January 15, 2025 • 58 mins
In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Professor Deborah Ancona about the importance of X-teams. These are a brand of team that emphasizes external outreach to stakeholders, extensive ties, expandable tiers, and flexible membership. The resulting X-teams are not only are able to adapt in ways that traditional teams are not, but they actually improve an organization’s ability to produce creative ideas and execute them increasing entrepreneurial and innovative capacity.
During the conversation Deborah highlights the shift from traditional team structures to distributed leadership, where leadership is distributed across all levels. She also explores the concept of "family ghosts," which are behaviours and attitudes formed in childhood that influence leadership and stresses the importance of creating a sense of belonging, vision, and innovation in leadership to navigate today's rapidly changing world.
In 2007 Deborah and Henrik Bresman wrote the book ‘X-Teams: How To Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, And Succeed’.
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Bluesky @evolvingleader.bsky.social
YouTube @evolvingleader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jean Gomes (00:03):
Given that the team is the primary operating unit of
value creation in anorganization, it's staggering
how few companies have asuccessful and reliable
blueprint for how teams shouldfunction given today's
realities. In this show, we talkto Deborah Ancona, the Seeley
Distinguished Professor ofManagement at the MIT Sloan
(00:24):
School of Management, about theneed for X teams and how they
create the DNA of highperformance and adaptive
organizations. Tune in to animportant conversation on the
evolving leader. You
Scott Allender (00:57):
Hey, folks, welcome to the evolving leader
the show born from the beliefthat we need deeper, more
accountable and more humanleadership to confront the
world's biggest challenges. I'mScott Allender
Jean Gomes (01:08):
And I'm Jean Gomes.
Scott Allender (01:09):
Mr. Gomes, how are you feeling on this Friday
afternoon?
Jean Gomes (01:12):
I am feeling in need of this conversation. Our guest
wrote a book time ago that Iabsolutely loved, and it's come
out of the library several timesevery year to help us think
about challenges facing ourclients. So I'm really excited
about about this conversation.
How are you feeling, Scott?
Scott Allender (01:34):
I'm feeling grateful that it's Friday
afternoon and the weekend ishere, because I definitely could
use a bit of rest and renewal,but what a wonderful way to sort
of cap the week with theconversation we're about to
have, because, as you alluded totoday, we're joined by a
wonderful guest, Deborah ankana,a professor at the Massachusetts
(01:57):
Institute of Technology, SloanSchool of Management. She is
best known for her binaryresearch on high performing
teams, distributed nimbleleadership and leadership
signatures. She is also thefounder of the MIT Leadership
Center, which is revolutionizingtraditional leadership to solve
the toughest problems in theworld of management. Her book
(02:20):
that you just mentioned a momentago, Jean, X-teams, gives deep
insights into how to createinnovative, successful teams,
using examples from Microsoftand Takeda and the Museum of
Modern Art. She's also founded Xlead, which develops research
based tools to encouragecreative leadership across
management levels. And her workbridges Theory and Practice,
(02:43):
bringing novel ideas intopractical leadership
application. Deborah's been withMIT for over 20 years, and in
2018 was awarded the Jamesonprize MIT Sloan's highest
teaching honor and her widelyacclaimed research on how family
upbringing affects workplacebehaviors, was published in the
Harvard Business Review titledfamily ghosts in the executive
(03:06):
suite. And I'm going to want tohear about some of these ghost
stories. So Deborah, welcome tothe evolving leader.
Deborah Ancona (03:14):
Well, thank you.
It's great to be here.
Jean Gomes (03:16):
Deborah, welcome to the show. How are you feeling
today?
Deborah Ancona (03:18):
I'm feeling great. It's a beautiful, sunny
day in New Hampshire. I have anice walk in the woods planned
for later on. Had a great classlast night, going to be working
on my book today, a new bookthat I'm going to be writing.
And my kids are all off andrunning and flourishing on their
own, so life is good.
Jean Gomes (03:38):
That's great to hear. So Deborah, what was the
moment in your career when youdecided that leadership and team
performance would be the focusof your life? Was there a kind
of an aha moment, or was it justa gradual process of
realization?
Deborah Ancona (03:53):
I think for me, those two things are a little
bit different. I started mycareer on teams and teams has.
Teams have always fascinated mefrom the time I was young, and
teams being families or groupsor any kind of small system, and
I just was always fascinated,why do some work and some don't
work? The dynamics can get very,very crazy. So what's going on
(04:17):
in those entities? And when Iwent to college, I learned that
actually they would pay you tostudy teams this. This was an
incredible idea that you couldhave a career doing this. So I
went to grad school and and gotto dig a little bit deeper, and
then just followed the data, andthat took me in all kinds of
(04:38):
interesting directions. Sothat's the team side, on the
leadership side.
I really think that one of themost intriguing questions we
have is, is, how do people work?
What makes people tick, and howdo we then unravel who? Well,
who we are. Are and then work onchange that That, to me, is a
(05:01):
kind of quintessential,quintessential question and task
for all of us. So that's why Ireally love this leadership
piece, where we can takeknowledge of organizations and
knowledge of psychology andreally dig into what we call
people's leadership signatures,how they came to be. How do we
(05:22):
change them? So that's just anintriguing question that I don't
think I'll ever get tired oftrying to answer.
Scott Allender (05:32):
So just to set the stage, so what is an X team?
Deborah Ancona (05:37):
So an X team, x is not cross functional. X is
externally active. So it's notonly what teams do inside their
boundaries, but also how they goout across their boundaries,
they're externally active.
Jean Gomes (05:52):
So that was the kind of the core idea here is that
why, when you were looking atwhy good teams fail, it was
because of this kind of thiskind of introversion. Can we
talk about that a little bitunpack it?
Deborah Ancona (06:05):
Yeah, I'm always surprised, maybe because I've
been talking about ex teams fora long time, and with my
colleague Henry fresman, we cowrote the book and continue to
work together. It alwayssurprises me when I get in front
of a group of executives. AndI've done this hundreds of
times, and I say, what makes foran effective team? And outpour
(06:27):
all these answers, clear goals,clear roles, synergies across
team members, trust, goodcommunication, good
collaboration, on and on and on.
And I always then stop and say,Well, you know what? That's half
right. But if you're only halfright, you can be very, very
wrong. The fact is that all ofthe best selling textbooks on
(06:50):
teams, all of our corporateprogramming and training is on,
how do we improve the internaldynamics of teams? But the truth
of matter is we're living in anexponentially changing world.
We're living in a world whereit's not just what you do in
your team, it's what you doacross teams in your
(07:11):
organization, and increasingly,the world has moved to dealing
with the external ecosystem.
It's how do you learn from andcollaborate with and partner
with, not just others in yourorganization, but other
organizations and so x teams,and we've got a ton of data on
this, are not just focused onthose internal dynamics that
(07:34):
everybody thinks about, but arealso focused on, how do We go
what we call out before in inorder to figure out what's going
on in that external world, whodo we want to partner with? What
do we want to learn from others?
How do we gain legitimacy in theinternal environment? All of
those things require an externalapproach. And so why do good
(07:59):
teams fail? Good teams failbecause they only focus
internally. And when you focusinternally, you build up a very
strong boundary for the team,and you lose out on that
external learning, gettingresources and getting buy in
from other parts of theorganization you aren't learning
(08:21):
except from dated, existingknowledge, and that can bring
you very easily into a failurepattern.
Jean Gomes (08:37):
So what are the capabilities, then, of the X
team? What are the that helpsthem to externalize? What do
they need to do?
Deborah Ancona (08:44):
Yeah, three things that they need to do. One
is sense making. So again, ifyou're working in a world that's
changing more and more rapidly,so we're accelerating the pace
of change, sense making isfiguring out what's going on in
that ever changing world. So itmeans learning about changing
(09:05):
technologies, changing politicalfactors. It's understanding more
about your customer, yourcustomer wanted last week may
not be what your customer wantsthis week. How do you track
that? How do you how do you lookat that? How do you look at
changes in the economy or thepolitical environment today,
every day, is a new announcementon the political environment in
(09:26):
this country and around theworld. That's even more intense.
So sense making is, how do youkeep up with that world? How do
you figure out who's best topartner with, who best to get
information from? So sensemaking making sense of the
context in which you'reoperating is a major function.
The other thing isambassadorship. So
(09:47):
ambassadorship is going up theorganization. We live in
hierarchies. We live in a worldwhere you have to get resources
from on high. You have to getbuy in from other parts of the
organization. You have to. Line,a team is more likely to succeed
and get those resources ifthey've got the blessing from
senior leaders, and if they canalign what they're doing with
(10:12):
the strategic imperatives of thegroup ahead of them. Oh, I fit
into what you're doing. Oh,good, we'll support you.
Sometimes that can't be true,and ex teams have to fight for
what they want to do. I believein the revolution when it's
necessary, but at any rate, it'sambassadorship. Is the second
piece, getting that buy in andalignment, and the third is just
(10:35):
coordination. There's a hugeamount of coordination. Most
teams can't operate as soloentities, they have to work with
and through a lot of othergroups, so managing those
interdependencies is a corepart. So three things, scouting,
or sense making, ambassadorshipand task coordination.
Scott Allender (10:53):
So, so interesting to me. So because
there's a lot of this that Ithink you're right, I think I
think, I think there's thismyopic focus on the internal but
I hear you saying that you kindof have to look at both, right?
