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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Serie: 90 Days to Level Up Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Supercharge your teamwork skills in just three months with expert advice from an industry leader
In 90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork, bestselling author Amy Edmondson teaches you how to become a better team player by focusing on a specific element of cooperative achievement each week. From overcoming barriers to creating psychological safety, this book walks you through exactly how to develop your teamwork skills, one step at a time.
Inside you'll find:
- A crystal-clear, week-by-week roadmap to help you improve your teamwork skills
- Practical tasks and actionable steps you can apply immediately to become a better teammate
- Thoughtful prompts to help you think about how what you've learned applies to your own career
If you're ready to transform your career and achieve your goals in just one quarter, the 90 Days to Level Up series is for you. Whether you're brand-new to a business, stepping into a leadership role for the first time, or looking to enhance your skills, this series will be your personal guide to unlocking your potential and reaching new professional heights.
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Seitenzahl: 265
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
90-Day Plan
Introduction
Part I: Days 1–30
Week 1: Teaming Is a Verb
Delving into Teaming
Organizing to Execute
Scientific Management
Ford and Taylor’s Legacy
Thriving in the Face of Uncertainty
Good-Bye Taylor and Ford … Hello Complex Adaptive Systems
Learning to Team, Teaming to Learn
Organizing to Learn
Note
Week 2: Identifying the Fundamentals of Teaming
Driving Teaming Success
Speaking Up
The Benefits of Teaming
Social and Cognitive Barriers to Teaming
Note
Week 3: Supporting Teaming as a Leader
Frame the Situation for Learning
Make It Psychologically Safe to Team
Learn to Learn from Failure
Span Occupational and Cultural Boundaries
Leading Through Failure
Developing a Learning Approach to Failure
Strategies for Learning from Failures
Week 4: Breaking Through Barriers
Visible and Invisible Boundaries
Three Types of Boundaries
Teaming Across Common Boundaries
Organization-Based
Occupation-Based
Occupation and Organization Combined
Notes
Part I: Wrap-Up
Part II: Days 31–60
Week 5: Teaming Without Fear
Unconscious Calculations
Envisioning the Psychologically Safe Workplace
An Accidental Discovery
Week 6: Creating Psychological Safety
Promoting Trust and Respect
Weighing Interpersonal Risks in the Work Environment
The Benefits of Psychological Safety
Cultivating Psychological Safety
Leadership Cultivating Psychological Safety
Week 7: Framing for Learning
Cognitive Frames
Tacit Interpretations
Reframing for Learning
Changing Frames
Reinforcing a Learning Frame
The Ideal Employee?
Tactics for Individual Reframing
Week 8: Working Without Fear
Setting the Stage for Psychological Safety
Inviting Participation So People Respond
Responding Productively to Voice—No Matter Its Quality
Part II: Wrap-Up
Part III: Days 61–90
Week 9: Shooting for the Moon
Aiming High for Innovation
Aiming High with Meaning
Worthy Aspirations That Motivate Innovation
Week 10: Coming Together
Sometimes a Team Calls for Strange Bedfellows
Teaming Across Boundaries
Types of Boundaries
What It Takes to Team
When Conflict Heats Up
Hot and Cool Cognition
Three Practices That Cool Hot Conflict
Embracing the Risks of Teaming
Week 11: Failing to Succeed
Unpacking Failure
Failure’s Causes
Mapping the Failure Landscape
Failing Well—At the Right Scale
Leading Failure
Courage and Fear
Note
Week 12: Learning from Failure
Learning as You Go
How to Learn Fast
Overcoming Barriers to Learning
Leading Learning to Innovate
Part III: Wrap-Up
Conclusion
Final Questions
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 Organizing to Execute Versus Organizing to Learn
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Strategies for Learning from Failure
Chapter 4
Table 4.1 Common Boundaries That Impede Teaming and Organizational ...
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Learning Frame Versus Execution Frame
Table 7.2 Activities and Cognitive Frames for Successful Implementa...
Chapter 8
Table 8.1 The Leader’s Tool Kit for Building Psychological Safety
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Leadership Behaviors That Build Psychological Safety
Chapter 11
Table 11.1 A Spectrum of Potential Causes of Organizational Failur...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 The imperfect relationship between process and outcome....
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
90-Day Plan
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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AMY EDMONDSON
Bestselling Author of The Fearless Organization
90DAYStoLEVELUP
YOUR TEAMWORK
Copyright © 2026 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies.
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Cover design: Paul McCarthy
90-Day Plan
Each week, you’ll focus on one element of teamwork that will help you achieve your performance goals. This 90-Day Plan outlines these skills and topics so you can pace yourself, track your progress, and identify the areas that will have the most impact for you. Add your personal goals and vision for success at the bottom of this plan.
Your 90-Day Plan to Level Up Your Teamwork Skills
Performance Goals
Get ready to learn, innovate, and compete.
Team fearlessly with psychological safety.
Innovate with teaming.
Benchmark Goals
Days 1–30
Get ready to learn, innovate, and compete.
Week 1: Understand how teaming is different than teamwork.
Week 2: Learn the four pillars of teaming and why they work.
Week 3: Lead through teaming.
Week 4: Discover how to team across boundaries.
Days 31–60
Team fearlessly with psychological safety.
Week 5: Grasp the power of psychological safety.
Week 6: Make it safe to team.
Week 7: Frame your team for success.
Week 8: Create a fearless organization.
Days 61–90
Innovate with teaming.
Week 9: Aim high.
Week 10: Team up.
Week 11: Fail well.
Week 12: Learn fast.
Personal Goals and Vision for Success
What do you hope to achieve by leveling up?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
How could your life change by reaching these goals?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
Are you ready to level up? Let’s get started!
Introduction
Welcome to 90 Days to Level Up Teamwork, your guide to taking your leadership skills to the next level in only 90 days. In this guide, I challenge you with actionable, practical goals to build your teamwork skills week by week. You don’t have to wait to see results: you’ll be learning and growing every week of this 90-Day Plan.
In this guide, I challenge you to do the following:
Get ready to learn, innovate, and compete.
Team fearlessly with psychological safety.
Innovate with teaming.
These overarching performance goals are broken down into benchmark goals for each week: rigorous but achievable targets to let you see immediate progress on your journey.
Each weekly goal comes with insightful readings, engaging activities, and opportunities for self-reflection.
Part I describes the basic activities and conditions that help organizations succeed through teaming, a dynamic kind of teamwork designed to fit the needs of the fast-paced modern workplace. I cover how work gets done, how leaders help make it happen, and how a safe interpersonal environment frees up people to focus on innovation. The model and guidelines presented throughout this part provide readers with a supportive framework for understanding and responding to the dynamics of collective learning. I examine and describe the mindset required to successfully incorporate teaming within an organizational setting and provide a set of leadership practices that can help develop a team-based learning infrastructure.
In Part II, I look at what psychological safety is and why it matters, as well as why it’s not the norm in many organizations. I discuss how crucial it is to create an environment where everyone feels free to speak up honestly and mistakes can be admitted without fear. I also talk about what psychological safety isn’t and why it doesn’t mean immunity from consequences. Leaders have a special responsibility to create the conditions of psychological safety, and I discuss what those are. Last, I cover the importance of framing work well and how to actually go about creating a psychologically safe environment.
In Part III, I discuss the four requirements to build a team for innovation: aim high, team up, fail well, and learn fast. Aiming high involves choosing a worthy goal for your team, and I cover what that means and how it spurs innovation. Successful teaming often requires diverse (in many ways) team members, and that diversity brings risks as well as benefits. You will learn how to maximize the benefits and minimize risks. I also explain why “fail well” isn’t an oxymoron and the many learning benefits that you can derive from an intelligent failure.
In Part I, you will get ready to learn, innovate, and compete with teaming.
In week 1, I define teaming and explain how teaming is different than teamwork. How does it work? What does it take for people to learn how to team? What do people do when teaming? How does teaming produce organizational learning? This week describes the challenges to teaming and shows what it looks like when it’s done well. I define teaming and examine why it’s so crucial in today’s complex organizations.
In week 2, you learn the four pillars of teaming and why they are a must: speaking up, collaboration, experimentation, and reflection. I also look at why those four pillars aren’t as easy to achieve as you might think. I review the benefits of teaming and talk about some of the barriers you must overcome to team effectively.
In week 3, I show you how to lead with teaming. My years of research have established four key responsibilities that leaders have to set the stage for successful teaming:
Frame the situation for learning.
Make it psychologically safe to team.
