When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any findings and whether they apply to the situation in question. Such conversations should explore the internal validity of any analysis (whether it accurately answers the question) as well as its external validity (the extent to which results can be generalized from one context to another). To avoid missteps, you need to separate causation from correlation and control for confounding factors. You should examine the sample size and setting of the research and the period over which it was conducted. You must ensure that you're measuring an outcome that really matters instead of one that is simply easy to measure. And you need to look for-or undertake-other research that might confirm or contradict the evidence. By employing a systematic approach to the collection and interpretation of information, you can more effectively reap the benefits of the ever-increasing mountain of external and internal data and make better decisions.

In 2023, Cindy Rose, President of Microsoft Western Europe, faced a critical decision. Rose grappled with the potential impact of widespread layoffs on psychological safety and the cultural transformation she had championed since her arrival. When Rose had first joined MSWE, her leadership team had faced significant challenges around culture, motivation, and team dynamics; Rose had worked diligently to change the culture across MSWE to foster a collaborative and innovative environment. Now, she wondered: Would these layoffs undo all the hard work? Could the cultural shift she had nurtured sustain the organization through this tough period? The case examines Rose's strategies for building psychological safety and transforming organizational culture, and the role of a General Manager in engaging people and achieving performance amidst profound change.

The skill of perspective taking can help build psychological safety for creative, collaborative problem-solving in the workplace. This approach is particularly effective with leaders who are skeptical about psychological safety and other concepts or interventions they see as "soft". The authors share a perspective-taking exercise that can help bring diverse team members together to address strategic challenges.

In 2021, Kevin "Bud" Couch, a retired Navy captain who was now working as a civilian employee of the Navy Safety Center, was trying to determine how best to reduce the risk of Navy mishaps. The Navy had experienced a series of major mishaps in 2017 that had led to a closer examination of how it operated and what it could improve.

In April 2020, Rachel Jarrett, President and COO of wedding technology company Zola, called a meeting with the organization's key decision-makers. The company had previously launched three business expansions: a vendor marketplace, a wedding apparel division, and a honeymoon-planning service. However, the March 2020 onset of COVID-19 had prompted many couples to delay or cancel their weddings, and it was unclear how long the pandemic would last. As a result, Jarrett and Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma knew that they could only fully invest in one of the three new businesses, while they could pursue a second business with limited funding. To decide the appropriate path forward, Jarrett and Ma sought the perspectives of the company's leadership team through a four-step decision-making process that Jarrett had developed. The process, which the team called "taking a vote," began when the key decision-maker delivered a data-driven presentation on a discrete set of options for a given strategic dilemma. Next, the team conducted an anonymous vote, followed by a discussion in which each team member explained the reasoning behind their vote. Finally, the team voted a second time on the ideal path forward. During the meeting, the Zola team must decide which business to pursue, which to continue in a limited way, and which to pause. Jarrett must also decide how to proceed if the team's opinion differed from her own.

This case describes the first six months of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, under the leadership of Kate Bingham. With a career spent in the private sector as a biotech investor, Bingham's appointment within the government was considered unusual. The overarching brief given to her by the UK Prime Minister was simple: "Stop people from dying." At that time, however, no vaccine for human coronaviruses had ever been successfully developed, and the average time to take any new vaccine to market was over ten years. Furthermore, the UK had a relatively weak market position. Bingham assembled a senior leadership team of private sector experts and civil servants with the skills required to think about how to make vaccines, test them, deliver them, and build long-term resiliency into the system. Beyond building a diversified portfolio of vaccine candidates, the team took a commercial approach and aimed to make the UK the best global client possible. While there were some frictions due to the unusual setup of the taskforce, the team's work was an unequivocal success. The UK became the first country to approve and administer a COVID-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial context, and had placed its bets on safe and effective vaccines.

Today's organizations rely on networks of dynamic systems of "agile" teams to get work done. Teams are distributed, transient, and loosely bounded in service of responsiveness and innovation. The key to this new way of doing work is managing the networked ecosystem in which teams are embedded. But in the context of leading multiple teams with fuzzy boundaries and shifting membership, the average overwhelmed manager quickly defaults to what is nearest in urgency: managing internal team dynamics and responding to internal customer demands. Drawn from field interviews with 100 top-performing team leaders, this article presents a framework-for-action to leaders who want to engage the networked ecosystem with intention and precision, including specific tactics for identifying and influencing high-leverage stakeholders.