But you said go out before yougo in. Why is it important that
a team looks outside ofthemselves before they sort of
look in on team time, teamdynamics?
Deborah Ancona (11:14):
Well, because if you're building a new product,
for example, and you're buildingit on old data, then you be
maybe making a product thatnobody wants anymore. So you
have to be up to speed on whatis it that our current clients
want? And that's that's part ofwhy you want to go out before
in. You want to understand thepriorities of the senior
(11:37):
leadership so that you knowwhether or not you're going to
fit in and align with wherethey're going, or or not, or you
want to, want to fight it so outbefore in, because you want to
understand the context beforeyou set your goals. Your goals
have to fit that newenvironment, and if they don't
fit, you can more easily go offcourse. So it's a course
(12:00):
correction where you say, Okay,this is the world we're living
in now. I decide what I want todo in that world, as opposed to
what I want to do in a worldthat doesn't exist anymore.
Scott Allender (12:11):
So what have you discovered about distributed
leadership and how that can helporganizations achieve this
become more agile?
Deborah Ancona (12:19):
Distributed leadership means different
things to different people. WhatI mean by industry or we mean
everything I do, by the way, incase I am not clear about that,
is in groups. I love workingwith other people and have great
colleagues. So Elaine Backmanand Kate Isaacs on the on the
work on nimble leadership anddistributed leadership, by which
(12:41):
we mean leadership at alllevels, not just leadership at
the top, but leadership isdistributed. You need people
leading at the bottom, themiddle and and the top of
organizations. And what we havefound is that in again, we start
always with it's anexponentially changing world.
How do we survive in that world?
How do we figure out how not toget blindsided by it? And so one
(13:05):
of the ways to do thatdistributed leadership is
basically you flip the hierarchyon its head. It's not just the
top sending orders down. You areempowering people at all levels
of the firm to also invent andcome up with ideas, new business
models, new products, new waysof organizing and sending those
(13:25):
up. So it's both top down andbottom up. And what our work has
found is that you you want tohave three different types of
leaders in those distributedleadership organizations. So you
want on the bottom, which, ifyou flip it, is really the top,
are your entrepreneurialleaders. So everyone in the
(13:47):
company is thinking, how do wedo this better? How do we
innovate? What's a new way ofdoing this, or a new way of
doing that? So you want a set ofpeople working on that, then you
want a set of enabling leaders.
So your middle level is notsaying, Do this, do that, etc.
They're enabling theentrepreneurial leaders to be
(14:08):
better. So, so many examples,but one example would be a team
says, look, we've been missingone particular group out there
in the market, and we want tocreate a product for that group,
but there's a little bit ofresistance, then the enabling
(14:28):
leader might say, Okay, we needto make the case to this, this,
this and this person, why don'tyou put together a presentation?
I'll look at it. I'll make surethat that you get that meeting,
and I'll help you to prep so youhave the skills to make
convincing arguments. So thatwould be entrepreneurial leaders
coming up with new ideas,enabling leaders, helping them
out. And then it's not that youget rid of the top of the
(14:52):
organization. The top of theorganization still extremely
important, but they're what wecall the architects. They're
architecting the system. Um, inwhich x teams thrive, in which
all kinds of leaders thrive. Sothey're figuring out what's the
culture, what is a way to have aan innovative, agile culture,
and what structures andprocesses enable that. So
(15:16):
they're creating, we call it thegame board on which everybody is
acting, but you need those otherpeople to be able to act in it,
so it's simultaneously buildingthe structure and empowering
people to inhabit it.
Jean Gomes (15:35):
Since you wrote x teams, a lot has changed in the
world, and one of the thingsthat you notice is just how many
teams people are part of. Youmight be part of three or four
or five teams, even. And teamcomposition is often never
stable, you know, the the kindof past version of teams where
(15:58):
you're going through the kind ofstorming forming, you know, and
that sort of that seems like abit of the old world. What are
you seeing now in terms of thechallenges of creating an X
team?
Deborah Ancona (16:10):
Yeah, well, so just for everybody's
information, we actually have asecond edition of the X team
book, which came out in 2023 soit's all been updated, and if I
think of what are the challengesthat exist now that didn't
exist, then one of them is evenpost COVID. Post COVID, we found
(16:36):
that there's much, much morework being done across
boundaries and in the broaderecosystem. So even moderna,
moderna did an amazing jobduring the pandemic coming
coming up with this vaccine, butthey didn't do it alone. They
were talking to experts atdifferent universities. They
(16:58):
were talking to people in thegovernment, because they had a
to work on, how do we get thesedrugs delivered, and how do we
deregulate some things or changethe way that that that processes
we have to go through to movethis ahead, they have to talk to
people in manufacturing sothey're working across
boundaries in ways they neverhad before. So in some ways, I
(17:19):
actually think that the X teammodel was ahead of its time.
There's even more of a need forit now because of the way in
which we're working. Again, wedo a lot of work in pharma,
Novartis and Takeda. We'repartnering. These are these are
rival organizations, and yetthey're now cooperating in
certain spheres and competingand others. So how do you work
(17:42):
across those boundaries? That'sa challenge that nobody, or many
fewer organizations, had to dealwith early on. So setting that
up teams of teams, crossingthose those organizational
boundaries, is a new challenge,and X teams have to evolve to
deal with those. The second is amuch greater need for sense
(18:07):
making that was alwaysimportant. It's part of our
individual leadership model aswell. But if the world is is
moving more slowly, then you canrely much more on what you
already know and what you knewbefore, and you can't do that
anymore. I mean, AI every day isa new application. Every day is
(18:32):
new data. Oh, it's great. Youimprove performance and quality,
but at the same time, peoplelose their creativity. People
become too dependent on thetechnology. I mean, there are
all kinds of things coming outevery day, so sense making and
understanding that new worldbecomes a much bigger part of
(18:54):
what teams need to do now thanit was a while ago. And I think
in some sense, related to that,and related to your, your point
just very well taken that peopleare on multiple teams, and
they're all over the place, andteam membership is changing that
(19:15):
to deal with those conditionsand the speed you need something
that Anita Woolley at CarnegieMellon, she calls burstiness. We
call it pulsing, that you needto figure out ways to pulse work
so that you can focus people fora given period of time, and then
they can go off on, on and dotheir other things. So pulsing
(19:39):
might be okay this week,everybody's going to interview
three customers, and then we'regoing to come back and figure
out what we're going to do, andthen you can go off again. So we
go out into the world, we comein and we process and learn from
what we did. We go out and learnagain. We come back in, so out
and in, or it might be togetherapart. But the other big trend
(20:02):
is that not everybody's in theoffice right. So we know that if
nothing's going on the officeand you come in, you're going to
say, Oh, why did I come in? I'mnot going to come in anymore.
But if you have a lot ofinteresting things going on the
office, then people have fear ofmissing out, and they want to
come in more. So you pulse Allright together, but when we're
(20:23):
together, we're doing reallyimportant things. We're doing
strategic planning, we're doingproblem solving, we're doing
team building. So all thosepeople all over can come
together, build the team, dealwith important problems, and
then they can go back into theirvirtual world or into whatever
else. So this pattern oftogether, apart outside, inside,
(20:46):
doing versus learning are allways to kind of deal with that
situation of, how do you build ateam when it's always changing,
when people are coming goingwell, when you get together, you
do an intensive team building,and that holds the team together
while it goes out and does theother work it has to do.
Jean Gomes (21:06):
Given everything that you've been learning about
all of this, how does thisinfluence how the C suite
operates? How do they the teamof teams to 10 of X teams?
Deborah Ancona (21:18):
Yeah, well, the senior team has to be a core
part of making this all work. Soas I said, they have to do their
own sense making and their ownwork to say, how do we build the
organization that we need tohave and what strategic
directions are going to be mostimportant? And that's going to
(21:41):
involve an out before, in kindof mindset, best, or one of the
best examples of this is, isSatya Nadella. There was just an
article we teach his, his caseand so on. But a new article
just came out about, really, howhe practices what we call an out
before, and he doesn't call itthat, but he's doing sense
(22:02):
making all the time he sets up.
I don't know if it's twice a dayor twice a week. He meets with
other CEOs around the globe,whether it's customer CEOs,
partner CEOs, whether it's CEOswho are working in industries
that he wants to learn moreabout. That is built into his
calendar. He spends time withventure capitalists to say, what
(22:24):
are you funding? What are thecoolest new companies? What are
the coolest new technologies? Heasks everybody, who do I need to
meet, who's doing interesting,daring things that I need to
learn about? That is built intohis modus operandi. So senior
leadership teams need to do thatas well. The first team meeting
he ever ran, he sent people oncustomer visits. He said, Go out
(22:48):
there. We need to understandthose people. He has enabled an
environment in the X team book,both the old one and the new
one. We have Microsoft examples.
And these teams are just theyfeel freed up because of that
learning culture, because ofthat out before, in culture that
(23:10):
that that team has created, theyfeel free to go out and say,
okay, customer, what do you do?
What gets in the way of whatyou're doing, so they can start
from ground zero on how we candeal with the situation on the
ground right now. So that seniorteam is following the same out
(23:31):
before in learning sense making,but they're also then crafting
the culture and structures thatenable the whole organization to
move forward in learning mode.
Jean Gomes (23:44):
I'm fascinated by that, because I just wonder how
many C suite teams are actuallydoing that, because it doesn't
sound very much like the agendaof a lot of the I know.
