X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed
- External focus fluid roles and distributed leadership define high-performing X-teams.
- The three phases of product or process development needed for a team's success.
- How to establish and support X-teams in your organization.
Deborah Ancona challenges the dominant wisdom that effective teams focus internally on the roles synergies and collaboration of team members to produce results. Building on twenty-five years of research she shows that the most successful teams instead focus externally on customers competition and the marketplace tapping into an expanded knowledge base and skills set to move forward quickly. X-teams cross boundaries within their own organizations as well.
Members network up and down the hierarchy gaining support for their undertaking, as well as knowing how best to integrate it strategically into the organization. X-teams need to be fostered and Dr. Ancona describes how team members should be selected what the mindset of the team should be from Day 1 and how the teams should be supported with tools timelines deliverables and top-management commitment.
Deborah Ancona is the faculty director for the MIT Leadership Center. She is the author of the book In Praise of the Incomplete Leader and co-author of X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead Innovate and Succeed.
Deborah Ancona Ph.D. - Seley Distinguished Professor of Management Behavioral and Policy Sciences MIT
Deborah Ancona is the faculty director for the MIT Leadership Center. Dr. Ancona is engaged in research examining core leadership capabilities. Another major area of her study is teams in particular how teams manage both their internal and external dynamics to obtain high performance.
Ancona proposes a new structure -the X-Team - that allows teams to manage complex tasks while being entrepreneurial. Ancona also examines time and timing in organizations. Her work on "entrainment" and "temporal design" examines how companies organize themselves to better mesh with key rates cycles and rhythms in the environment.
The author and co-author of numerous articles and papers including X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead Innovate and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press June 2007) Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing 3rd ed. 2005), which centers on the skills and processes needed in today's diverse and changing organizations.
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