"Teaming" is "Winning"

A true success of the NWCG Leadership Subcommittee (LSC)is the use of our support cadre--also referred to as our "eyes forward" cadre. Randy Skelton, Dupty Fire Staff on the Payette National Forest, is the LSC's Support Cadre Coordinator. These men and women come together to complete a task or project and then disband when finished. This grassroots effort has proven quite effective for the program.

Recently, Karl Moore, Forbes magazine contributor and professor at McGill and Oxford Universities, interviewed Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School, regarding the death of teams.

Edmondson believes that teams are being replaced effectively by "teaming." To Edmondson, "teaming is a verb, teaming is a skill, teaming is an activity." "Teaming" is the LSC's support cadre.

In "HBS's Amy Edmondson on the Death of Teams," Moore and Edmondson discuss how organizations and employees may have to adapt to adapt to embrace the "teaming" way of doing business.

Here are some interview highlights from Edmondson:

• We're going to have to get better at learning how to quickly relate to people we don't know; learning how to trust them, learning how to share our knowledge, extract their knowledge, synthesize it, even though we come from very different backgrounds, different expertise areas and so forth.

• Trust must be built quickly.

• Team building will be conducted in the context of doing the work itself.

If you are unable to access the YouTube video, the interview transcript is available in Forbes' online article "HBS's Amy Edmondson on the Death of Teams.