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X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed

Join us on January 16 where author and Professor Deborah Ancona will encourage you to consider the ways you can help support teams that lead, innovate, and succeed.

X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed“This book presents fresh new ideas that challenge many of our existing assumptions about teams in organizations…any leader who’s seeking to increase competitive innovation needs to not only read this book, but study it in detail.”
—David A. Nadler PhD., Chairman, Mercer Delta Consulting, LLC and author of Building Better Boards

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, success and perhaps survival depend on innovation, speed, and organizational synergies that efficiently satisfy customer needs. In this new world, leadership must be distributed throughout an organization—across many players, within and across a company, and up and down the reporting hierarchy.

In this realm of “distributed leadership,” a team cannot look solely inward: It must augment its internal focus with an external approach. Specifically, its members must become the eyes that read the changing environment, the visionaries who help shape the future, and the inventors of innovative solutions.

In X-TEAMS: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed, Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman introduce the “X-Team,” a team that engages in high levels of external activity thus becoming the vehicle for innovation and distributed leadership in action. These high-performing teams manage across their boundaries, reach out to find the information they need, understand the context in which they work, manage the politics and power struggles that surround any team initiative, get support for their ideas, and coordinate with the myriad other groups that are key to a team’s success.

Many managers find it relatively easy to build a team around top-notch talent. The team members work well together. They are committed to the mission. And they are highly motivated to perform. Yet all too often, the results prove disappointing: The team fails to generate the breakthrough ideas and move from ideas to real products. It is unable to come up with creative solutions to the company’s most pressing business problems.

“X-teams” differ from traditional teams in that they work well together, but also see external outreach as a core mission, mindset, and modus operandi. They differ from traditional teams in three concrete ways:

External activity: Members seek top management support and funding, spend abundant time understanding customer needs, and look around their organization for pockets of expertise they can build on. They figure out how to keep the team’s work connected to strategic imperatives, as well as learn from other teams.
Extreme execution: Members develop internal processes that enable them to coordinate their work and execute effectively while simultaneously carrying out external activity. For example, they gather large amounts of information about their company’s customers and translate it into product features the customers want.
Flexible phases: The team’s activities shift over its lifetime. For instance, members may initially engage in exploration—learning about customer needs, the external culture and top management expectations. They may then move to exploitation—narrowing the focus and moving quickly to prototype, test, and modify an innovative new product or service. Finally, they shift to exportation—transferring their product, expertise, and excitement to the larger organization for full-scale implementation.

Three “X-factors” enable teams to embody these qualities. X-factors include extensive ties to useful outsiders who enable a team to go beyond its boundaries and adapt over time; expandable tiers, such as a core leadership group, a set of members who carry out the work, and other members who drop in for short periods to work on specific pieces of work; and exchangeable membership, by which some members come in and out of the team and rotate leadership.

The authors cite Microsoft’s Netgen team as an example of X-teams’ power. The team formed when Tammy Savage, a business strategy manager, realized that Microsoft didn’t know what technologies it needed to develop for 13- to 24-year-olds (the “Netgeners,” or Internet generation). Savage created the team to get to know these customers better and develop software to meet their needs.

The team gained a top manager’s support for the effort by providing data about what features Netgeners might like and how Microsoft could benefit from this approach. It gathered data about customers by asking a set of college students prepare a business plan—and then observed how the students used technology and what they wanted it to do for them. The effort resulted in development and production of “threedegrees,” a product that enabled groups of people to do things together online, such as listen to music or create a joint photo album.

To carry out its work, the Netgen team members got out their PDAs and contacted anyone who might be able to provide expertise. They borrowed ideas from others, examined competitors’ products, and kept top management informed of their progress. They also shopped for the best technologies within Microsoft and, when necessary, developed some of their own. Meanwhile, they kept going back to the customer—the real Netgeners—to test their ideas. After producing the code for threedegrees, they moved it into Microsoft Messenger.

Ultimately, the Netgen team created change in this immense organization. It produced innovative new software ideas and technology for the Internet generation. And Savage became head of an entirely new group that focuses on learning about customer needs and integrating them into product design. Other case studies in the book include BP, Oxfam, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, and P&G.

In a world where adaptability and creativity are paramount to an enterprise’s success – and even its survival – X-TEAMS is an essential handbook for constructing teams that maximize companies’ innovative capacity.

About the Authors: Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman
Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center.

Henrik Bresman is Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD.