Making the Most of Inevitable Team Mistakes
As Covid-19 disrupts the way teams work, teams are challenged to evolve and forced to use new mechanisms (e.g. technology) to communicate and complete tasks during an already complex and uncertain environment. Due to this challenge, failures are inevitable and the best way to mitigate failure is by learning (Cannon & Edmundson, 2005). Therefore, it is imperative that organizations and practitioners understand the factors that could enable or restrict a team’s ability to learn from failure, which could ultimately increase organizational competitiveness (McCarthy & Garavan, 2008). Thus, this post explains the factors that impact teams’ abilities to learn from failure and provide specific recommendations.
Well-known author and professor Amy Edmundson’s (1999) definition of team learning is the most widely used among leading practitioners. She defines learning at the group level as “an ongoing process of reflection and action, characterized by asking questions, seeking feedback, experimenting, reflecting on results, and discussing errors or unexpected outcomes of actions” (Edmundson, 1999, p. 353). Based on this definition, discussing and reflecting on failure is a tacit and explicit characteristic of team learning and therefore, team learning is highly dependent on the team’s abilities to deal with failures.
Team learning transpires when “individuals within teams create, acquire and share unique knowledge” (McCarthy & Garavan, 2008, p. 511); an important activity that allows teams to make changes, adapt and improve. However, it is important to note that in order for team learning to occur, it is not enough for an individual to simply engage in the learning process on a team. Instead that knowledge must be transferred and integrated into existing processes and systems at the group level (McCarthy & Garavan, 2008). Because failure provides information that something went wrong, mistakes present opportunities for team members to understand and incorporate new knowledge into their thinking and behavior. Thus, mistakes provide teams the information needed to spur team learning (Tjosvold, Yu & Hui, 2004). But negative feedback can also be viewed as threatening to teams and so, the impact that failure has on team learning is based on multivariable conditions such as psychological safety, metacognition and cognitive biases (Edmundson, 1999). A more comprehensive list of positive and negative components is noted in Visual 1.
Positive Impact of Failure Leading to Team Learning
A key component of team learning is metacognition, which facilitates teams’ engagement to learning from failure because of its capacity to enhance awareness by actively reflecting on knowledge, team processes and structures at each stage of the collaborative process (McCarthy & Garavan, 2008). Also, guided team reflexivity at an early stage can benefit teams by learning from past experiences to improve future performance (Gabelica, Bossche, Segers, & Gijselaers, 2014).
Another key relationship that influences a team’s ability to learn from failure is psychological safety, which is defined as a “shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” (Edmundson, 1999, p.354). This belief tends to be tacit and comes from the joint respect and trust of team members (Edmundson, 1999). Failures tend to have a potential for embarrassment so psychological safety is necessary to mitigate psychological barriers by alleviating excessive concern about others' reactions so teams can learn (Edmundson, 1999).
Negative Impact of Failure Leading to Team Learning
Cognitive biases and limitations in human sensemaking can lead people to draw false conclusions that inhibits collective learning (Cannon & Edmundson, 2005). An example of a cognitive bias that negatively impacts a team’s ability to identify, analyze and learn from failure is the Team Halo Effect. This phenomenon explains that teams are typically not blamed for their failures within an organization. Instead, organizations, teams and individuals diagnose failure scenarios by identifying an individual as the cause rather than the team as a collective, which causes a lack of team accountability that inhibits team learning (Naquin & Tynan, 2003).
It is important to recognize that the output of team learning can lead to dysfunctional learning. As well, team learning does not always lead to team effectiveness or productivity as an output (Wilson, Goodman & Cronin, 2007).
Solutions and Best Practices
Leadership that models desired learning behaviors and visibly “walks the talk” by disclosing and analyzing their own failures is a best practice that helps create psychological safety and thus can effectively help teams learn from failure (Cannon & Edmundson, 2005).
Another solution is to conduct debriefs (“after action reviews”) that uses metacognition and reflexivity to push teams to reflect, discuss and action plan as way to increase team learning after a challenge. (Alliger, Cerasoli, Tannenbaum & Vessey, 2015; Smerek, 2017). By encouraging team members to share insights, critical information is divulged that might not have been uncovered (Alliger et al, 2015). This helps teams identify and learn from early warning failures that hopefully mitigate potential catastrophic failures (Alliger et al, 2015; Cannon & Edmundson, 2005).
Last, teams can apply cooperative goal setting to emphasize perceived interdependencies between group members (Tjosvold, 2004). Cooperative goals cause team members to “share information, explain their ideas, support each other and challenge each other’s thinking” (Tjosvold et al, 2004, p. 1229). This increases psychological safety and metacognition, leading to a problem-solving approach, which research has shown to enhance team learning from failure (Tjosvold, 2004).
Given the widespread challenges Covid-19 presents to teams, it is imperative to understand and take a proactive approach to teaming so that when teams inevitably face failure it positively impacts team learning.
Visual 1:
