X-Teams: Extroverted Teams That Lead and Innovate

Author

• Deborah Ancona

Produced

• 2008

Key Features

54-minute DVD or VHS program

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.

This program includes information and descriptions on how to external focus, fluid roles, and distributed leadership define high-performing X-teams.  It also covers the three phases of product or process development needed for a team’s success, and how to establish and support X-teams in your organization.

Members of X-teams cross boundaries within their own organizations, too. Members network up and down the organizational hierarchy, gaining support for their undertaking.  They know to best integrate strategically into the organization.

Dr. Ancona describes how X-teams need to be fostered, 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 Succeed."

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