Deborah Ancona (23:55):
Well, and that's why that first meeting was meant
to shake up the team. That'sthat's a very visual, okay, get
in those vans and go out and seeyour customers. The other thing
that he did was he invited theCEOs of companies that Microsoft
had acquired, and said, meetwith these people, because we
acquired them, because they cando something that we don't know
(24:15):
how to do. Why don't you figureout how they did that? Right? It
sets up a very different mindsetinside the company. And yeah, I
would agree that probably,probably not that many C suites
are operating that way.
Scott Allender (24:33):
So in addition to the mindsets that you've
mentioned that they need toadopt, what are the sort of,
maybe legacy mindsets they needto lose.
Deborah Ancona (24:42):
Well there, yes, good, good question. There are a
number of legacy mindset one isin some companies, you still
can't talk. You can't do a skiplevel meeting. You can only
speak to the next person upthere. So that's bad. You have
to have open communication. Ofgoing around the organization.
(25:03):
Another thing is that you don'tpay any attention to input from
below, and you have to figureout ways to do that. So a part
of legacy systems is therepeople always have ideas.
They've always had ideas, butwhat you need isn't to enable
(25:26):
those ideas to move up thehierarchy, and that's much
harder so creating somethinglike a funneling system. So we
say to the people we want you toinnovate. You're you're talking
to the customers, you'refiguring out the processes. You
know what's going on. We wantyour ideas, but not every idea
is a good one, so you have tohave some kind of funneling or
(25:49):
choice process. Not manyorganizations have that. So you
need to create a mechanism bywhich that happens. At Takeda R
and D, they have the dragoncontest. You come up with new
ideas, and there's a team thatevaluates those ideas along set
criteria. They pick the bestones. The best team gets a
(26:13):
dragon. It's a very cool dragonsculpture. But they also get
time with the head of R and D,so that there's a mechanism to
take their idea through theorganization. Their legacy
organizations don't necessarilyhave that ability to move ideas
up. Southwest Airlines, at leastthey used to have a choice
process where there was acommittee that took new ideas
(26:35):
and evaluated them and decided,okay, these don't go up front,
but these will move ahead. Soyou need those kinds of of
mechanisms to come through.
Scott Allender (26:46):
No, I love this.
And what I'm what I'm hearing,tell me, if this is a this is
right, I'm the in this sort ofinversion of the hierarchy.
We're sort of moving from apower over to a power under,
right? It's an enabling force.
Deborah Ancona (26:58):
Well, I prefer to think of it as a power from a
power over to a power with soit's not that, it's not that one
rules and the other. It's notthat we're turning it around and
everybody rules at the lowerlevels. It's that we're figuring
(27:19):
out how to bridge the upper andlower levels so that Innovation
and Learning can thrive. Andit's not the article we wrote on
nimble leadership was calledwalking the line between
creativity and chaos. What youwant to do is have this
empowered, thoughtful,innovative set of people, but
(27:42):
not chaos. That's why you needthe structures and processes to
to control what's going on, asopposed to just anyone can do
anything. It's not anyone can doanything, right? That would be
bad. So it's power with so thatyou can work together to create
that's good.
Jean Gomes (28:06):
I am just changing the topic now for a little bit,
I read a couple of years agofascinating article you wrote
about how our family ghostsinfluence our leadership. Can we
unpack that a bit and understandwhat what that means and how are
some ghost stories.
Deborah Ancona (28:25):
Okay, so just, let's, let's clarify. I know
that the ghost stories are thebest. I have to say. This is the
work I'm doing right now, and itis just so interesting and fun.
And you know, my students whoare able to kind of tackle the
darker sides of their ghosts.
There are positive sides ofghosts too, but just have
(28:45):
amazing change in their lives,and that's been incredibly
rewarding. But so what is aghost? Ghosts are attitudes and
behaviors that you learn as achild in your family system that
you carry into the executivesuite or work, it doesn't only
(29:06):
executives that we carry intowork. So that's what we mean by
ghosts. And ghosts can bereally, really good. So we've
started cataloging ghosts. So wehave the people pleaser ghost
that comes from a family systemin which you want to be the good
child, and that means pleasingthe parent and doing what the
(29:27):
parent wants and doing what theparent says, and not
contradicting anything orfighting back so the people
pleaser ghost can get you reallyfar ahead in the organization.
You know how to please yourboss, you know how to please
your peers. You know how to youknow work in the organization.
So that's the good, the goodside. So most ghosts have both
(29:47):
the positive and a negative sideto them. The negative of the
people pleaser ghosts is thatone, if you're so busy, please.
Others. Sometimes you don't havetime to think about well, what
do I want? What do I think isthe best way? What is my
strategy for moving forward? Youdon't develop those critical
(30:09):
thinking skills or strategicskills because you're so
involved in helping otherpeople, or because it's respect
for the elders that's part ofthat ghost. And people all have
different ghost stories, butthat particular ghost is, you
don't question authority, youfollow authority. And so those
(30:30):
folks have are, they're great.
They work really well. They'regood with their teams, but
sometimes they're not so good atspeaking up to authority, of
saying, I disagree, saying no,that's that's not what we should
be doing here. So speaking up inthose executive meetings becomes
(30:53):
hard for the people pleaser.
Another common ghost that wehave is the the can do performer
ghost. The can do. Performerghost is wonderful. Okay, you
set the bar. I'm gonna make itI'll make it happen. I'm gonna
I'm gonna go. And that oftencomes from family systems, where
everything was about geteducated and succeed, and you're
(31:15):
representing the family, and wewant to represent our community
and and so your job is to learn.
Your job is to be good ateducation. Your job is to
succeed. And so you become a cando kind of ghost. And again,
that is amazing. You. You know,a lot of my my students are
(31:37):
executives, and they'resuccessful executives, or they
wouldn't be in my classes, andthey have risen up the
hierarchy, really good. But thenthere can be a dark side to that
kind of ghost too. One isperfectionistic. I'm never
enough. I've always got to domore. I'm always trying to
please more. Sometimes it'sabout getting love. I think that
(32:01):
the road to getting appreciatedand love my family is by
performing. So I'm always tryingto get more. Never can stop
perfectionist tendencies. It'snever enough. And some of those
folks burn out. You You can'tkeep that post that pace going,
you can always raise the bar. Sothere's burnout, there is an
(32:26):
inability to delegate, becausemaybe they won't. Others won't
do it as well as I can. So I'mgoing to take over this, and I'm
going to take over that, andthen you spending too much time
at work, your family suffersbecause you're in this, this
escalating faster moving cycleof more, more, more more.
Jean Gomes (32:47):
What's the ghost that does the most damage?
Deborah Ancona (32:50):
That's an interesting question.
I think, I think the biggest So,a couple come to mind. One is
the for people who have learnedthat they're worthless. For a
(33:12):
child, let's say who a girl bornin China when there was the one
child policy whose father walkedinto the room, learned it was a
girl, was so upset, walked outand basically paid no attention,
(33:32):
that person is just constantlysearching for some way to prove
themselves. There's a lack of akind of an inner sense of self.
And I think that those ghostsalso those who have been abused
or have had really and I don'tuse the word trauma readily, I
(33:57):
think it's an overused term.
Everybody who I failed a test.
I'm traumatized. No, you're nottraumatized by failing the test.
You said you suffered a setback,but, but there are people, I
don't mean to say that. Thereare people who have been
traumatized in fairly dramaticways, and those can leave a lot
(34:17):
that sometimes is very, veryhard to to to over, overcome in
some way. The other ghosts thatcan be there is one where you're
you've learned to be toxic.
You've learned that the way tosucceed in life is to take
advantage of others is to you.
(34:43):
Know, it's all about me and whatI need, and the heck with
everybody else. And so I havethe great ideas, and let the
rest of the organization or myteam just figure out how to work
with me, because I know, andjust come with me. I'm
brilliant. And. You guys have tojust deal with my temper
tantrums and deal with whateverit is I have to spew out at you,
(35:06):
and that can also be a dangerousghost, if not to that person,
certainly to the to theenvironment.
Scott Allender (35:20):
This, this resonates so deeply with me.
This, it's very close to some ofthe modalities I use and some of
my coaching work. And I loveyour ghost framing. And in the I
want to pull out what you'resaying, though, about people
being very successful, almostmotivated by these very ghosts
in some ways. How do you helppeople see the risk and the
(35:42):
downside before maybe they havea catastrophe or some kind of
massive setback, because theyhave this unwieldy ghost that
they're unwilling to even noticeor see, that it's even there.
Deborah Ancona (35:56):
Well, most people don't see their ghosts. I
always find this shocking,because I was a psychology
major. I've been in the world ofpsychology for a very long time,
so the fact that so many peoplesay, Oh, I never thought about
this, is it just shows we're allin our bubbles, and we don't see
(36:19):
outside our bubbles, that peoplewho just never took never look
there, which is fine, or thatlook there in their personal
lives, but then not in the worklife, right? So therapy is fine
for your marriage, but youwouldn't think about how that
translates into into a workenvironment. So I think one of
(36:48):
the first things is to see yourghosts, and when you see them,
that gives you a lot of power.
Talk about power. Power over ifyou've just got these beliefs
and behaviors and attitudes thatare running around in your
brain, then it has power overyou. It is controlling you,
(37:09):
right? Those are deep set,right? So if it came from your
childhood, you guys have lookedat neuroscience, some of those
neural pathways are buried verydeeply. They're not in your in
your thinking part of yourbrain. They're way down and
automatic, and so you can't dealwith them unless you see them.
