How do your teams look at problems? Do they self-reflect? Do they concentrate on looking beyond the team for answers? Deborah Ancona, along with Henrik Bresman, say traditional teams aren’t looking in the right direction. The two have written a very interesting book on teams called “X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed.” Deborah met with David Creelman to discuss the concept.

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DC: When did you first start doing research on teams?

DA: I have been doing research on teams, starting with my dissertation, for over 20 years, based on an intrinsic interest in what makes teams effective. I have always been interested not only in process in an abstract sense, but also in what makes teams effective in real organizations and how we can differentiate high and low performing teams.

A lot of teams flounder because they don’t know where they are going and conflict is one of the most written about topics on what is wrong with teams. Those sorts of inward looking reasons are all the kinds of things that people typically come up with when we ask why teams have difficulty.

Whenever I am in front of a set of executives and asking them about what is it that makes teams effective, they give the same kinds of answers: issues of clarifying goals, communication or dealing with conflict and building trust. All of those things are the models that have been burnt into our brains. But all of those things have to do with the internal dynamics of the team.

All of these things are important, but they are only half the story.

DC: What we have we missed?

DA: Well, the other half of the story is what goes on outside team boundaries. So, the essence of X-Teams is how they work externally with the rest of the organization and even people outside of the organization. The predictors of team performance are not how members interact with each other, but also how they interact with their external context and environments.

DC: Is this based on research?

DA: Yes. We are spending billions of dollars training team members to do exactly what the audience and many executives, including myself, have learned to focus on the internal dynamics. However, there are 25 years worth of research that shows that teams that follow this model, the good teams in the sense of following through on all the things we just talked about, often fail. We have documented proof that that is what happens and when teams are effective, not only internally but also outside their boundaries, they perform better.

DC: So, we have probably done a reasonable job investing and training on internal team dynamics, but it is this external side of things that have been neglected.

DA: That is exactly right and that is really the motivation for this book, to say, we do a have a lot of data. We have been studying teams in real organizations. We have been in fact creating, at MIT executive programs and at the leadership center, teams that follow this X-Team program with great results.

DC: Tell me a bit more about this alternative view.

DA: The context that we are coming from is that the world has changed and it is a very different world than the one that encourages the internal model that we all carry in our brains and that we use. Very often success and survival depend on innovation, speed and organizational synergy. The very survival of organizations depends on succeeding and trying to understand the forces in the marketplace that may in fact do us in. Another piece of the world that has changed is the notion that leadership has to be distributed in an organization, that is, it is no longer the case that people just at the top of the organization are going to have all the answers.

Leadership in terms of the people who have motivation, the people who have information are further down in the organization and even outside the organization. In that world of distributed leadership, teams need to change the way they operate. The way they operate is that teams need to augment their internal focus with this external approach. If you think about it, team members don’t necessarily only have to work on how they get along with one another. They now also have to become the eyes that read the environment, the visionaries who help shape the future and inventors of innovative solutions. Those are the things that are needed for organizations to succeed and therefore the tasks that team members need to take on and that requires a different approach and that’s what we call the X-Team approach.

DC: Tell me more about X-Teams.

DA: Let’s look at X-Teams as a vehicle of distributed leadership or a vehicle of leadership at all levels. This is a tool that people can use to actually make that happen, because people have been talking about the need for networks and leadership at all levels for a long time and the question is, how to do it. So, enter X-Teams. I think many teams engage in some level of external activity. What differentiates X-Teams is they engage in external activity from day one. This is how they start out and they have as their central mission mindset and modus operandi that they need to be active outside the team as well as inside the team. So, it is this balancing act that X-Teams perform focusing both outside and inside the team.

DC: What sort of external activities do X-Teams do?

DA: We found in the research that we did that there are three key external activities that are important for high performing teams. The first is what we call scouting. A scout is just like a scout on a hunting expedition where the person goes out to say what is out there, what is the terrain like, what do we need to know about? Standing in a business environment is keeping pace with shifts in markets and technologies and cultures and the competition. It is asking, what is going on out there that we really need to know about?

DC: Before you get into the other two activities, let’s focus on scouting for a moment. In their day-to-day job, people are reading journals and they are talking to other people in the industry as a matter of course; they are getting e-mails all the time that are telling them things. Are people who are scouting doing anything extra?

