Training Industry: Making Cross-functional, Functional: 3 Essential Skills for L&D Team Collaboration

An article in the Academy of Management Review shared that between 65% and  95% of knowledge workers in the U.S. and Europe work on multiple teams, and that percentage is likely even higher in today’s volatile business environment.

Also consider when your teams’ membership last changed. How many changes have occurred in this year alone? This differs from the past when most well-known team models and interventions were developed, when it was more common for people to be on one team with stable membership. In these times, it made sense to focus training interventions at the team level rather than the individual level.

However, with the increases in multi-team membership, and more frequent changes to team make-up and structure, there has been an emerging recognition of and interest in the impact an individual can have on a team.

Dr. Amy Edmondson popularized the term “teaming” as a verb in her book, “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy,” and says, “Fast moving work environments need people who know how to team, people who have the skills and flexibility to act in moments of potential collaboration when and where they appear.” This is not to minimize the importance of more traditional team-level concepts such as establishing trust and figuring out how to coordinate, but rather to recognize that our approach needs to be different, and that developing teaming skills in the individuals in our organizations is a key component of building effective teams today.