So bringing out, what are someof those attitudes that are in
(37:32):
my brain, you have power overthem when they're out there and
you can see them, they're nowwhat Keegan and Leahy call their
object, not subject. Subject.
It's part of you object. It'sout there, and then you can
begin to work on those things.
So, in fact, I just had my classyesterday. One of the frequent
(37:53):
things with ghosts in the classis this inability to be
assertive, so inability to beassertive. So what are the what
are the negative thoughts thatyou have in your mind that are
getting in the way of you beingassertive? You want to be
(38:14):
assertive. You know you have tobe assertive for your career,
but in your brain, oftenunbeknownst to you, if I am
assertive, that will mean I'mselfish, or I'm getting above my
britches, or I'm not respectfulof authority, I'm going outside
of my role. And once you seethat, you can say, oh, wait a
(38:39):
second, let's test that out. Isit that I'm not respectful? Is
you know, you can, you can testand you can begin to say, Okay,
how do I move away fromautomatically acting, not
assertively, because of thesethings. So first you have to
surface it, then you have tolook at it, then you have to
(38:59):
maybe reframe it. So maybe wehad this really good
conversation yesterday. Maybeassertive just triggers you in a
negative direction. I want to beassertive, but assertive means
all of these things. I'mselfish. I'm going above myself.
Maybe it's more about, oh, Iwant to represent my team and
(39:20):
our ideas to senior leadershipthat's much more acceptable in
in a frame than is. I want to beassertive. So one thing is just
to do that. The second thing isto go and find people, women, or
if it's a woman or people thatyou respect, who speak up and
(39:41):
who don't seem selfish, youdon't say, Oh, those people are
terrible. They're doing what youwant to do without the baggage
associated with it. So let'slearn what they do. You have to
become like a detective and say,Well, how do they respond? What
do they say? What is theirdemeanor, and look at them and
(40:02):
then begin to say, Okay, whydon't I try that out? So one
woman in one of my other classesa few years ago, she couldn't
speak up in the senior team. Shenever, ever said anything in the
senior team, but she was going,Okay, I know why I'm not doing
this. It's because I'm thinkingthis. She reasserted from being
(40:22):
assertive to I need to representmy team here. That's what I'm
paid to do. That's what we'vebeen working really hard on
this. That's a more acceptablepathway into this realm, and
I've been studying all theseother things. So she went in and
I'm going to be an executivevice president, said something,
(40:43):
and she said, we can't do that.
That's terrible. That's whatshe's thinking. And she normally
would say nothing, which sheokay, I'm channeling Elizabeth.
Elizabeth would remain calm, notinterrupt, not get flustered.
She just said, I disagree withthat, and here's why, a very
fact based this is what myreasoning is, and I think we
(41:08):
can't do that. And that was thefirst time that she had done
that, and she said everybody inthe room looked at me had never
said anything before, much lessdisagreed with this executive
vice president. So it was a bigmove. So she was very nervous
afterwards. Did I do the rightthing? And what are these people
thinking? But in fact, her bosssaid that was really well done
(41:31):
and and I think we should payattention to what you said. So
that's step one, and once youget step one going, then you you
build and build and build andbuild and then you take on
something else.
Jean Gomes (41:43):
I love this whole area, because I think our, you
know, kind of the the archetypesthat we form as you know, young
response coping strategies to tofamily dynamics, does play out
to a massive extent in our inour lives. I'm wondering if
you're noticing, because you'reat the coalface of education,
whether you're noticing anydifference in the generational
(42:06):
kind of progress, you know, howis that playing out? Because
that's a fascinating, you know,thought on the minds of many
senior leaders is, how do I copewith with, you know, Gen Z, Gen
Alpha. I have no idea how tocope with this conversation.
Deborah Ancona (42:22):
So I want to first respond to the first thing
that you said, which is, wereplay our family dynamics and a
couple of things there. One is,and this goes back, Scott, to
what you were asking is, how doyou prevent this? Is to begin to
and we have a framework in thatHBR article. How do you frame
your family system. Becausewe're always attracted to the
(42:43):
family system we come from, evenif it's toxic, even if it's led
to all kinds of bad things, weare drawn to that because that's
what we know that's familiar. Infact, I was meeting with a
student yesterday who said, Isaid, Well, you know, you're in
an organization. It's just likeyou're you're a home
organization. Everybody isattacking everybody else and and
all these things are going on.
She's like, Oh, I never thoughtof that so, so understanding
(43:05):
that we are replaying over andover and over again these family
system dynamics. So it's, it'snot just what are your ghosts,
but what are the dynamics thatyou came out of? And how can you
be watchful of them. Sometimesthey're watchful, and we end up
in the same place anyway,because we didn't catch certain
things. But that's that. Theother thing is, I don't want to
(43:27):
think of us. There's a famousarticle, prisoners of childhood.
We are not prisoners ofchildhood. So what that means is
we do not have to replay thosedynamics all the time. What you
had to do as a child, you hadlimited resources. You were
young, you couldn't thinkclearly. You do not have to
(43:49):
respond the same way anymore asyou did as a child. You're an
adult, you have free you knowit's not easy to do it, but just
having people recognize, yes,this is what you did, and don't
be ashamed of it. Just becauseyou did what you did, you had to
survive well, but now you havesurvived, and you're an adult
with a lot of resources. Solet's figure out a different way
(44:11):
to deal with that samesituation. So I just wanted to
to denote that now we can goback to the question of this new
younger generation. Okay, so,yes, it's always the younger
generations complaining aboutthe old focus at the top. And
the top are saying, Who arethese people? And so I think
(44:33):
that there are a couple ofthings I don't certainly have
the silver bullet to solve allof it. There are many people who
work in this domain, who who aremore knowledgeable than I am,
but a few things, one is theyounger people are looking for
more meaning. They watch theirparents, you know, these
workaholics, go, go, go all daylong and and they have some
(44:56):
judgments about that. They. Wantto have a different kind of
lifestyle, so they want meaning,and so leaders have to think
about creating more vision. Whyare you here? How can I give you
a sense of why it's important?
Why do we have to work day andnight because patients are
dying? Why do we have to dothis? Because we're we're
(45:18):
helping. It's not just thatyou're doing the little things
you're doing, something big inwhat you're doing, and we have
to connect people to that largersense of mission and vision if
we're going to keep themmotivated. The second thing is
the work that we give them todo, don't stick them in a room
(45:38):
and have them working on theircomputers eight hours a day.
They are not going to want to bethere, and they are going to
leave. So give them more activeroles. I mean, x teams actually
enable you to do that, go andsend everybody out. You guys
know more about technology thatwe do. Let's say we want, we're
looking to how to change ourmarketing group to add more AI
(46:02):
into the marketing function. Allright, you younger folks,
everybody, go out. We want toknow what are the best sources
on AI and marketing, whatcompanies have done this before?
What can you learn from whatthey did? What mistakes do they
made? What's working the best?
Who are the best vendors of AIfor marketing right now? I mean,
give them a set of questions andset them loose, they will be
much more they will be muchhappier and much more engaged
(46:25):
and much more connected to whatthe organization is actually
trying to do. If, if you go anddo that, give them, as I said,
there are these pulsingactivities. So sometimes you
want everybody together. Andorganizations do this, not just
teams, but organizations dothis. Smuckers jam. You can be
(46:47):
anywhere in the world doingwhatever. Certain weeks of the
year you are at headquarters,because we're networking,
learning what other teams do.
We're hearing a guest speakerwho has some interesting things
to say. And then you talk about,how do we bring that into our
daily practice? Have a very fullset of activities, and bring the
(47:10):
younger people in to thosethings, get them motivated, and
part of the actual goings on, itshouldn't necessarily be only
for senior leaders. You wantengagement in in some very deep
ways, they are learning in avery different world than those
(47:34):
who are older ever grew up in.
And so when we think aboutteaching them, when we think
about engaging them, we have tothink about other media and
other modes of of teaching andlearning on the job and so on
and so forth. So that's why, forexample, x teams. I can talk
about x teams all the time. Ican, I can lecture. I can, I can
(47:58):
do things, but if we want toagain connect, then there needs
to be video content. We'vecreated a simulation so you
actually do it and then talkabout what you learned. We have
all kinds of we redid, as Isaid, the X team book, The
chapter six is a checklist sothat you know how to go and you
(48:20):
don't have to read anything. Youdon't have to just go directly
to chapter six and say, okay, amI doing this? Am I doing this?
How do I do this? So we need tocreate that learning
environment, not not just in inour training courses, but all
the learning that we need to doin a much more exciting,
innovative capture kind of way,because folks are on social
(48:46):
media, this is what they'redoing all the time. And so if we
want to capture them, we need tobe where they are. And oh, by
the way, it's not just for them.
I think everybody is more pulledin when you have more compelling
interactive at the moment, kindof learning going on.
Sara Deschamps (49:08):
If the conversations we've been having
on the evolving leader havehelped you in any way, please
share this episode with yournetwork friends and family.
Thank you so much for listening.
Now, let's get back to theconversation
Jean Gomes (49:20):
as you you look at the kind of world as it
currently is, and this isn't thepolitical statement or anything
like that, but there isobviously a lot of things going
on right now. If you were kindof thinking about the leadership
that we need in the world, andyou have a, you know, you have a
place where you can influencefuture leaders. What would you
(49:42):
say is really important rightnow that we need to be investing
in for the future, that perhapswe're not seeing enough of?