DA: The X-Team framework suggests that they need to get active quite early on, scouting around the particular issues that are key to the task that the teams take on. So, yes we are all scouting in general. There is information coming at us all the time. The key for X-Teams is that when a new task comes up or when they are trying to learn how to do something better the first reaction is to say, what do we need to know right now so that we can view this problem with up-to-date information, with new eyes, so that how we actually think about and define the task is fresh and new and gives us a picture of the context in which we are operating.

DC: What is the second of the key external activities?

DA: That’s what we call ambassadorship, getting buy-in from senior management and aligning the team’s work with strategic imperatives. As we talked about X-Teams being a vehicle for leadership at all levels, part of what an X-Team does is really focused not only on the environment but also up the organizational hierarchy and that is what ambassadorship is all about. From the very beginning, and again I stress it is very important early on from the very beginning, linking up to senior level leaders to say, “Does the work this team is doing align with the strategic direction of the unit or the firm wherever the team is housed?” If it doesn’t, then how do we work on getting some of that alignment?

Ambassadorship is also managing politics in power, figuring out who supports the team, who doesn’t support the team, so that the team can be focused on getting the support that it needs in order to survive. This is the upward linkage for a team, so that you get buy-in early on and you get support from the top and whatever levels the X-Team is working on working in the same direction.

DC: I can see how younger people may come into the organization and think, well if my boss told me to do it or somebody set up his team then it must have the support of everyone, but of course, we all know that is not the case in real life and it’s interesting that these smart X-Teams have identified this as a key activity.

DA: Even if you do have a senior manager you who has given you the task, it’s very often helpful for a team to go back to that manager and clarify the task because the manager may have said, “Go and develop a program for this,” or whatever it is x, y, or z and yet exactly what that person means by a program, may be different from what the team imagines it to be. So even checking in to make sure the expectations are aligned and to make sure that what the team is going to produce asking the question, if we produce this, is that really what you were looking for? It’s a way again to build alignment.

A team might also have some of its own ideas that it wants to bring to that upper level manager. “We could do this, but could also do something else as well,” because they are complementary. Testing that idea with the manager before just going off and doing it is a way again to assure alignment even if that person has supported the team from the beginning.

DC: Why don’t you go on to your third point in terms of key external activities?

DA: Task coordination is our third and here we talk about convincing and cajoling other groups that are a key to a team's success. The essential piece of this is that most teams in today’s organizations are dependent on other teams for input or for output. All teams need data and information from other kinds of teams. Product development teams might actually have another group that’s developing a part of whatever product they are developing. Task forces may need cooperation from other parts of an organization. Task coordination is really about keeping these groups together and convincing them to stay focussed on what the core team is trying to do.

DC: What’s next?

DA: Extreme execution, and the key point here is that you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. All those things that we talked about at the beginning are important as well. The internal processes like managing conflict, role clarity, goal clarity, etc. are still important. They are in fact more important for X-Teams because what the team needs to do is take all of that information that is gathered outside and sift through it, coordinate it, and use it to help the team to move along and keep on the task milestones that it has. So extreme execution is keeping in mind that you don’t want to go too far in the other direction; that is, yes you need all of these external activities - scouting, ambassadorship and task coordination – but you also need the internal processes that enable the team to coordinate their work and execute the task.

DC: I can see that being one reason why teams might be a little bit reluctant to go and get more information from more people and more points of view because these tasks can be complex enough as it is and it might be tempting to close your little world because it does make execution more complex when there is more information.

DA: It’s true, it does make your world more complex and our research shows that in fact early on in an X-Team's existence, you may actually have lower levels of satisfaction in the team than in a traditional internally focussed team. It doesn’t stay that way if you follow teams through to the end of their task because even though there may be a little bit more confusion early on it’s worth it because you have gotten that alignment, you have pulled and created synergies with other parts of the organization. You have gotten critical information that points the team in the right direction and we have found that if you don’t have that, if you really stick to this protective mode of not going outside, your probability of failure is much higher.

DC: It is very interesting that initial indications of a team being less comfortable than usual may be a good sign. Tell me more about how X-Teams actually work to get things done.

