It’s Halloween! Speaking about X teams and leadership ghosts with MIT’s Deborah Ancona

Rita McGrath

It’s Halloween! Speaking about X teams and leadership ghosts with MIT’s Deborah Ancona Thought Sparks

Introduction Our conventional wisdom about teams is that factors internal to the team mostly determine how well they will operate. My LinkedIn Live guest, Professor Deborah Ancona from MIT, begs to differ. No matter how great the clarity of roles, alignment on deadlines or otherwise suitable a team’s internal structure is, it isn’t until they bring in the external environment that teams truly begin to perform at a high level. Some notes from our conversation follow.

Rita McGrath

The original insight behind the book: We don’t understand what makes a team outperform What prompted the original writing was a stream of research in which we learned that a lot of what we thought accounted for team performance wasn't working. When I was working on my dissertation, we studied a number of sales teams.

We thought that what would drive good performance was clear goals, clear roles, good problem solving in the team, all the things that we learn about as key to team success. And when we looked at those variables compared to team satisfaction, we got very high correlations. If you do all those things, people would be satisfied.

Rita McGrath

Nimble organizations and distributed leadership Part and parcel of new organizational forms is the concept of distributed leadership. We’ve known for some time that we're moving away from command and control to having more distributed leadership, with leaders at all levels.

Rita McGrath

Out before in My motto for X teams is always “out before in” when setting one up. I always say in my classes, “If you remember nothing else from today, it's out before in.” I make a point of this because that’s not how we normally begin with a team establishing a new task. Teams often want to jump right to solutions, without recognizing that first you have to go outside. If you create your goals and your roles and your norms inside the team, without recognizing that your information about the external environment might be wrong, you risk zooming ahead in the wrong direction.

Rita McGrath

Working in bursts

A pattern that we’ve found to be very effective can be thought about like “burstiness” or “pulsing.” You have to develop a rhythm that suggests when we need to go out, but then we need to come in again to make sense of what we’re learning. This also relates to the working remotely versus together debate. When you're together, you want to really make sure that you can get all the work of culture, accountability, and group norm creation done. Then you can move apart and people can do their the separate things.

Rita McGrath

Getting input from the “edges” of the organization My daughter was a summer intern, working for Li and Fung, an organization that deals with supply chains in the fashion industry. The senior people wanted to know what the current fashion trends were. They asked all these supposedly lowlevel people, like the interns and new employees, and said, “you have the afternoon off, take your phone and take pictures of New York, Milan and Paris. Go take pictures of the hottest boutiques in your cities. Bring it all together.

What are you seeing as the trends? They did it within cities and then across cities and then they presented their discoveries. That was a fun assignment. People were motivated and it was useful to the organization and it was a way of getting people outside of the normal suspects involved in sensemaking.

And what about the ghosts? I did promise ghosts!

Rita McGrath

I teach something called leadership signatures, which reflects your own unique way of leading.

What I found was that when we let people choose an improvement goal, often they would focus on something that was shallow or unimportant. I wanted the course to be more meaningful. And so I connected in with Dennis Perkins. We joined forces and now have an HBR article called family ghosts in the executive suite.

Happy Halloween everyone!

This Halloween will find me on my way to London for the first Thinkers50 gala in several years. I’m very excited to meet up with old friends and potentially make some new ones!

Rita McGrath

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