In a world constantly in flux, leading a team can be challenging. Yet, in a Deloitte study, 81 percent of respondents ranked the ability to lead through complexity and ambiguity as the most important skill for 21st-century leaders.
The same study found that new technologies, the pace of change, and evolving demographics, employee, and customer expectations are considered the top reasons leadership today requires a unique skill set.
One competency that can help you excel in an ever-changing world is the ability to build, manage, and lead dynamic teams. Here’s a primer on dynamic teaming, why it’s crucial for all leaders, and how you can develop your skills.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Dynamic Teaming?
Dynamic teaming is the process of working in groups that have fluid membership—meaning, they may need to gather in the moment across industries, functions, time zones, and languages without proper preparation—to navigate ever-shifting circumstances and tasks.
When you consider a team, you may think of the more traditional variety: a bounded group with stable membership and one shared goal. As the world becomes more dynamic, teams must adapt to meet these new challenges—and you must adapt to lead them to success.
In Dynamic Teaming, part of the online Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB), Harvard Business School Professor and CLIMB Faculty Chair Amy Edmondson describes the difference between traditional and dynamic teams.
“Think about a routine dental visit,” Edmondson says. “The same dentist and hygienist team you’ve probably gone to for years is prepared to care for your teeth. They’ve practiced together and can move efficiently through their tasks with skill and expertise.
“Now imagine you’re visiting Boston and slip on the ice, knocking out a tooth,” Edmondson continues. “You’re rushed to the emergency room (ER). The hospital that will care for you is open 24 hours, and the doctors, staff, and nurses rotate through shifts, working in different teams and on different patients. You come to the ER with a set of unique and complex challenges that differ significantly from the patient before you and the patient after you.”
As business teams today become less like the traditional “dental team” and more like the dynamic “emergency room team,” being able to work efficiently and flexibly to solve whatever challenges arise is increasingly important.
Related: 5 Characteristics of a Courageous Leader
Why Is Dynamic Teaming Important?
The need for dynamic teams is a direct result of operating in what Edmondson calls a “VUCA world.” VUCA stands for:
- Volatile: Rapid changes, ups and downs
- Uncertain: Inability to predict future events or societal values
- Complex: The world’s increasing interconnectedness
- Ambiguous: Unsureness of events’ and signals’ meanings
Why is the world more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous? Factors include:
- Technological advancements in communication that allow information to spread rapidly at scale
- Transportation advancements that enable people and goods to travel faster and farther than ever before
- Business’s global nature and how interconnected supply chains and capital markets have become
When change was more predictable, a more controlling managerial style guaranteed efficiency. In a VUCA world, managerial styles need to change to foster the innovation, flexibility, and collaboration required to reach goals.
“Work has changed over the last 100-plus years,” Edmondson says in Dynamic Teaming, “but that industrial era mindset has endured. It bleeds into places it doesn’t belong, encouraging front-line employees to keep their heads down, not raise questions, and follow orders.”
While traditional management requires control and replicable formulas for reaching goals, modern management requires experimentation, diversity, and creativity.
“To move from traditional management to managing in a VUCA world requires adopting a new mindset,” Edmondson says in the course. “Today’s world requires cross-functional and dynamic teaming. It’s your job—the leader’s job—to move your team and organization toward that mindset.”
To help you set your team and organization up for success, here are four key factors of dynamic teams and how to sharpen your skills.
Key Factors of Dynamic Teams
1. Diversity
When building a team to tackle new and unexpected challenges, your first thought may be to compile the top experts in your field. Yet, crafting a team with high levels of diversity is the foundation for a strong, dynamic team.
Factors to consider when building a diverse team include:
- Background and upbringing
- Expertise and skills
- Identity, including race, gender, and sexual orientation
- Culture and nationality
One example of leveraging diversity to form dynamic teams is the Freedom Team network in Massachusetts. Created to tackle issues of bias-motivated threats, harassment, or violence, each team features:
- Local police officer
- Public school administrator or teacher
- Legal professional
- Public relations or social media specialist
- Business professional
- Medical professional
- Finance professional
- Representatives from local faith organizations
Each team’s diverse range of skills and perspectives enables them to work together when unexpected scenarios arise in their communities.
Related: DEI: What It Is & How to Champion It in the Workplace
2. Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is a group phenomenon that allows and sparks interpersonal risk-taking within a team. It encourages group members to offer opinions, suggest ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, speak up, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
While diversity is the first step in creating dynamic teams, it doesn’t ensure success on its own. Edmondson explains in Dynamic Teaming that you must provide your team with a psychologically safe environment to bring out their best.
In fact, without psychological safety, diverse teams have been shown to underperform compared to their homogenous counterparts.
“Overcoming challenges requires a strong sense of psychological safety and disciplined learning practices,” Edmondson says. “This is where you come in. As a leader, it’s your job to unlock the potential of your team and create the best possible chance for breakthrough performance.”
3. Inclusive Leadership Style
If you’ve built a diverse team and established an environment of psychological safety, the next step is to ensure you lead inclusively.
Inclusive leadership is the ability to lead a diverse, dynamic team in a way that empowers, encourages, and engages them in creating solutions. Not only does your team need to feel safe to share their ideas (psychological safety), but also valued and invested in projects’ success.
To illustrate this concept, Vernā Myers, the inaugural vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix and one of the many real-world business leaders featured in Dynamic Teaming, coined the quote, “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.”®
Reflect on your leadership style and how you can use processes and practices to lead inclusively.
Related: How Does Leadership Influence Organizational Culture?
4. Deliberate Processes and Practices
Finally, when leading dynamic teams, you must deliberately craft processes that enable you to make sense of unexpected challenges and organize your team for success.
Processes are recurring steps that help simplify and discipline chaotic situations, and practices are actions and mindsets you employ to work toward the same goal.
Processes and practices for leading dynamic teams include:
- Risk assessment: What’s at stake?
- Context assessment: How do you define success or failure, and what are either’s implications?
- Scheduling meetings: How can you balance collaborative with individual work time?
- Identifying milestones: What key goals must you hit along the way?
- Framing and communication: How will you present this challenge to your team and regularly communicate in a way that upholds psychological safety and inclusion?
In Dynamic Teaming, Edmondson presents skills, tools, frameworks, and process examples to help you make deliberate choices as a leader of dynamic teams.
“As you practice effective leadership, remember that the purpose of team leaders is to achieve objectives that support the organization’s mission,” Edmondson says. “One of the essential tools a team leader can use to influence action is the deliberate design of processes.”
Learning to Lead Dynamic Teams
As you navigate leadership in a VUCA world, remember you have the capacity to grow your skills. Like your dynamic teams working to solve new challenges, you’ll need to experiment with and innovate how you lead.
Reframe failure as an opportunity to learn, so each mistake becomes a welcome chance to iterate and enhance your leadership skills.
One way to continue learning is by enrolling in the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB), which features Edmondson’s Dynamic Teaming course. Designed for the modern leader, CLIMB will teach you how to lead dynamic teams, navigate leadership in the digital world, create and leverage your personal brand, and build a foundation in strategy, leadership, management, and finance skills.
By adopting a growth mindset, you can learn to lead your teams through uncertainty to success.
Are you interested in learning more about dynamic teaming? Explore our yearlong Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB), which comprises seven courses for leading in the modern business world. Download our CLIMB brochure to learn more about the program’s curriculum, admissions requirements, and benefits.
