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 employee and customer demographics and 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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What Is Dynamic Teaming?
Dynamic teaming is the process of working in groups that have “fluid membership.” This means 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 considering a team, you may think of the more traditional variety: a static group with stable membership and one shared goal. As the world becomes increasingly dynamic, teams must adapt to meet these new challenges—and you must adapt to lead them to success.
In the online course Dynamic Teaming, which can be taken individually or as a part of the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB), Harvard Business School Professor and CLIMB Faculty Chair Amy Edmondson compares traditional and dynamic teams by looking at Henry Ford’s infamous assembly lines.
“The Ford Model broke work down into small, standardized tasks to be carried out modularly by individuals and objectively assessed by professional managers,” Edmondson says in Dynamic Teaming. “Perhaps not much fun, and you could get fired for smiling, but it was unquestionably efficient. I can say, with near surety, that the work you lead is the opposite on every dimension.”
As Edmondson emphasizes, modern work demands agility and collaboration across shifting roles and boundaries. In contrast to assembly lines of the past, today’s teams thrive not on predictability but on their ability to learn, adapt, and evolve together.
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
- Complex: The world’s increasing interconnectedness
- Ambiguous: Lack of clarity surrounding events and signals
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
- The complex interconnection between supply chains and capital
- The increasingly global nature of business
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 Dynamic Teaming. “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 instinct might be to assemble a group of experts with similar backgrounds and training. However, relying on a homogenous group—even if highly skilled—can limit the range of ideas and solutions. In contrast, when different perspectives inform solutions, diverse viewpoints can create more potential pathways forward.
When building and leading teams, it’s important to include individuals with varied backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. Diversity of thought is essential for fostering creativity and resilience.
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 centers on Kate Bingham, a managing partner at SV Health Investors, whose story is explored in Dynamic Teaming. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, Bingham served as chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce. She was asked to assemble a team capable of delivering a viable vaccine under extraordinary time pressure—condensing a typical four- to 10-year process into just months. There was no precedent for a successful human coronavirus vaccine and no guarantee that any attempt would succeed.
Faced with a complex challenge, Bingham recognized the need for a dynamic team. Rather than filling it solely with the world’s top vaccine scientists, she assembled a diverse group with varied expertise across the following areas:
- Pharmaceuticals
- Manufacturing
- Business development
- Venture capital
- Procurement
- Logistics
- Trade
- Government
- Biotech
By gathering this wide range of cross-functional expertise, Bingham and her team helped make the seemingly impossible possible.
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 its members to contribute to meaningful solutions. It’s not enough for team members to feel safe sharing their ideas and concerns; they also need to feel valued and personally invested in their work’s 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.
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 on 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 Dynamic Teaming or CLIMB, which features Edmondson’s 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.
Are you ready to lead your teams through uncertainty and towards success? Learn more about Dynamic Teaming, which can be taken independently or as part of the seven-course Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB). Download our CLIMB brochure to learn more about the program’s curriculum, admissions requirements, and benefits.
This post was updated on June 3, 2025. It was originally published on January 18, 2024.