Deborah Ancona (49:53):
Yeah, that's a good, good question. I think
what we need to see more of.
First of all is the sense ofbelonging. Thing. Part of why we
are where we are is becausepeople don't feel part of
anything, and so they're moreeasily swayed and pulled in
other kinds of directions. So Ithink, you know, people, when
(50:13):
they're building teams orbuilding units, they the
workplace has to be a place thattakes up some of the slack in
the system, not all of it. Ithink there are other places as
well, but we need to create aplace of belonging. So people
feel that belonging two. I thinkwe need to, as I said before,
(50:34):
create more of a sense ofvision, more of a sense of
mission. Why is important whatwe do. I think that's important.
I think innovation. What we'reseeing, in some sense, is a
decline in people believing thatthe way we work is good. There's
a lot of throwing out of whatexists. And so I think we
(50:58):
perhaps need to think clearlyabout, well, how do we move
forward in new and innovativeways that are compelling? And I
think we need to underlinevalues. This is not there are
certain values that people, Iactually think, want to believe
(51:24):
in, and yet there's no way ofsaying, how do we invent to
those, to those values and tothose ideals in a way that works
for more people? And I thinkthere's a huge amount of
inventing that needs to takeplace right now in a group of
people who become committed andbelong with one another and can
(51:45):
begin to to reshape how we'reapproaching this world.
Jean Gomes (51:54):
And I really love that. I think there's a huge
amount of importance in thethings that you're saying there.
And I wonder, from yourperspective, as you're listening
to this, if you're in a startupor a scale up, or you're just
about to leave college, or, youknow, where's the hope that we
(52:15):
have that we can create a betterworld? What do you think are the
things that we should beoptimistic about?
Deborah Ancona (52:20):
Well, I think that right now, people are
exhausted, people are depressed,people are going off into their
little cocoons, and maybe weneed a little of that. People
need to just kind of processwhat's gone on. But then I think
(52:43):
what we need to do as leaders,and in a distributed leadership
system, anyone can be a leader,is begin to focus people on,
okay, what's the next chapter weneed to create? Go from we're
stuck here into a sense offuture visioning. What's the
(53:03):
next chapter? If what we havehasn't worked, then let's get
organized into creating andinventing the next chapter of
this crazy life that we're allliving and in this crazy world
that we're living in, it's notokay to say it hasn't gone in a
(53:24):
direction that we like. And sowe're we're just opting out,
which I think a lot of peopleare doing right now. And if we
want them not to opt out, as Isaid, maybe we need some period
of mourning, of of gettingourselves together. But then
some folks out there have tolead, lead the charge in saying,
(53:44):
what is the next chapter? Whatcan the next chapter be if we
don't like what it was before?
Okay? What do we do? And some ofthat might be going forward is
the resistance movement. If wedon't like what's going on, part
of it may be okay, Join theResistance. How do we mean? How
do we make it so that wherewe're going does not remain and
the other side might be okay?
(54:10):
It's kind of like Mike sushmanand Charles O'Reilly's. We have
to be ambidextrous. We have toboth execute on what's today and
innovate to what the nextchapter is we need to be doing
both of those things so that wehave something to go toward.
Vision is aspirational. It'sinspirational. It means that
(54:30):
you're pulling people into somenew direction, not going against
what is and so unless we shiftinto that aspirational,
inspirational, inventing newthing kind of mode. I think it's
a problem.
Scott Allender (54:45):
So speaking of new chapters, you're working on
a new book. Can you give us theelevator pitch and when is it
due out? When can we get ourhands on it?
Deborah Ancona (54:53):
Well, so I'm working on the proposal for a
new book, so you're not going toget your hands on it. Be a
minute anytime. Time soon,although I'm working on it very
diligently, and I'm onsabbatical in January, so the
intensive Book, book writing, soit's it's working more on the
ghosts work. So I have 10 yearsworth of data of students
(55:16):
writing about their ghosts. So Ihave my research assistants hard
at work to say, what are theclusters that we see in these
executives? What are the mostcommon kinds of ghosts, where
they come from? What are theways in which you can move
forward? So it's it starts offwith kind of stuck in the bog.
(55:41):
Where are we stuck? Where arestuck patterns? And looking at,
you know, one woman who is like,Okay, I was in this big
bureaucracy, and people didn'tlike me, but I managed to get
things done anyway, working fromon high, but I it was toxic, and
I didn't like it, and so shemoved into a startup, and the
(56:02):
startup, she ended up in thesame thing where she had no
support from her peers.
Everything she got was from fromworking as she was successful,
but, but it was hard, and it wasit was isolationist, so stuck in
the bog is looking again at whythose stuck patterns exist. We
repeat the family dynamics, andyou have to first see that, and
(56:23):
then we offer a way to begin tohow do you see that? And what
are the models? And what arethese prototypical ghosts? They
seem to be working students.
They say, Yeah, I'm the I'm thego getter on the people pleaser
rebel. And and then that. How dowe get out of it? How do we do
(56:48):
those provisional selves? How dowe begin to see what our
greatest fears are? How do we dothat work that we were just
talking about at the individuallevel? How do we create a future
that's different? How do wecreate the next chapter, and
what can that look like? And sothat's, that's what the book
will be.
Scott Allender (57:07):
Well, I want to read that. So best wishes on the
whole process.
Jean Gomes (57:11):
So it's coming out on October 31 next year?
Deborah Ancona (57:15):
That's right, the Halloween edition.
Scott Allender (57:21):
Well, Deborah, thank you for for joining us,
for sharing your your insights.
I found this to be a really richconversation, and I know our
listeners will as well. So thankyou so much for your time.
Deborah Ancona (57:31):
Well, thank you so much. You guys had great
questions, and you're really funand supportive and enthusiastic
and and also probing. So sothank you for the interesting
questions and for theinteraction
Scott Allender (57:45):
Our pleasure, our pleasure, and until next
time, folks remember, the worldis evolving. Are you?
Given that the team is the primary operating unit of
value creation in anorganization, it's staggering
how few companies have asuccessful and reliable
blueprint for how teams shouldfunction given today's
realities. In this show, we talkto Deborah Ancona, the Seeley
Distinguished Professor ofManagement at the MIT Sloan
(00:24):
School of Management, about theneed for X teams and how they
create the DNA of highperformance and adaptive
organizations. Tune in to animportant conversation on the
evolving leader. You
Scott Allender (00:57):
Hey, folks, welcome to the evolving leader
the show born from the beliefthat we need deeper, more
accountable and more humanleadership to confront the
world's biggest challenges. I'mScott Allender
Jean Gomes (01:08):
And I'm Jean Gomes.
Scott Allender (01:09):
Mr. Gomes, how are you feeling on this Friday
afternoon?
Jean Gomes (01:12):
I am feeling in need of this conversation. Our guest
wrote a book time ago that Iabsolutely loved, and it's come
out of the library several timesevery year to help us think
about challenges facing ourclients. So I'm really excited
about about this conversation.
How are you feeling, Scott?
Scott Allender (01:34):
I'm feeling grateful that it's Friday
afternoon and the weekend ishere, because I definitely could
use a bit of rest and renewal,but what a wonderful way to sort
of cap the week with theconversation we're about to
have, because, as you alluded totoday, we're joined by a
wonderful guest, Deborah ankana,a professor at the Massachusetts
(01:57):
Institute of Technology, SloanSchool of Management. She is
best known for her binaryresearch on high performing
teams, distributed nimbleleadership and leadership
signatures. She is also thefounder of the MIT Leadership
Center, which is revolutionizingtraditional leadership to solve
the toughest problems in theworld of management. Her book
(02:20):
that you just mentioned a momentago, Jean, X-teams, gives deep
insights into how to createinnovative, successful teams,
using examples from Microsoftand Takeda and the Museum of
Modern Art. She's also founded Xlead, which develops research
based tools to encouragecreative leadership across
management levels. And her workbridges Theory and Practice,
(02:43):
bringing novel ideas intopractical leadership
application. Deborah's been withMIT for over 20 years, and in
2018 was awarded the Jamesonprize MIT Sloan's highest
teaching honor and her widelyacclaimed research on how family
upbringing affects workplacebehaviors, was published in the
Harvard Business Review titledfamily ghosts in the executive
(03:06):
suite. And I'm going to want tohear about some of these ghost
stories. So Deborah, welcome tothe evolving leader.
Deborah Ancona (03:14):
Well, thank you.
It's great to be here.
Jean Gomes (03:16):
Deborah, welcome to the show. How are you feeling
today?
Deborah Ancona (03:18):
I'm feeling great. It's a beautiful, sunny
day in New Hampshire. I have anice walk in the woods planned
for later on. Had a great classlast night, going to be working
on my book today, a new bookthat I'm going to be writing.
And my kids are all off andrunning and flourishing on their
own, so life is good.
Jean Gomes (03:38):
That's great to hear. So Deborah, what was the
moment in your career when youdecided that leadership and team
performance would be the focusof your life? Was there a kind
of an aha moment, or was it justa gradual process of
realization?
Deborah Ancona (03:53):
I think for me, those two things are a little
bit different. I started mycareer on teams and teams has.
Teams have always fascinated mefrom the time I was young, and
teams being families or groupsor any kind of small system, and
I just was always fascinated,why do some work and some don't
work? The dynamics can get very,very crazy. So what's going on
(04:17):
in those entities? And when Iwent to college, I learned that
actually they would pay you tostudy teams this. This was an
incredible idea that you couldhave a career doing this. So I
went to grad school and and gotto dig a little bit deeper, and
then just followed the data, andthat took me in all kinds of
(04:38):
interesting directions. Sothat's the team side, on the
leadership side.
