Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies, and the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Ancona is the author of X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press) and teaches courses involving X-team curriculum at MIT Sloan Executive Education.
The current business landscape is shaped by new technologies, work patterns, and a changing workforce with changing expectations, as Ancona explains. To lead teams effectively in these turbulent times, Ancona introduces an organizational model with distributed leadership where teams are built with end-to-end accountability.
In contrast to traditional organizational models with top-down hierarchy and siloed teams, the distributed leadership model allows for nimble, cross-functional teams that work in alignment with an organization’s overall strategic direction. Teams that work externally and across team boundaries are known as “X-teams,” and these teams are what allow organizations to stay flexible, customer-focused, and innovative.
X-Teams & Distributed Leadership
The three main components of implementing X-team collaboration are:
- Sensemaking
- Task coordination
- Ambassadorship
Sensemaking is understanding the context in which you are working by collaborating across departments and the entire organization and working outside the organization to understand competitors, the industry, and your customers. Through task coordination, all members of the team can participate in this process and come together afterward to debrief the findings. Once you determine next steps, you bring ideas to senior leadership through ambassadorship to ensure that all teams are aligned and accepting of the organization’s current strategic direction.
Implementing the X-Team Model
Some challenges to implementing the X-team model are a mental model that is focused on internal work, fear of a loss of control and chaos, and uncertainty about how to move forward.
Ancona provides key steps to combat these challenges and put X-teams into practice at your organization:
- Educate: Get people comfortable with the idea of change and being future-forward. Speak with teams that have implemented the X-team model to learn how they did it, what worked, and what didn’t. Focus on gains over losses.
- Take It One Step at a Time: Conduct one information-seeking endeavor at a time. For example, have all members of the team interview one satisfied customer to illuminate what the organization is excelling at. Learn about what competitors are doing. Brainstorm with outside experts, identify key findings, and communicate them to your teams.
- Put Up Guardrails: Ensure that all members at every level of the organization understand its strategic direction. When X-teams are producing many new ideas, bring them through a funnel so only the best, key ideas will be further developed and implemented. Create simple rules and empower team members to have quality control over new ideas.
Transform Your Leadership at MIT
As the face of management evolves, organizations are increasingly favoring collaborative and distributed leadership models. MIT’s Transforming Your Leadership course, taught by Professor Deborah Ancona, teaches you how to drive innovation, maximize team performance, and develop the personal leadership skills necessary to succeed in today’s world of fast-paced change.
In this course, you’ll be introduced to Transformational Leadership Theory through MIT’s unique 4-CAPs+ Leadership Framework. This framework allows you to uncover four capabilities of effective leadership and the ability to harness, align, and leverage these capabilities throughout your organization.