AMY EDMONDSON
The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Recognized by the biannual Thinkers 50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, she teaches, writes, and speaks widely on teaming, leadership, innovation, decision-making, learning, failure, and psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson - Speaker Profile
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. She teaches MBA and Executive Education courses in leadership, service management, and organizational learning and is the Faculty Chair of the HBS World Bank Group program for new leaders. She was recently included in the 2011 Thinkers 50, a prestigious ranking of the world’s top fifty business thinkers.
Amy Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #3 in 2019; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017. Her prior books – “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy” (Jossey-Bass, 2012), “Teaming to Innovate” (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and “Extreme Teaming” (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organizational environments. In “Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation” (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. A prolific author, Professor Edmondson’s book, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete, was published in March 2012. In it, she examines group dynamics, how groups learn, and especially how to create highly effective collaborative teams. In her provocative Harvard Business Review article, Strategies for Learning from Failure, Amy explores why some failure is inevitable, and why some is even valuable. In addition to over 50 articles in academic journals, management periodicals, and books, Amy is also the author of dozens of HBS teaching cases, including classic leadership studies on The Cleveland Clinic, General Motors Powertrain, Prudential Financial, Simmons Mattress Company, YUM brands, IDEO product design, and NASA’s failed Columbia mission. Professor Edmondson is widely known for her brilliant work around leadership influences on learning, collaboration, and innovation in teams and organizations. Her innovative field-based approach includes research in contexts ranging from health care delivery and manufacturing to space exploration. One stream of her work has shown effects of leadership behavior and a safe psychological climate on patient safety in hospitals while other streams have investigated management team practices that promote effective decision-making and organizational learning. Professor Edmondson is a respected and beloved speaker and consultant to corporations, government entities, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. She typically receives the highest audience evaluations with clients often adding that she changed their thinking and was the best speaker they had ever engaged. |
Amy Edmondson Releases New Book on The Potential of Innovation Through "Big-Teaming"What happens when software entrepreneurs, real estate developers, government officials, and architects are given a common goal: create a city from scratch? Can such a diverse group of experts put ego aside to achieve large-scale innovation? Building the Future is a compelling technological adventure story that explores a new era of teamwork and leadership - an era where teams are increasingly complex and success depends on leaders' abilities to unite vastly different people behind a bold vision. Critics are already celebrating Building the Future, which Edmondson co-authored with LA Times journalist, Susan Salter Reynolds, as a must-read for leaders who face a world where cross-industry collaboration is no longer an option but a requirement. |
Amy Edmondson - Suggested speaking topics
Teaming: How Organizations, Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
In today’s fast-moving, 24/7 business world, people are increasingly – especially in the COVID-19 era – working with off-site team members, many of whom are located across towns, countries and time zones, and often tackling projects on the fly. Some may even speak other languages, use unfamiliar terms and have completely different value systems. In the context of her work with major firms, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson views teaming as a verb, an activity that happens when disparate stakeholders come together to create, innovate, solve problems and make decisions, usually around complex projects with many moving parts and high-pressure deadlines. During her 20-plus years studying workplace behaviors, Edmondson has developed and implemented successful teaming methodologies built around such factors as open-mindedness, humility, curiosity and willingness to listen, learn quickly and take risks. Through workshops, keynotes and advisory meetings, she teaches leaders and team members at organizations how to use these tools to “team” more effectively, efficiently, creatively and cooperatively in order to improve individual and organizational performance.
Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities. The pace of change and the fluidity of most work structures means that it's not really about creating effective teams anymore, but instead about leading effective teaming.
Teaming shows that organizations learn when the flexible, fluid collaborations they encompass are able to learn. The problem is teams, and other dynamic groups, don't learn naturally. Edmondson outlines the factors that prevent them from doing so, such as interpersonal fear, irrational beliefs about failure, group-think, problematic power dynamics, and information hoarding. With Teaming, leaders can shape these factors by encouraging reflection, creating psychological safety, and overcoming defensive interpersonal dynamics that inhibit the sharing of ideas. Further, they can use practical management strategies to help organizations realize the benefits inherent in both success and failure.
Want to Vastly Improve Your Organization? Make It Fearless
When looking to improve operations, organizational leaders have a powerful tool at their disposal, more valuable than focus groups and surveys combined: their employees. Leaders just need to nurture an environment where employees feel safe and empowered to share their thoughts, point out problems and, ultimately, be more innovative. For over 20 years, Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson has been studying how workplace behaviors affect performance. Her research confirms that organizations that create paths for speaking up are more effective in dealing with challenges of every kind, and markedly improve performance across the board, including the bottom line. Edmondson calls this an environment of psychological safety, and when working with firms to identify barriers to success that are often hidden inside a workplace culture, she employs the well-researched methodologies outlined in her bestselling 2018 book, “The Fearless Organization.” Through keynotes, workshops and confidential advisory meetings, Edmondson teaches organizations how to continuously improve performance by fostering a culture of psychological safety in which problems can be identified and addressed in an atmosphere of learning, cooperation and teamwork.
Leading Through Crisis: Leveraging Teaming to Solve Problems and Innovate
In 2016, Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson co-authored a now prescient book called “Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation.” The themes she covers are even more relevant today as organizations often must use cross-sector collaboration to reframe operations in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In this talk, Edmondson discusses the value of successful teaming in a crisis and shares methods and exercises she’s developed during her more than 20 years of research into workplace behaviors and learning to help bridge the “culture clash” that frequently thwarts collaboration among diverse experts. Edmondson sees leadership as extremely critical during a crisis, pointing out that successful changes do not and will not happen spontaneously. During her keynotes, workshops and advisory meetings, she shares concrete tools leaders and their teams can use to innovate when faced with disruption so they can envision and create a more robust future.
AMY EDMONDSON - VIDEOS
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