Editor's note: Many managers are taught to think of teams as
carefully designed, static groups of individuals who, like a
baseball team or improv comedy troupe, have ample time to
practice interacting successfully and efficiently. The truth is,
most corporate project teams don't have the temporal luxury.
Teams are often disbanded before they have a chance to gel, as
individual members are delegated to new projects—and therefore
new teams—on a hectic as-need basis. HBS Professor Amy Edmondson
maintains that managers should think in terms of
"teaming"—actively building and developing teams even as a
project is in process, while realizing that a team's composition
may change at any given moment. Teaming, she says, is essential
to organizational learning. She elaborates on this concept in
her new book, "Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and
Compete in the Knowledge Economy." "Teaming calls for developing
both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills," she
writes. "Enabled by distributed leade