DA: We have followed teams in our research and in creating teams in a variety of different companies. There are three key phases that enable X-Teams to actually execute. Even though scouting and ambassadorship, learning all you can at the beginning, is very important the team can’t stay in that mode. The first phase is what we call “explore” and that is a lot of scouting, a lot of ambassadorship to understand the environment, to understand emerging needs and opportunity, and to get that buy-in and to generate all kinds of ideas about how to meet the challenges in that environment.

The team cannot stay in explore mode; it has to move to what we call “exploit.” Exploit means moving from the world of lots of ideas, input and exploration to focusing on one key idea, product or whatever the task is that the team is asked to implement and moving to actually exploiting the ideas from the first phase in order to move ahead on the product or the task that the team has to create. It’s moving from discovery to prototyping, testing, and modifying one innovative new product or service that the team thinks is the best direction to move in.

Some teams we have seen get stuck in exploit mode; that is, they want to keep adding one bell or one whistle, they think ‘that’s not quite good enough’ or we want to keep working. Here again, if a team is to create new ideas and new products that the organization can use and work in a rapidly changing environment then the key third phase is what we call “exportation.” Exportation is transferring the team’s product, expertise, and excitement to the larger organization for full-scale implementation. Taking an idea for a new product and testing it with the customer, getting ideas out and then rolling into actual manufacturing are all examples of exporting the product away from the team to the broader organization.

DC: Are there relatively clear transitions where the team goes from exploring to exploiting to exporting?

DA: Well, of course, it’s never as neat as we portray it. It’s often a little bit fuzzy, but again, high-performing teams are able to make these transitions. When we are creating these teams, part of we might want to do is give the team milestones or have the team create their own milestones as to when they will need to move from one place to the other to make sure that those transitions take place.

DC: That actually brings me to the next question, which is, roughly what percentage of time should be spent on each of these three elements?

DA: I don’t have a direct answer. How much exploration depends on whether or not the team has prior experience and expertise in this, whether or not there already is alignment or the team needs to really work with top management to get alignment, so how much exploration depends on the context. It can take really a large percentage of what the team does or it can be done very quickly if there is alignment and understanding. Interestingly, when we work with executives and create these teams, one of the biggest “Ahas!” that we get is from ‘explore’ because very often teams move directly into exploiting and thinking ‘it has to be done yesterday.’ One of the things the people take away is, “When I do explore, when I really understand the context and understand the problem deeply, the work that I can do is so much better.”

We encourage teams to give themselves the luxury of moving on explore so that when they make the choice of what direction to take and exploit, they can usually move much faster and then when they want to export they have already got buy-in, so that’s an easier process as well. We have seen lots of teams working on their own and then they move to exportation and nobody cares about what it is they have created and that is the worst. That’s when you see whole teams actually exit the organization because they are so angry at the lack of a reception for their product. All of that time, energy and motivation gets wasted whereas if you have taken the time upfront to get the buy-in and to get commitments from other parts of the organization to work together toward a clear and aligned goal, then the second two processes move much faster and are more effective.

DC: Can you tell us what sort of organizations this approach applies to?

DA: In the book, we have spent a lot of time talking about different X-Teams. Microsoft is one of the organizations where we found a team headed by a woman named Tammy Savage. She brought the voice of the customer more clearly into the Microsoft environment when she created a team called the NetGen team that created software for the Internet generation. We do a lot of work with BP in terms of creating teams that help to improve the way that BP works. At Merrill Lynch, we have created a program of teams. So, there are a lot of places working with us to create X-Teams and there are a lot of companies that have already.

Henrik has done a lot of work in particular in the pharmaceutical industry where there is a lot of evidence that the X-Team format is highly successful because that’s an environment in which even in core technologies, the molecules that are used are brought in from outside so it’s an industry in which you really need to know what’s going on in the external environment.

DC: When you go into these companies, how do you go about finding which teams are X-Teams and which are not?

DA: The first phase of the work that we did was going into organizations and looking at a wide variety of types of teams: sales teams, product development teams, consulting teams, software teams, hardware teams, a broad range of kinds of teams and try to understand what differentiated high and low performing teams. That’s where the X-teams model emerged. We didn’t create the model; the model emerged from watching high-performing teams and seeing they tended to engage in a lot of these external activities. We asked these teams to create logs. What did you actually do? That’s where we learned about scouting, ambassadorship and task coordination.

Then we went into companies and used surveys to look statistically to see if teams that are carrying out these external activities do better. And they did.

DC: What sort of tasks have these teams worked on?

DA: The team that Microsoft created was new social networking software for Netgeners. Netgeners are those between the ages of 13 and 24. At BP they invented new ways to manage huge oil and gas projects. At Merrill Lynch they were doing new financial services. We have many research studies that show that these teams create higher revenues if you are a sales team, more innovative products if you are a product development team, etc.

DC: Does the nature of the company or the nature of the task matter?

DA: I think an X-Team is useful whenever there is a team that wants to get something done.

X-Teams are a discipline and a new way of working in teams. It terms of big or small tasks, we are addicted to them here. My colleagues and I, whenever we form a committee, we say we are going to work as an X-Team.

DC: This sounds like a fundamental management discipline in terms of how you get things done in a group of people.

DA: That is exactly true. It’s a fundamental way of operating in this world where again problems are so complicated and the world is moving so quickly you need to find a mechanism to deal with that kind of environment and this is one such mechanism.

DC: What do people really need to do to make these X-Teams happen in their organization?

DA: The good news is that you can create these in your organization. You have to take on what I would call an external mindset. That starts right at the beginning with staffing teams. When we staff teams we need the correct expertise. We need people who know how to work in a team; we need people who are motivated. We need people who get along with each other. All these things are true and all of these things are part of the internal model. But if you take an external approach, an X-Team approach, then you also want to staff teams for networks and connections so that they can more easily become an X-Team. If you are in, for example pharmaceuticals, then part of what you want are people who have connections, perhaps to small start-up companies, or to universities where new molecules are being created all the time. That facilitates a team’s ability to work as an X-Team, to network both within the organization and outside the organization.

The second thing that you can do is push teams to take an external approach from day one. Given that all of us may be focused on getting moving, it often takes a lot of holding back to say no, we are going to start in a very different way. In fact very often when I work with a team, the first thing I do is say, “If you guys want to get started then a great way to get started is to have each member of the team go out and interview three or four different people to understand where the market is going, what are the expectations in this company for what this team will produce. What are your competitors doing?”

The third thing is using checklists to focus the team on external behavior and to shift across phases. One of the things that we provide, in the book there is a full chapter on checklists that teams can use to make sure that they are focusing on the right things at the right moment in time. We have found that it’s not really important to know the jargon of X-Teams. If you don’t know what scouting, ambassadorship and task coordination is that is okay as long as you do those things. Checklists provide a framework that helps teams; they don’t have to think about how do I do this? They just go ahead and do it, and providing those tools is key to helping teams shift from a more traditional approach to an X-Team approach.

Another thing is providing feedback to the team so they know if they are doing a good job or not.

We have seen lots and lots of X-Teams in companies where the top was not committed, but it’s so much easier when top management gives X-Teams the time and attention that they need.

Finally, creating a supportive environment in which you are actually encouraging people to say what it is they want to do and to integrate their voice and the information that they get from being externally oriented and push that information up the organization while also aligning from below.

DC: It doesn’t sound that difficult, if we compare it to something like say, Six-Sigma.

DA: I wouldn’t say it was simple, because it’s a new way of operating and anytime you introduce a new way of operating to people, they are a little less sure of what to do or how to do it, which is why checklists and milestones are so important. But I don’t think it’s that difficult, once you have a framework of how to do it.

DC: Why has it taken so long for the world to pick up on the idea of X-teams?

DA: That is a very good question. We wrote the book because of asking ourselves the question, ‘Why isn’t this being taken over in practice?’ I think that there are several reasons. Even in the academic community people get locked into one way of thinking. If you are locked into an internal model, it’s sometimes very difficult to change the way that you think. Second of all there is a lot of theory that gets written up in the academic side of the world that never makes its way into the practitioners’ side of the world. One of the things that we as academics need to be better at doing is translating theory into practice. That’s why things like checklists and models and so on are very important.

The third thing is that we have been trained to think in a particular way. We know how to start a team and say: What are our goals? What are our roles? How do we get started? How do we set this team up? We know how to train teams to do that. X-teams require a different mindset.