BUSN - MGST

Companies today increasingly rely on teams that span many industries for radical innovation, especially to solve “wicked problems.” So leaders have to understand how to promote collaboration when roles are uncertain, goals are shifting, expertise and organizational cultures are varied, and participants have clashing or even antagonistic perspectives. HBS professor Amy Edmondson has studied more than a dozen cross-industry innovation projects, among them the creation of a new city, a mango supply-chain transformation, and the design and construction of leading-edge buildings. She has identified the leadership practices that make successful cross-industry teams work: fostering an adaptable vision, promoting psychological safety, enabling knowledge sharing, and encouraging collaborative innovation.

3D Leadership, the framework presented here, is a multi-theory integrated approach that combines the visionary, transformational and transactional dimensions of leadership into a single practicable leadership framework that draws upon findings from both past and recent leadership research. STL incorporates a three-stage bi-dimensional behavioral intervention model for team management practice and provides step-by-step guidance to modern team managers on how to integrate work deliveries and competencies of teammates with the vision, mission, goals and chosen strategies of their firm.

This paper addresses group process and team management strategies. Recognizing the trajectory in both groups and teams, as living systems in our postmodern society, it challenges why teams are assessed as having better performance or development.

HBR's 90th anniversary is a sensible time to revisit a basic question: Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? The answer may seem obvious to most HBR readers, but these three economists cast their net much wider than that. In a decade long study of thousands of organizations in 20 countries, they and their interview team assessed how well manufacturers, schools, and hospitals adhere to three management basics: targets, incentives, and monitoring.They found that huge numbers of companies follow none of those fundamentals, that adopting the basics yields big improvements in outcomes such as productivity and longevity, and that good nuts-and-bolts management at individual firms shapes national performance. At 14 textile manufacturers in India, for example, an intervention-involving free, high-quality advice from a consultant who was on-site half-time for five months-cut defects by half, reduced inventory by 20%, and raised output by 10%. A control group saw no such gains.The authors' global data set suggests that implementing good management at schools and hospitals yields change more slowly than at manufacturers-but it does come eventually. And the macroeconomic potential-for incomes, productivity, and delivery of critically needed services-is huge. A call for "better management" may sound prosaic, but given the global payoffs,it's actually quite radical.