Event Details

January 16, 2008 5:30pm-8:00pm

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

Location: Sovereign Bank, 75 State Street, Boston, MA
RSVP: Register online

Cross-functional teams are playing an increasingly large role in today’s organizations. And yet, many of them fail to deliver results. In the past two decades, Professor Deborah Ancona has studied the factors that affect team performance. Among her findings is that externally-focused communication is a key driver in the superior results of what she terms “X-Teams.” In this interactive workshop, Professor Ancona will encourage you to consider the ways you can help support teams that lead, innovate, and succeed. This program is co-sponsored by Sovereign Bank.

You will learn:

Why X-Teams outperform traditional teams
How X-Teams communicate vertically and horizontally
The importance of ‘ambassadorial activity” and other key communication practices

When: Dinner and networking 5:30pm – 6:30pm; Program 6:30pm – 8:00pm
Where: Sovereign Bank, 75 State Street, Boston, MA
Complete event summary

There will be a drawing for two copies of the recently-published X-Teams by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman and additional copies will be available for purchase.

About Deborah Ancona
Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT and the faculty director for the MIT Leadership Center. Professor 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.

The author of numerous articles and papers, her most recent books are 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 and X-Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). Her article, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader (co-authored with Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski, and Peter Senge), was published in the February 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review.