Learn to learn from failure.
Span occupational and cultural boundaries.
I cover all of these in more depth throughout this 90-Day Plan. In week 3, I also offer strategies for learning from failure.
In week 4, you discover how to team across boundaries. There are many barriers or boundaries to successful teaming. In the modern workplaces, workers are often widely dispersed geographically, have different cultural backgrounds, have varying educational backgrounds, and have widely differing status. But in order to get the results you want, you’ll need to overcome these stumbling blocks to successful teaming. In this week, you look at the common types of boundaries, how they interfere with successful teaming, and, most important, how to overcome them.
In Part II, you will discover teaming fearlessly with psychological safety.
In week 5, we begin a deep dive into psychological safety—what it is and why it’s important. You will also learn the dangers of an environment where people don’t feel psychologically safe. Finally, I explain why psychologically safe high-performing teams only seem to make more errors than other teams.
In week 6, you will learn the many benefits of psychological safety. In addition, you will see why it can be so difficult for workers to feel comfortable in speaking up and how interpersonal risk plays into that. I also explain how everyone, but especially leaders, can help encourage psychological safety throughout the organization.
In week 7, you look at the subject of framing and the important responsibilities that leaders have to frame work and the team effectively. Considerable research has shown that when a project is framed well by leadership, successful outcomes are more likely. In this week, you learn what successful framing looks like and strategies for achieving it. I also explain why the “ideal employees” might not be who you think they are.
In week 8, I dive into the hows of psychological safety. How does a leader create a fertile environment for it? One key factor is encouraging employees to use their voice. I examine how to do that and why it matters. You will also read about an interesting case where an employee was fired from Google for expressing an (unpopular) opinion. I examine how it could have been handled differently and how Google could learn from this situation in the future.
In Part III, you will learn how to innovate with teaming by discovering four key concepts to innovation: aim well, team up, fail well, and learn fast.
In week 9, you begin to learn about the first of the key concepts that set the stage for innovation: aiming well. When you are looking to do something that has never been done before, it helps to have a worthy goal. A leader is responsible for not only pointing the team in the direction of an inspiring or meaningful goal but also helping to frame it that way for everyone on the team.
In week 10, I discuss the second key to innovation: teaming up. Contrary to popular belief, some of the most successful teams are composed of strange bedfellows. You will learn about one fascinating real-life example that formed the basis of the movie Argo. Diverse skills and backgrounds are often necessary for a successful team, but those differences can create challenges, too. I also cover how to address those boundaries to successful teaming.
In week 11, I cover the third key to innovation: failing well. Despite what you might think, not all failure is created equal. Sometimes, failures can be an essential and productive learning opportunity, but not all failures fall into this category. In this week, I explain the different types of failures and how to make sure that your failures are the right kind. I also cover the responsibilities of a leader in managing failures.
In week 12, I look at the fourth key to innovation: learning fast. When you have those productive failures that you learned about in week 11, it’s vital that you learn from them and learn fast. In this week, you discover how to learn fast and how to overcome barriers to it. You will also discover your responsibilities as a leader to prepare your team for learning from its mistakes and setbacks.
If you are ready to level up your teamwork, turn the page and get started!
Part IDays 1–30
Performance goal: Get ready to learn, innovate, and compete.
Teaming, coined deliberately to capture the activity of working together, presents a new, more flexible way for organizations to carry out interdependent tasks. Unlike the traditional concept of a team, teaming is an active process, not a static entity. Imagine a fluid network of interconnected individuals working in temporary teams on improvement, problem-solving, and innovation. Teaming blends relating to people, listening to other points of view, coordinating actions, and making shared decisions.
The following table summarizes the skills you will sharpen over the next 30 days. To keep yourself motivated, consider your personal goals and vision for success. What does teamwork mean to you?
Days 1–30Performance Goal: Get ready to learn, innovate, and compete.
Week 1
Benchmark Goal: Understand how teaming is different than teamwork.
What was psychologist Richard Hackman’s perspective on teams?
How is teaming different than that traditional understanding?
Do you agree that fear is no longer an effective management strategy in the workplace?
What is the difference between organizing to execute and organizing to learn?
Week 2
Benchmark Goal: Learn the four pillars of teaming and why they work.
What are the four pillars of teaming?
What are the benefits of teaming compared to a traditional structured team?