I really think that one of themost intriguing questions we
have is, is, how do people work?
What makes people tick, and howdo we then unravel who? Well,
who we are. Are and then work onchange that That, to me, is a
(05:01):
kind of quintessential,quintessential question and task
for all of us. So that's why Ireally love this leadership
piece, where we can takeknowledge of organizations and
knowledge of psychology andreally dig into what we call
people's leadership signatures,how they came to be. How do we
(05:22):
change them? So that's just anintriguing question that I don't
think I'll ever get tired oftrying to answer.
Scott Allender (05:32):
So just to set the stage, so what is an X team?
Deborah Ancona (05:37):
So an X team, x is not cross functional. X is
externally active. So it's notonly what teams do inside their
boundaries, but also how they goout across their boundaries,
they're externally active.
Jean Gomes (05:52):
So that was the kind of the core idea here is that
why, when you were looking atwhy good teams fail, it was
because of this kind of thiskind of introversion. Can we
talk about that a little bitunpack it?
Deborah Ancona (06:05):
Yeah, I'm always surprised, maybe because I've
been talking about ex teams fora long time, and with my
colleague Henry fresman, we cowrote the book and continue to
work together. It alwayssurprises me when I get in front
of a group of executives. AndI've done this hundreds of
times, and I say, what makes foran effective team? And outpour
(06:27):
all these answers, clear goals,clear roles, synergies across
team members, trust, goodcommunication, good
collaboration, on and on and on.
And I always then stop and say,Well, you know what? That's half
right. But if you're only halfright, you can be very, very
wrong. The fact is that all ofthe best selling textbooks on
(06:50):
teams, all of our corporateprogramming and training is on,
how do we improve the internaldynamics of teams? But the truth
of matter is we're living in anexponentially changing world.
We're living in a world whereit's not just what you do in
your team, it's what you doacross teams in your
(07:11):
organization, and increasingly,the world has moved to dealing
with the external ecosystem.
It's how do you learn from andcollaborate with and partner
with, not just others in yourorganization, but other
organizations and so x teams,and we've got a ton of data on
this, are not just focused onthose internal dynamics that
(07:34):
everybody thinks about, but arealso focused on, how do We go
what we call out before in inorder to figure out what's going
on in that external world, whodo we want to partner with? What
do we want to learn from others?
How do we gain legitimacy in theinternal environment? All of
those things require an externalapproach. And so why do good
(07:59):
teams fail? Good teams failbecause they only focus
internally. And when you focusinternally, you build up a very
strong boundary for the team,and you lose out on that
external learning, gettingresources and getting buy in
from other parts of theorganization you aren't learning
(08:21):
except from dated, existingknowledge, and that can bring
you very easily into a failurepattern.
Jean Gomes (08:37):
So what are the capabilities, then, of the X
team? What are the that helpsthem to externalize? What do
they need to do?
Deborah Ancona (08:44):
Yeah, three things that they need to do. One
is sense making. So again, ifyou're working in a world that's
changing more and more rapidly,so we're accelerating the pace
of change, sense making isfiguring out what's going on in
that ever changing world. So itmeans learning about changing
(09:05):
technologies, changing politicalfactors. It's understanding more
about your customer, yourcustomer wanted last week may
not be what your customer wantsthis week. How do you track
that? How do you how do you lookat that? How do you look at
changes in the economy or thepolitical environment today,
every day, is a new announcementon the political environment in
(09:26):
this country and around theworld. That's even more intense.
So sense making is, how do youkeep up with that world? How do
you figure out who's best topartner with, who best to get
information from? So sensemaking making sense of the
context in which you'reoperating is a major function.
The other thing isambassadorship. So
(09:47):
ambassadorship is going up theorganization. We live in
hierarchies. We live in a worldwhere you have to get resources
from on high. You have to getbuy in from other parts of the
organization. You have to. Line,a team is more likely to succeed
and get those resources ifthey've got the blessing from
senior leaders, and if they canalign what they're doing with
(10:12):
the strategic imperatives of thegroup ahead of them. Oh, I fit
into what you're doing. Oh,good, we'll support you.
Sometimes that can't be true,and ex teams have to fight for
what they want to do. I believein the revolution when it's
necessary, but at any rate, it'sambassadorship. Is the second
piece, getting that buy in andalignment, and the third is just
(10:35):
coordination. There's a hugeamount of coordination. Most
teams can't operate as soloentities, they have to work with
and through a lot of othergroups, so managing those
interdependencies is a corepart. So three things, scouting,
or sense making, ambassadorshipand task coordination.
Scott Allender (10:53):
So, so interesting to me. So because
there's a lot of this that Ithink you're right, I think I
think, I think there's thismyopic focus on the internal but
I hear you saying that you kindof have to look at both, right?
But you said go out before yougo in. Why is it important that
a team looks outside ofthemselves before they sort of
look in on team time, teamdynamics?
Deborah Ancona (11:14):
Well, because if you're building a new product,
for example, and you're buildingit on old data, then you be
maybe making a product thatnobody wants anymore. So you
have to be up to speed on whatis it that our current clients
want? And that's that's part ofwhy you want to go out before
in. You want to understand thepriorities of the senior
(11:37):
leadership so that you knowwhether or not you're going to
fit in and align with wherethey're going, or or not, or you
want to, want to fight it so outbefore in, because you want to
understand the context beforeyou set your goals. Your goals
have to fit that newenvironment, and if they don't
fit, you can more easily go offcourse. So it's a course
(12:00):
correction where you say, Okay,this is the world we're living
in now. I decide what I want todo in that world, as opposed to
what I want to do in a worldthat doesn't exist anymore.
Scott Allender (12:11):
So what have you discovered about distributed
leadership and how that can helporganizations achieve this
become more agile?
Deborah Ancona (12:19):
Distributed leadership means different
things to different people. WhatI mean by industry or we mean
everything I do, by the way, incase I am not clear about that,
is in groups. I love workingwith other people and have great
colleagues. So Elaine Backmanand Kate Isaacs on the on the
work on nimble leadership anddistributed leadership, by which
(12:41):
we mean leadership at alllevels, not just leadership at
the top, but leadership isdistributed. You need people
leading at the bottom, themiddle and and the top of
organizations. And what we havefound is that in again, we start
always with it's anexponentially changing world.
How do we survive in that world?
How do we figure out how not toget blindsided by it? And so one
(13:05):
of the ways to do thatdistributed leadership is
basically you flip the hierarchyon its head. It's not just the
top sending orders down. You areempowering people at all levels
of the firm to also invent andcome up with ideas, new business
models, new products, new waysof organizing and sending those
(13:25):
up. So it's both top down andbottom up. And what our work has
found is that you you want tohave three different types of
leaders in those distributedleadership organizations. So you
want on the bottom, which, ifyou flip it, is really the top,
are your entrepreneurialleaders. So everyone in the
(13:47):
company is thinking, how do wedo this better? How do we
innovate? What's a new way ofdoing this, or a new way of
doing that? So you want a set ofpeople working on that, then you
want a set of enabling leaders.
So your middle level is notsaying, Do this, do that, etc.
They're enabling theentrepreneurial leaders to be
(14:08):
better. So, so many examples,but one example would be a team
says, look, we've been missingone particular group out there
in the market, and we want tocreate a product for that group,
but there's a little bit ofresistance, then the enabling
(14:28):
leader might say, Okay, we needto make the case to this, this,
this and this person, why don'tyou put together a presentation?
I'll look at it. I'll make surethat that you get that meeting,
and I'll help you to prep so youhave the skills to make
convincing arguments. So thatwould be entrepreneurial leaders
coming up with new ideas,enabling leaders, helping them
out. And then it's not that youget rid of the top of the
(14:52):
organization. The top of theorganization still extremely
important, but they're what wecall the architects. They're
architecting the system. Um, inwhich x teams thrive, in which
all kinds of leaders thrive. Sothey're figuring out what's the
culture, what is a way to have aan innovative, agile culture,
and what structures andprocesses enable that. So
(15:16):
they're creating, we call it thegame board on which everybody is
acting, but you need those otherpeople to be able to act in it,
so it's simultaneously buildingthe structure and empowering
people to inhabit it.
Jean Gomes (15:35):
Since you wrote x teams, a lot has changed in the
world, and one of the thingsthat you notice is just how many
teams people are part of. Youmight be part of three or four
or five teams, even. And teamcomposition is often never
stable, you know, the the kindof past version of teams where
(15:58):
you're going through the kind ofstorming forming, you know, and
that sort of that seems like abit of the old world. What are
you seeing now in terms of thechallenges of creating an X
team?
Deborah Ancona (16:10):
Yeah, well, so just for everybody's
information, we actually have asecond edition of the X team
book, which came out in 2023 soit's all been updated, and if I
think of what are the challengesthat exist now that didn't
exist, then one of them is evenpost COVID. Post COVID, we found
(16:36):
that there's much, much morework being done across
boundaries and in the broaderecosystem. So even moderna,
moderna did an amazing jobduring the pandemic coming
coming up with this vaccine, butthey didn't do it alone. They
were talking to experts atdifferent universities. They
(16:58):
were talking to people in thegovernment, because they had a
to work on, how do we get thesedrugs delivered, and how do we
deregulate some things or changethe way that that that processes
we have to go through to movethis ahead, they have to talk to
people in manufacturing sothey're working across
boundaries in ways they neverhad before. So in some ways, I
(17:19):
actually think that the X teammodel was ahead of its time.