This case describes the corporate turnaround of the Ford Motor Company under the charismatic leadership of Alan Mulally. Ford was in deep trouble in the early 2000s as its prices and debt ratings plummeted and employee morale suffered. In 2006, the company anticipated a loss of $17 billion. Ford's declining product quality and lackluster designs led to declining sales. Moreover, the company struggled with a dysfunctional, ego-driven corporate culture. External factors like rising oil prices and raw materials costs also posed problems. To address these widespread challenges, Bill Ford, then CEO of Ford and great-grandson of Henry Ford, recruited Alan Mulally from Boeing, who had turned around that company in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Mulally developed and implemented an ambitious transformation of Ford; his plans included instituting accountability among senior executives using a data-driven approach that eventually trickled down to frontline employees and simplifying Ford's product line, portfolio of brands, and organizational structure. The sweeping restructuring and culture change allowed Ford to once again, become a profitable automaker.

The Risk organization at SEB, a leading Nordic financial services group founded in 1856, undertook a culture change program focused on psychological safety, empathic listening, and strategic framing. The program enabled risk organization teams to make progress on strategic challenges and improved decision making processes. Chief Risk Officer Magnus Agustsson believed that the rest of SEB should go through a similar program. But it was not clear how to convince other departments to invest considerable time in developing the soft skills of culture change.

Facing a significant decline in revenues in 2016, David Gwilliam, Head of Transformation at PepsiCo UK introduced a new way of working ("Responsive Working"), which encompasses a set of work practices and some new team structures. The work practices comprise a set of 9 codified practices that employees can be trained in to use as part of their daily work. The team structures-called SLAM teams-are put together following strict procedures to tackle key strategic or operational challenges. They are typically cross-boundary, time limited teams. Through these interventions, PepsiCo UK managed to turn the business around (back to growth) by late 2017. At the time of the case in December 2019, PepsiCo UK seems poised for continued success, while Gwilliam contemplates whether or not to authorize employee requests to initiate modified SLAM team for less urgent and strategic issues.

Facing a significant decline (downward trend) in revenues in 2016, David Gwilliam, Head of Transformation at PepsiCo UK introduced a new way of working ("Responsive Working"), which encompasses a set of work practices and some new team structures. The work practices comprise a set of 9 codified practices that employees can be trained in to use as part of their daily work. The team structures - called SLAM teams - are put together following strict procedures to tackle key strategic or operational challenges. They are typically cross-boundary, time limited teams. Through these interventions, PepsiCo UK managed to turn the business around (back to growth) by late 2017. At the time of the case in December 2019, PepsiCo UK seems poised for continued success, while Gwilliam contemplates whether or not to authorize employee requests to initiate modified SLAM team for less urgent and strategic issues.

This case examines efforts to foster teamwork within and across work units in the Cleveland Clinic, a large, distributed healthcare delivery organization. With a long history of valuing teamwork since its founding in 1921, the Clinic had taken dramatic steps to further enable collaboration back in 2008 after the growing complexity of medical care had led to problematic divisions across specialties. The Clinic restructured from departments organized by specialty to "institutes" organized by disease and organ systems. A decade later, when this case takes place, the world has continued to change-with the Clinic substantially expanding its scale and scope-posing new teamwork challenges. The case asks students to understand the Clinic's efforts to enable teamwork with the Institute Model and to evaluate whether the Model should be continued, abandoned or changed to address new teamwork needs for 2020 and beyond. It reveals the complexities of enabling teamwork in large, distributed organizations in which fluid, cross-boundary "teams of teams" are operating.

In the midst of the global pandemic, the Outthinker Strategy Network and Thinkers50 assembled some of the world's foremost management thinkers (virtually, of course) to share their thoughts on leading in times of unprecedented uncertainty. In this compilation of highlights from six of the speakers, topics range from the effects of psychological safety on innovation (Edmondson) to the role of fear in human behavior (Lindstrom) to tips for innovating in times of crisis (Anthony).

This case compares leadership and team dynamics between the cockpit crews in two renown passenger airline crashes, twenty years apart: Air France 447 in 2009 and United 232 in 1989. The key dimensions of difference across the cases include organization and task sharing in the cockpit, leadership, the application of established procedures, ability to improvise to create new procedures, the type and quality of team communication, and the outcomes. Both flights encountered unexpected malfunctions; in one, teamwork and problem solving failed badly; in the other, the team collaborated extraordinarily well to try to solve the problem. The case discussion will focus on factors that enable effective teamwork under stress, the organizational conditions that lay the foundation for such teamwork, and the conditions under which dissent is vital to effective performance.