Which of the social and cognitive barriers of teaming have you struggled with in the workplace?
Were you able to handle the barrier effectively? If not, can you think of a better way to handle such a barrier in the future?
Week 3
Benchmark Goal: Lead through teaming.
How can leaders promote teaming?
Can you think of a time when you learned a valuable lesson from failure?
Can you recall a failure you should have learned from but didn’t?
Week 4
Benchmark Goal: Discover how to team across boundaries.
What are some of the biggest boundaries or barriers to teaming?
What are some of the challenges of teaming across boundaries of physical distance?
Have you found status a serious boundary in your experience of teamwork?
Personal Goals and Vision for Success
What do you hope to achieve by leveling up?
How could your life change by reaching these goals?
Week 1Teaming Is a Verb
Benchmark goal: Understanding how teaming is different than teamwork.
Say the word team and the first image that comes to mind is probably a sports team: football players huddled in the mud, basketball players swarming in a full-court press, or baseball players turning a game-saving double play. In sports, great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust one another. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole. Similarly, musicians form bands, chamber groups, and orchestras that rely on interdependent talents. A symphony falls apart unless the string section coordinates with the woodwinds, brass, and percussionists. Even when a soloist is featured on stage, the orchestral score has a part for every musician. A successful performance is one in which the musicians complement one another and play in harmony. Like all good teams, they display synergy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The players understand that they succeed or fail together—they win or lose as a team.
In today’s complex and volatile business environment, corporations and organizations also win or lose by creating wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Intense competition, rampant unpredictability, and a constant need for innovation are giving rise to even greater interdependence and thus demand even greater levels of collaboration and communication than ever before. Teaming is essential to an organization’s ability to respond to opportunities and to improve internal processes. Week 1 aims to deepen your understanding of why teaming and the behaviors it requires are so crucial for organizational success in today’s environment.
Delving into Teaming
Sports teams and musical groups are both bounded, static collections of individuals. Like most work teams in the past, they are physically located in the same place while practicing or performing together. Members of these teams learn how to interact. They’ve developed trust and know each other’s roles. Advocating stable boundaries, well-designed tasks, and thoughtfully composed membership, many seminal theories of organizational effectiveness explained how to design and manage just these types of static performance teams.
Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman, a preeminent scholar of team effectiveness, established the power of team structures in enabling team performance. According to this influential perspective, well-designed teams are those with clear goals, well-thought-out tasks that are conducive to teamwork, team members with the right skills and experiences for the task, adequate resources, and access to coaching and support. Get the design right, the theory says, and the performance will take care of itself. This model focused on the team as an entity, looking largely within the well-defined bounds of a team to explain its performance. Other research, notably conducted by MIT professor Deborah Ancona, showed that how much a team’s members interact with people outside the team boundaries was also an important factor in team performance. Both perspectives worked well in guiding the design and management of effective teams, at least in contexts where managers had the lead time and the run time to invest in composing stable, well-designed teams.
In these prior treatments, team is a noun. A team is an established, fixed group of people cooperating in pursuit of a common goal. But what if a team disbands almost as quickly as it was assembled? For example, what if you work in an emergency services facility where the staffing changes every shift, and the team changes completely for every case or client? What if you’re a member of a temporary project team formed to solve a unique production problem? Or you’re part of a group of managers with a mix of individual and shared responsibilities? How do you create synergy when you lack the advantages offered by the frequent drilling and practice sessions of static performance teams like those in sports and music?
The answer lies in teaming.
Teaming is a verb. It is a dynamic activity, not a bounded, static entity. It is largely determined by the mindset and practices of teamwork, not by the design and structures of effective teams. Teaming is teamwork on the fly. It involves coordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable team structures, because many operations, such as hospitals, power plants, and military installations, require a level of staffing flexibility that makes stable team composition rare. In a growing number of organizations, the constantly shifting nature of work means that many teams disband almost as soon as they’ve formed. You could be working on one team right now, but in a few days, or even a few minutes, you may be on another team.
Fast-moving work 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. They must have the ability to move on, ready for the next such moments. Teaming still relies on old-fashioned teamwork skills such as recognizing and clarifying interdependence, establishing trust, and figuring out how to coordinate. But there usually isn’t time to build a foundation of familiarity through the careful sharing of personal history and prior experience, nor is there time for developing shared experiences through practice working together. Instead, people need to develop and use new capabilities for sharing crucial knowledge quickly. They must learn to ask questions clearly and frequently. They must make the small adjustments through which different skills and knowledge are woven together into timely products and services.