There's even more of a need forit now because of the way in
which we're working. Again, wedo a lot of work in pharma,
Novartis and Takeda. We'repartnering. These are these are
rival organizations, and yetthey're now cooperating in
certain spheres and competingand others. So how do you work
(17:42):
across those boundaries? That'sa challenge that nobody, or many
fewer organizations, had to dealwith early on. So setting that
up teams of teams, crossingthose those organizational
boundaries, is a new challenge,and X teams have to evolve to
deal with those. The second is amuch greater need for sense
(18:07):
making that was alwaysimportant. It's part of our
individual leadership model aswell. But if the world is is
moving more slowly, then you canrely much more on what you
already know and what you knewbefore, and you can't do that
anymore. I mean, AI every day isa new application. Every day is
(18:32):
new data. Oh, it's great. Youimprove performance and quality,
but at the same time, peoplelose their creativity. People
become too dependent on thetechnology. I mean, there are
all kinds of things coming outevery day, so sense making and
understanding that new worldbecomes a much bigger part of
(18:54):
what teams need to do now thanit was a while ago. And I think
in some sense, related to that,and related to your, your point
just very well taken that peopleare on multiple teams, and
they're all over the place, andteam membership is changing that
(19:15):
to deal with those conditionsand the speed you need something
that Anita Woolley at CarnegieMellon, she calls burstiness. We
call it pulsing, that you needto figure out ways to pulse work
so that you can focus people fora given period of time, and then
they can go off on, on and dotheir other things. So pulsing
(19:39):
might be okay this week,everybody's going to interview
three customers, and then we'regoing to come back and figure
out what we're going to do, andthen you can go off again. So we
go out into the world, we comein and we process and learn from
what we did. We go out and learnagain. We come back in, so out
and in, or it might be togetherapart. But the other big trend
(20:02):
is that not everybody's in theoffice right. So we know that if
nothing's going on the officeand you come in, you're going to
say, Oh, why did I come in? I'mnot going to come in anymore.
But if you have a lot ofinteresting things going on the
office, then people have fear ofmissing out, and they want to
come in more. So you pulse Allright together, but when we're
(20:23):
together, we're doing reallyimportant things. We're doing
strategic planning, we're doingproblem solving, we're doing
team building. So all thosepeople all over can come
together, build the team, dealwith important problems, and
then they can go back into theirvirtual world or into whatever
else. So this pattern oftogether, apart outside, inside,
(20:46):
doing versus learning are allways to kind of deal with that
situation of, how do you build ateam when it's always changing,
when people are coming goingwell, when you get together, you
do an intensive team building,and that holds the team together
while it goes out and does theother work it has to do.
Jean Gomes (21:06):
Given everything that you've been learning about
all of this, how does thisinfluence how the C suite
operates? How do they the teamof teams to 10 of X teams?
Deborah Ancona (21:18):
Yeah, well, the senior team has to be a core
part of making this all work. Soas I said, they have to do their
own sense making and their ownwork to say, how do we build the
organization that we need tohave and what strategic
directions are going to be mostimportant? And that's going to
(21:41):
involve an out before, in kindof mindset, best, or one of the
best examples of this is, isSatya Nadella. There was just an
article we teach his, his caseand so on. But a new article
just came out about, really, howhe practices what we call an out
before, and he doesn't call itthat, but he's doing sense
(22:02):
making all the time he sets up.
I don't know if it's twice a dayor twice a week. He meets with
other CEOs around the globe,whether it's customer CEOs,
partner CEOs, whether it's CEOswho are working in industries
that he wants to learn moreabout. That is built into his
calendar. He spends time withventure capitalists to say, what
(22:24):
are you funding? What are thecoolest new companies? What are
the coolest new technologies? Heasks everybody, who do I need to
meet, who's doing interesting,daring things that I need to
learn about? That is built intohis modus operandi. So senior
leadership teams need to do thatas well. The first team meeting
he ever ran, he sent people oncustomer visits. He said, Go out
(22:48):
there. We need to understandthose people. He has enabled an
environment in the X team book,both the old one and the new
one. We have Microsoft examples.
And these teams are just theyfeel freed up because of that
learning culture, because ofthat out before, in culture that
(23:10):
that that team has created, theyfeel free to go out and say,
okay, customer, what do you do?
What gets in the way of whatyou're doing, so they can start
from ground zero on how we candeal with the situation on the
ground right now. So that seniorteam is following the same out
(23:31):
before in learning sense making,but they're also then crafting
the culture and structures thatenable the whole organization to
move forward in learning mode.
Jean Gomes (23:44):
I'm fascinated by that, because I just wonder how
many C suite teams are actuallydoing that, because it doesn't
sound very much like the agendaof a lot of the I know.
Deborah Ancona (23:55):
Well, and that's why that first meeting was meant
to shake up the team. That'sthat's a very visual, okay, get
in those vans and go out and seeyour customers. The other thing
that he did was he invited theCEOs of companies that Microsoft
had acquired, and said, meetwith these people, because we
acquired them, because they cando something that we don't know
(24:15):
how to do. Why don't you figureout how they did that? Right? It
sets up a very different mindsetinside the company. And yeah, I
would agree that probably,probably not that many C suites
are operating that way.
Scott Allender (24:33):
So in addition to the mindsets that you've
mentioned that they need toadopt, what are the sort of,
maybe legacy mindsets they needto lose.
Deborah Ancona (24:42):
Well there, yes, good, good question. There are a
number of legacy mindset one isin some companies, you still
can't talk. You can't do a skiplevel meeting. You can only
speak to the next person upthere. So that's bad. You have
to have open communication. Ofgoing around the organization.
(25:03):
Another thing is that you don'tpay any attention to input from
below, and you have to figureout ways to do that. So a part
of legacy systems is therepeople always have ideas.
They've always had ideas, butwhat you need isn't to enable
(25:26):
those ideas to move up thehierarchy, and that's much
harder so creating somethinglike a funneling system. So we
say to the people we want you toinnovate. You're you're talking
to the customers, you'refiguring out the processes. You
know what's going on. We wantyour ideas, but not every idea
is a good one, so you have tohave some kind of funneling or
(25:49):
choice process. Not manyorganizations have that. So you
need to create a mechanism bywhich that happens. At Takeda R
and D, they have the dragoncontest. You come up with new
ideas, and there's a team thatevaluates those ideas along set
criteria. They pick the bestones. The best team gets a
(26:13):
dragon. It's a very cool dragonsculpture. But they also get
time with the head of R and D,so that there's a mechanism to
take their idea through theorganization. Their legacy
organizations don't necessarilyhave that ability to move ideas
up. Southwest Airlines, at leastthey used to have a choice
process where there was acommittee that took new ideas
(26:35):
and evaluated them and decided,okay, these don't go up front,
but these will move ahead. Soyou need those kinds of of
mechanisms to come through.
Scott Allender (26:46):
No, I love this.
And what I'm what I'm hearing,tell me, if this is a this is
right, I'm the in this sort ofinversion of the hierarchy.
We're sort of moving from apower over to a power under,
right? It's an enabling force.
Deborah Ancona (26:58):
Well, I prefer to think of it as a power from a
power over to a power with soit's not that, it's not that one
rules and the other. It's notthat we're turning it around and
everybody rules at the lowerlevels. It's that we're figuring
(27:19):
out how to bridge the upper andlower levels so that Innovation
and Learning can thrive. Andit's not the article we wrote on
nimble leadership was calledwalking the line between
creativity and chaos. What youwant to do is have this
empowered, thoughtful,innovative set of people, but
(27:42):
not chaos. That's why you needthe structures and processes to
to control what's going on, asopposed to just anyone can do
anything. It's not anyone can doanything, right? That would be
bad. So it's power with so thatyou can work together to create
that's good.
Jean Gomes (28:06):
I am just changing the topic now for a little bit,
I read a couple of years agofascinating article you wrote
about how our family ghostsinfluence our leadership. Can we
unpack that a bit and understandwhat what that means and how are
some ghost stories.
Deborah Ancona (28:25):
Okay, so just, let's, let's clarify. I know
that the ghost stories are thebest. I have to say. This is the
work I'm doing right now, and itis just so interesting and fun.
And you know, my students whoare able to kind of tackle the
darker sides of their ghosts.
There are positive sides ofghosts too, but just have
(28:45):
amazing change in their lives,and that's been incredibly
rewarding. But so what is aghost? Ghosts are attitudes and
behaviors that you learn as achild in your family system that
you carry into the executivesuite or work, it doesn't only
(29:06):
executives that we carry intowork. So that's what we mean by
ghosts. And ghosts can bereally, really good. So we've
started cataloging ghosts. So wehave the people pleaser ghost
that comes from a family systemin which you want to be the good
child, and that means pleasingthe parent and doing what the
(29:27):
parent wants and doing what theparent says, and not
contradicting anything orfighting back so the people
pleaser ghost can get you reallyfar ahead in the organization.
You know how to please yourboss, you know how to please
your peers. You know how to youknow work in the organization.
So that's the good, the goodside. So most ghosts have both
(29:47):
the positive and a negative sideto them. The negative of the
people pleaser ghosts is thatone, if you're so busy, please.
