How to Move From One X-team to Many

Welcome back to xNEWS, where we explore principles and practices of leadership in an exponentially changing world.

My partner in this experiment is Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT. You can learn more about me here and Deborah here.

We plan to publish a biweekly newsletter in the form of a dialogue. Today, I respond to? Deborah's newsletter from two weeks ago (which you can find here) and, in turn, she will respond in two weeks.?

We hope you will join us with insights and questions along the way. Please feel free to connect and message me on LinkedIn.

Deborah, thank you for your shift toward taking actionable steps for implementing x-teams in your last newsletter, Just do it. It’s true—the road to x-team success requires diving in, and we’ve provided several strategies through sensemaking, ambassadorship, and task coordination.?

Deborah ended her last newsletter with this question:?

How do we move from one team to many?

One x-team is great, but what if you’re part of a much larger organization? What if you want to create a set of x-teams to establish an infrastructure of innovation??

This calls for an x-team program.

Taking the plunge to create an x-team program is a big decision, but x-teams can be incredibly beneficial for organizations today, assisting in fostering innovation, finding new ways to collaborate with customers and partners, searching for new market arenas, and even redesigning parts of the organization or supply chain.?

Here are a few steps to assuring x-team program success:

Staff for Success

Because x-team members rotate in and out and take on different roles, x-team composition can be more fluid and complex than that of more traditional teams. To be sure, having these “fuzzy” boundaries can be confusing (If I want to buy team t-shirts, do I buy five or thirty-five?), and this is why it’s so important to create different membership types, which we covered in How Do X-teams Go Outside without Falling Apart Inside? There are core members (who manage the team, carry its history, and make key decisions), operational members (who work on the team’s task at any given moment, even if they’re part time), and outer-net members (who work across the organization or broader ecosystem and contribute when their expertise is needed).

These teams should be staffed with a diverse set of members representing different areas of expertise, function, and mindset. I highlighted this importance in my last newsletter, How do x-teams realize the potential of diversity - inside and out?

Counter Resistance Early

In order to ensure x-team success, leaders must not only move with intention when it comes to building the makeup of the teams but also when it comes to selling these team members on the x-team approach. Not everyone can see the value of x-teams from the beginning. There are often concerns about reaching outside the organization, compromising intellectual property, putting competitive advantage at risk, or slighting the talented team members already within the organization. Not to mention others who just don’t believe the x-team approach will work.?

And yet, x-teams have proven their value time after time. This requires a strong x-team launch, showcasing senior leadership support and overcoming resistance to a new way of operating. By walking the talk, leadership will help teams overcome barriers, motivate participants, and provide legitimacy to the program.

Start with Small Steps

As Deborah and I covered in our SMR article, Turn Your Teams Inside Out, there are many small steps that you can take to implement an x-team, whether with existing teams that need to act differently or with new project teams taking on a specific form of innovation.?

Some initial steps might be:

• Map your competitive landscape, including both current and potential players. In doing so, team members often realize they do not understand the market as well as they should and have much to learn from looking outward.
• Ask each team member to meet with one customer in the next week to find out what they like and dislike about existing products. Then team members can report back on what they learned.?
• Find experts in your task inside and outside the organization to provide advice and perspective. This helps team members sharpen their ability to identify useful resources.

Focus on Support, Feedback, Check-ins, and Recognition

Since teams will be moving ahead with a new way of operating, it is helpful to offer support, feedback, check-ins, and recognition.?

Support may come in many forms—helping teams understand processes, offering effective information and training systems, and providing clear avenues on whom to contact for information or help.

Feedback is another component of x-team success, as a mechanism to begin creating a culture of learning within teams and across organizations. This can come from coaches, managers, and x-team members themselves, and should follow the simple formula of the “plus-delta” system: what is the team doing that is working, and what can the team do better?

Additionally, x-team members appreciate when regular check-ins are built into the schedule so they can report their findings—who they contacted, what they learned, and whether any kind of future connection or partnership seems useful and doable. These check-ins can also serve to generate metrics that can eventually be developed into key performance indicators (KPIs).

And finally, offering recognition is a great way to solidify x-team behavior. Call out team members that are doing a good job, promote team leaders and members on successful x-teams, let x-teams tell their stories to the rest of the organization, and publish the names of top teams to incentivize people.?

Have a Clear Endgame

The last critical success factor is managing the closing of x-teams. If they are project teams with a specific end date, then there should be a clear ending ceremony. If they are ongoing teams, they can report out after the various phases of team activity.?

Then, team members should assemble lessons learned and think about what they want to carry forward to their next team assignments. These can be written in short lesson documents like ten things an x-team should never do and ten things an x-team must always do.?

Important, too, are success stories, which should be broadcast widely, encouraging time-pressured team members to take note and organizations to move toward culture change.

Deborah, how can organizational infrastructure support this culture change to x-teaming?

Thank you for reading the latest edition of xNEWS. Look out for Deborah's response in two weeks, and don’t forget to subscribe.