Why should managers care about teaming? The answer is simple. Teaming is the engine of organizational learning. By now, everyone knows that organizations need to learn—to thrive in a world of continuous change. But how organizations learn is not as well understood. Organizations are complex entities; many are globally distributed, most encompass multiple areas of expertise, and nearly all engage in a variety of activities. What does it mean for such a complex entity to “learn”? An organization cannot engage in a learning process in any meaningful sense—not in the way an individual can. Yet, when individuals learn, this does not always create change in the ways the organization delivers products and services to customers.
In spite of the obvious need for change, most large enterprises are still managed according to a powerful mindset I call organizing to execute.
Organizing to Execute
If you stood on a main street in Detroit around 1900, you would have seen electric trolleys sharing the streets with horse-drawn carriages. A mere decade later, cars had arrived in force. Though inefficient and unreliable, these increasingly popular cars brought with them the promise of a new, exciting world. For a short time, however, both horse and mechanical horsepower tried to share the streets, sometimes with devastating consequences. Many people found the collision of old and new worlds difficult, especially when those streets became even more crowded with young men from the countryside drawn to the city by the promise of manufacturing jobs.
In this transitional period, it was not obvious to the average worker how much the new industrial era would disrupt the social order by calling for new forms of obedience, unprecedented conformity to routine, and a new mindset that revered systems of control. Self-sufficient farmers and shopkeepers, who had for generations confronted vicissitudes of weather and illness and found ways to survive, would subtly but inexorably be transformed into order followers collecting paychecks from impersonal enterprises.
Organizing to execute found its seminal momentum in Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line: workers focused on fitting cog to component and component to cog. Emphasizing routine procedures, Ford’s approach made the working life of employees menial and tedious. Reliable and predictable, Ford’s assembly line process was as much a novelty as its product. With the new century, age-old structures for self-reliance were being replaced with the small, repetitive steps that made mass production possible and brought about the modern world of products and services we know today. Ford’s success was contingent on a high level of managerial control over employee practices known today as command-and-control management, or top-down management. The practice of top-down management is one component of a broader organizational methodology known as scientific management.
Scientific Management
Ford’s intellectual partner as a pioneer in mass production was management expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, who complemented Ford’s assembly line with his efficiency methods and scientific measurement. Taylor and his followers devised ways to transform unpredictable and expensive customized work into efficient, economical systems of mass production. Long product life cycles enabled ample payback for the time invested in designing near-foolproof execution systems like the machine-paced assembly line. Periods of stability could be counted on. Products, processes, and even customers were mercifully uniform, minimizing the need for real-time improvisation to respond to unexpected problems, technological changes, or customer needs. Promoting the use of empirical methods, Taylor advocated his model of management and production in two influential monographs, Shop Management and The Principles of Scientific Management.
As managers today well know, an advantage of these new small, repetitive tasks was their transparency. Small, repetitive tasks are easy to monitor. They make the performance of the individual worker easy to measure. The assumption that firm performance was the cumulative result of thousands and thousands of well-designed and well-executed individual tasks dominated managerial theory and matched the economic reality. Even today, when it comes to issues like efficiency and productivity, most managers and corporate leaders are driven by taken-for-granted beliefs that were first promulgated by Ford and Taylor. For example, many consider the ability to measure and reward the specific, differentiated performance of individuals crucial to good management—a belief that is inaccurate and unhelpful in certain settings.
Ford and Taylor’s Legacy
Devotion to efficiency and productivity resulted in two major workplace changes. First, it spurred a demand for professional managers who could oversee a vast complex of work activity. Second, it instilled a basic distrust of the worker. To ensure that workers did their jobs according to specified procedures, objective measurements of individual performance were relatively easy for managers to develop and implement. And, for the most part, workers who tried harder performed better. In mass production settings like the one designed by Ford, opportunities for worker decision-making or creativity were nonexistent. With this transparency, fear worked reasonably well to motivate employees. Whether through a fear of supervisor sanction or loss of material rewards, managers were able to coerce and intimidate workers to ensure high productivity. If there were costs to this approach for the enterprise or corporation, they were not in plain view.
