The (mis)alignment paradox: if we focus on the need for internal alignment, we will miss the need to grapple with external misalignment

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.

In the last edition of xNEWS, Deborah asked me how team leaders can tackle the challenge of connecting the "core" team to its external context. Specifically how to address the inevitable tensions between the internal and external environments.

At the end of this newsletter, I will share a few practical tools that leaders can use to tackle this challenge, but first, let me zoom out.

Balancing Wealth and Wellbeing Through Distributed Leadership

Much of my career has been focused on designing and leading organizations for wealth and wellbeing. My goal has been to ensure positive instrumental and mental health outcomes for organizations and teams by exploring how leaders can mutually reinforce these objectives.

To achieve these outcomes, leadership must be distributed to wherever the best information and capabilities are found. Most of my focus has been on teams because they are the fundamental unit of distributed leadership in any system, wherever you sit in the hierarchy and whatever your role.?

As frequent readers of this newsletter know, I believe we need to reimagine how we build and lead teams. Specifically, in our exponentially changing world, which relentlessly points toward a future of work that is not only distributed but also dynamic, digital, and diverse. To succeed, teams need to go out before they go in - they need to care as much about their external world as their internal world.?

Now, I return to Deborah's question.?

What does this mean? It means teams must create alignment internally while grappling with misalignments externally. They must align their goals, roles, and processes while being open to diverse external perspectives. They also need to absorb misalignments from changing external conditions and take input from the larger system. We call teams that excel at this "both/and" way of working x-teams, a concept described in depth in our book with the same title.

Deborah and I have explored in detail what external activities teams need to engage in to make this connection (see here and here).

Importantly, as the book explains, absorbing misalignments externally risks creating commotion internally. High-performing teams are not necessarily spaces of harmony. The way out is this: teams must create a robust internal environment characterized by psychological safety. This psychologically safe environment equips the team to learn from the often punishing and contradictory inputs the external environment serves up. I wrote about this here. Importantly, a team can't do it all at once. It needs to find a rhythm by which it modulates its attention between an external and an internal focus, something my collaborators Jean-Francois Harvey and @Amy Edmondson wrote about elegantly in a recent article in Administrative Science Quarterly.

Practical Tools for Navigating the Alignment Paradox

As promised, let me conclude this newsletter with a couple of practical tools we have developed that your team can use to help build the skills needed to take it on.

1. xCARDS. It is a simple but powerful card game that helps a team explore its identity, strengths, and limitations. A critical starting point is to surface the team's diversity of talents and perspectives.

2. xCHANGE. A web-based computer simulation serving up a critical challenge to your team: how to lead meaningful strategic change in an exponentially changing world.

We have successfully used these in companies, public-sector organizations, and nonprofits to create wealth and wellbeing in the communities they care about.

The alignment paradox is not only important for teams to navigate but also for individual leaders. I will return to this theme in future posts.

Deborah, why are x-teams perfectly poised to help teams deal with the AI revolution?

Further reading:

Harvey, J-F, J. Cromwell, A. Edmondson, "The Dynamics of Team Learning: Harmony and Rhythm in Teamwork Arrangements for Innovation", Administrative Science Quarterly.