Teaming Across Boundaries

Teaming Across Boundaries is highly interactive two-day program developed by Dr William Noonan. The program addresses the challenges associated with coordinating and collaborating across disciplines and functional boundaries. It introduces a new and more flexible way for organisations to carry out interdependent tasks and is based on the research of Prof Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School.
Leaders face an increasingly complex and demanding business world that poses significant challenges for learning and innovation. Leaders that form flexible and collaborative teams to achieve their goals are more likely to be successful.
Enabling such collaboration can be challenging. Research by Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School highlighted how hierarchical status, cultural differences, and distance often prevent individuals from teaming effectively.
Teaming Across Boundaries provides leaders with the means to overcome these barriers by recognising them and modifying their leadership styles to support and facilitate teaming. Learning is paramount in this process.
Teaming is a dynamic activity, not a confined, fixed process. It involves coordinating and collaborating without the benefit of stable team structures. Often this requires collaborating across functional and organisational boundaries.
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.
The power of teaming in complex operations is the ability to anticipate, solve, and diagnose problems, and reduce system risks in order to avoid consequential failures.

Teaming is a way of working that brings people together to generate new ideas, find answers, and solve problems. Teaming requires a new type of leadership that supports speaking up, asking questions, and sharing ideas.

Teaming Across Boundaries provides leaders with an opportunity to develop the capability to:
  • Enable teaming across boundaries
  • Build productive working relationships
  • Give and receive feedback effectively
  • Create psychological safe environments

Given the complex nature of teaming across boundaries, this program relies heavily on facilitated interactive dialogues that ground the material within the specific work environments of the participants.
Amy Edmondson’s research highlighted that to be successful at teaming, leaders need to be skilled at the following behaviours:
  • Speaking up: Asking questions, seeking feedback, and discussing errors. This element of frank communication enables teams to appreciate multiple viewpoints and access individual knowledge.
  • Collaboration: Working with others in ways that involve mutual respect, cooperation, and goals. This cooperative attitude fosters information sharing, action coordination, and the constant invitation of feedback and inputs.
  • Experimentation: Recognising that teaming employs a tentative approach to situations where uncertainty may prevail. As a behaviour, it means reaching out to others to evaluate the effects of one’s actions on them.
  • Reflection: Judiciously examining results to arrive at new ideas. It makes use of specific observations, questions, and considerations of processes and outcomes.

Teaming Across Boundaries  provides leaders with an opportunity learn how to create work environments that are conducive to these behaviours.

Get In Touch

Contact us today on Info@executiveleadership.com.au to find out more about our Teaming Across Boundaries program.