Why Managers Fail Their Teams - And What To Do About It

Why Managers Fail Their Teams - And What To Do About It: “Teamwork” is the mantra of today’s workplace – but too few executives know how to manage and support it. That’s the conclusion of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, author of the new Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. For starters, she says, the fast-paced demands of modern corporate life have rendered stable, carefully-selected, long-term teams obsolete: “We often don’t have the time and luxury to get it just right before the moment has passed,” she says. Instead, teams have yielded to a more fluid, ad hoc series of relationships – “teaming,” in which groups come together for short-term projects, often crossing geographical or other boundaries.