s and tomorrow’s world will be about learning. Old formulas for what a group should be, how it should be organized and run, will not work. One of these old formulas emphasizes group composition—find out what everyone’s personal style and competence is and fit the parts together. The most obvious limitation to this formula is that the changing nature of complex tasks makes it difficult to decide ahead of time what personal style and competency set to measure. Secondarily, it will be more and more difficult to find and recruit whatever competence may be needed. What this book emphasizes so well is that the mindset of teaming has to be focused on how to get the job done with the team resources available, and that inevitably is a learning process.

Teaming and learning are here to stay. Enjoy learning about it.

Edgar H. Schein