Novartis' Genesis Labs program, launched in 2016 as part of Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), hosted pitch competitions where teams of NIBR scientists proposed ideas to explore that aimed to revolutionize drug discovery. The goal was to break down barriers between functions and regions that slow innovation. After advancing to the pitch stage, a panel selected a handful of winning proposals. Winning teams left their roles for 18 months and received the resources and laboratory space to pursue their ideas. By 2018, two cohorts of winners had been selected-one almost at the end of its 18-month tenure and the other soon to begin. Genesis Labs had already overcome several hurdles-for example, scientists at first worried that stepping out of their ordinary role or pitching ideas that were not chosen could end their careers at Novartis. Though the Genesis Labs program ultimately succeeded in attracting many candidates, the company wondered how to further refine it to foster greater agility in Novartis R&D. Should they expand the call for entries? Did it encourage true shoot-the-moon ideas? How often should the program run, and how disruptive should it be to existing teams? What was the best way to reintegrate scientists to prior roles after their 18-month stint as part of Genesis Labs was over? Finally, could such contests be adapted and rolled out in other functions in the organization?

In 2012, Nalin Jain, then head of GE aviation for South Asia, was given the added responsibility for GE's transportation business in India, including bidding for a $2.5 billion contract to manufacture, service and maintain 1,000 diesel locomotives for state owned Indian Railways (IR). The deal, which would have been "the largest deal on the planet" for the transportation business, had been under discussion for six years, and many within GE had given up hope that it would materialize, but Jain persisted. In February 2015, when IR requested companies to submit a financial bid in six months, Jain quickly built an autonomous team, sequestered from the rest of GE, with people from multiple businesses and functions. His team overcame internal resistance from people at headquarters and stiff competition to help GE win the deal by a narrow margin. Jain was then tasked with executing the deal. As many of his earlier team members had moved on, Jain hired new people and built a new diverse yet integrated team for execution, with members able to put aside their many differences, look beyond their functional silos, and focus on the project deliverables. However, 2017 brought a series of challenges. GE changed India's organization structure, making India business leaders report only to their respective global business leaders instead of reporting to both their business leaders and the India country leader. Jain's mandate was expanded to include the entire international operations of GE's transportation business. And, sub-optimal company performance forced GE to announce cost cuts of $2 billion. In the face of this turmoil, Jain wonders, "Have I created an agile team that can succeed in GE's matrix environment and deal with the internal challenges? Do the team members have the maturity and motivation required for the project to succeed?"

In 2012, Nalin Jain, then head of GE aviation for South Asia, was given the added responsibility for GE's transportation business in India, including bidding for a $2.5 billion contract to manufacture, service and maintain 1,000 diesel locomotives for state owned Indian Railways (IR). The deal, which would have been "the largest deal on the planet" for the transportation business, had been under discussion for six years, and many within GE had given up hope that it would materialize, but Jain persisted. In February 2015, when IR requested companies to submit a financial bid in six months, Jain quickly built an autonomous team, sequestered from the rest of GE, with people from multiple businesses and functions. His team overcame internal resistance from people at headquarters and stiff competition to help GE win the deal by a narrow margin. Jain was then tasked with executing the deal. As many of his earlier team members had moved on, Jain hired new people and built a new diverse yet integrated team for execution, with members able to put aside their many differences, look beyond their functional silos, and focus on the project deliverables. However, 2017 brought a series of challenges. GE changed India's organization structure, making India business leaders report only to their respective global business leaders instead of reporting to both their business leaders and the India country leader. Jain's mandate was expanded to include the entire international operations of GE's transportation business. And, sub-optimal company performance forced GE to announce cost cuts of $2 billion. In the face of this turmoil, Jain wonders, "Have I created an agile team that can succeed in GE's matrix environment and deal with the internal challenges? Do the team members have the maturity and motivation required for the project to succeed?"

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that's a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers, or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others' thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees' vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

When Stefan Oschmann became CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, in 2016, the company had started its transformation from a mid-tier traditional German industry player to a global modern science and technology player. The restructuring and portfolio overhaul led by Oschmann's predecessor Karl-Ludwig Kley since 2007 had been approved by the Merck founding family in its 13th generation, which still owned the majority of the shares. Its intermediate results had been encouraging. After three large acquisitions (Serono, Millipore, and Sigma-Aldrich) that broadened its reach from healthcare and pharmaceuticals into life sciences and performance materials and an internal optimization program, revenues and profitability had doubled in the decade leading up to 2016. But more needed to be done. Preparing for the company's 350-year anniversary in 2018, Oschmann had kept up the pace of change, and announced further divestments and restructurings, sparking reactions from employees who expressed increasing exasperation about the new measures. In the fall of 2017 Oschmann and his Executive Board had to decide on the best strategic option for the company's consumer health division. Should they divest a division that lacked scale but that with its consumer brands in pain and cold remedies was viewed as a symbol of the company's origins? Was more change too much change in such a short time?