Others. Sometimes you don't havetime to think about well, what
do I want? What do I think isthe best way? What is my
strategy for moving forward? Youdon't develop those critical
(30:09):
thinking skills or strategicskills because you're so
involved in helping otherpeople, or because it's respect
for the elders that's part ofthat ghost. And people all have
different ghost stories, butthat particular ghost is, you
don't question authority, youfollow authority. And so those
(30:30):
folks have are, they're great.
They work really well. They'regood with their teams, but
sometimes they're not so good atspeaking up to authority, of
saying, I disagree, saying no,that's that's not what we should
be doing here. So speaking up inthose executive meetings becomes
(30:53):
hard for the people pleaser.
Another common ghost that wehave is the the can do performer
ghost. The can do. Performerghost is wonderful. Okay, you
set the bar. I'm gonna make itI'll make it happen. I'm gonna
I'm gonna go. And that oftencomes from family systems, where
everything was about geteducated and succeed, and you're
(31:15):
representing the family, and wewant to represent our community
and and so your job is to learn.
Your job is to be good ateducation. Your job is to
succeed. And so you become a cando kind of ghost. And again,
that is amazing. You. You know,a lot of my my students are
(31:37):
executives, and they'resuccessful executives, or they
wouldn't be in my classes, andthey have risen up the
hierarchy, really good. But thenthere can be a dark side to that
kind of ghost too. One isperfectionistic. I'm never
enough. I've always got to domore. I'm always trying to
please more. Sometimes it'sabout getting love. I think that
(32:01):
the road to getting appreciatedand love my family is by
performing. So I'm always tryingto get more. Never can stop
perfectionist tendencies. It'snever enough. And some of those
folks burn out. You You can'tkeep that post that pace going,
you can always raise the bar. Sothere's burnout, there is an
(32:26):
inability to delegate, becausemaybe they won't. Others won't
do it as well as I can. So I'mgoing to take over this, and I'm
going to take over that, andthen you spending too much time
at work, your family suffersbecause you're in this, this
escalating faster moving cycleof more, more, more more.
Jean Gomes (32:47):
What's the ghost that does the most damage?
Deborah Ancona (32:50):
That's an interesting question.
I think, I think the biggest So,a couple come to mind. One is
the for people who have learnedthat they're worthless. For a
(33:12):
child, let's say who a girl bornin China when there was the one
child policy whose father walkedinto the room, learned it was a
girl, was so upset, walked outand basically paid no attention,
(33:32):
that person is just constantlysearching for some way to prove
themselves. There's a lack of akind of an inner sense of self.
And I think that those ghostsalso those who have been abused
or have had really and I don'tuse the word trauma readily, I
(33:57):
think it's an overused term.
Everybody who I failed a test.
I'm traumatized. No, you're nottraumatized by failing the test.
You said you suffered a setback,but, but there are people, I
don't mean to say that. Thereare people who have been
traumatized in fairly dramaticways, and those can leave a lot
(34:17):
that sometimes is very, veryhard to to to over, overcome in
some way. The other ghosts thatcan be there is one where you're
you've learned to be toxic.
You've learned that the way tosucceed in life is to take
advantage of others is to you.
(34:43):
Know, it's all about me and whatI need, and the heck with
everybody else. And so I havethe great ideas, and let the
rest of the organization or myteam just figure out how to work
with me, because I know, andjust come with me. I'm
brilliant. And. You guys have tojust deal with my temper
tantrums and deal with whateverit is I have to spew out at you,
(35:06):
and that can also be a dangerousghost, if not to that person,
certainly to the to theenvironment.
Scott Allender (35:20):
This, this resonates so deeply with me.
This, it's very close to some ofthe modalities I use and some of
my coaching work. And I loveyour ghost framing. And in the I
want to pull out what you'resaying, though, about people
being very successful, almostmotivated by these very ghosts
in some ways. How do you helppeople see the risk and the
(35:42):
downside before maybe they havea catastrophe or some kind of
massive setback, because theyhave this unwieldy ghost that
they're unwilling to even noticeor see, that it's even there.
Deborah Ancona (35:56):
Well, most people don't see their ghosts. I
always find this shocking,because I was a psychology
major. I've been in the world ofpsychology for a very long time,
so the fact that so many peoplesay, Oh, I never thought about
this, is it just shows we're allin our bubbles, and we don't see
(36:19):
outside our bubbles, that peoplewho just never took never look
there, which is fine, or thatlook there in their personal
lives, but then not in the worklife, right? So therapy is fine
for your marriage, but youwouldn't think about how that
translates into into a workenvironment. So I think one of
(36:48):
the first things is to see yourghosts, and when you see them,
that gives you a lot of power.
Talk about power. Power over ifyou've just got these beliefs
and behaviors and attitudes thatare running around in your
brain, then it has power overyou. It is controlling you,
(37:09):
right? Those are deep set,right? So if it came from your
childhood, you guys have lookedat neuroscience, some of those
neural pathways are buried verydeeply. They're not in your in
your thinking part of yourbrain. They're way down and
automatic, and so you can't dealwith them unless you see them.
So bringing out, what are someof those attitudes that are in
(37:32):
my brain, you have power overthem when they're out there and
you can see them, they're nowwhat Keegan and Leahy call their
object, not subject. Subject.
It's part of you object. It'sout there, and then you can
begin to work on those things.
So, in fact, I just had my classyesterday. One of the frequent
(37:53):
things with ghosts in the classis this inability to be
assertive, so inability to beassertive. So what are the what
are the negative thoughts thatyou have in your mind that are
getting in the way of you beingassertive? You want to be
(38:14):
assertive. You know you have tobe assertive for your career,
but in your brain, oftenunbeknownst to you, if I am
assertive, that will mean I'mselfish, or I'm getting above my
britches, or I'm not respectfulof authority, I'm going outside
of my role. And once you seethat, you can say, oh, wait a
(38:39):
second, let's test that out. Isit that I'm not respectful? Is
you know, you can, you can testand you can begin to say, Okay,
how do I move away fromautomatically acting, not
assertively, because of thesethings. So first you have to
surface it, then you have tolook at it, then you have to
(38:59):
maybe reframe it. So maybe wehad this really good
conversation yesterday. Maybeassertive just triggers you in a
negative direction. I want to beassertive, but assertive means
all of these things. I'mselfish. I'm going above myself.
Maybe it's more about, oh, Iwant to represent my team and
(39:20):
our ideas to senior leadershipthat's much more acceptable in
in a frame than is. I want to beassertive. So one thing is just
to do that. The second thing isto go and find people, women, or
if it's a woman or people thatyou respect, who speak up and
(39:41):
who don't seem selfish, youdon't say, Oh, those people are
terrible. They're doing what youwant to do without the baggage
associated with it. So let'slearn what they do. You have to
become like a detective and say,Well, how do they respond? What
do they say? What is theirdemeanor, and look at them and
(40:02):
then begin to say, Okay, whydon't I try that out? So one
woman in one of my other classesa few years ago, she couldn't
speak up in the senior team. Shenever, ever said anything in the
senior team, but she was going,Okay, I know why I'm not doing
this. It's because I'm thinkingthis. She reasserted from being
(40:22):
assertive to I need to representmy team here. That's what I'm
paid to do. That's what we'vebeen working really hard on
this. That's a more acceptablepathway into this realm, and
I've been studying all theseother things. So she went in and
I'm going to be an executivevice president, said something,
(40:43):
and she said, we can't do that.
That's terrible. That's whatshe's thinking. And she normally
would say nothing, which sheokay, I'm channeling Elizabeth.
Elizabeth would remain calm, notinterrupt, not get flustered.
She just said, I disagree withthat, and here's why, a very
fact based this is what myreasoning is, and I think we
(41:08):
can't do that. And that was thefirst time that she had done
that, and she said everybody inthe room looked at me had never
said anything before, much lessdisagreed with this executive
vice president. So it was a bigmove. So she was very nervous
afterwards. Did I do the rightthing? And what are these people
thinking? But in fact, her bosssaid that was really well done
(41:31):
and and I think we should payattention to what you said. So
that's step one, and once youget step one going, then you you
build and build and build andbuild and then you take on
something else.
Jean Gomes (41:43):
I love this whole area, because I think our, you
know, kind of the the archetypesthat we form as you know, young
response coping strategies to tofamily dynamics, does play out
to a massive extent in our inour lives. I'm wondering if
you're noticing, because you'reat the coalface of education,
whether you're noticing anydifference in the generational
(42:06):
kind of progress, you know, howis that playing out? Because
that's a fascinating, you know,thought on the minds of many
senior leaders is, how do I copewith with, you know, Gen Z, Gen
Alpha. I have no idea how tocope with this conversation.
Deborah Ancona (42:22):
So I want to first respond to the first thing
that you said, which is, wereplay our family dynamics and a
couple of things there. One is,and this goes back, Scott, to
what you were asking is, how doyou prevent this? Is to begin to
and we have a framework in thatHBR article. How do you frame
your family system. Becausewe're always attracted to the
(42:43):
family system we come from, evenif it's toxic, even if it's led
to all kinds of bad things, weare drawn to that because that's
what we know that's familiar. Infact, I was meeting with a
student yesterday who said, Isaid, Well, you know, you're in
an organization. It's just likeyou're you're a home
organization. Everybody isattacking everybody else and and
all these things are going on.
She's like, Oh, I never thoughtof that so, so understanding
(43:05):
that we are replaying over andover and over again these family
system dynamics. So it's, it'snot just what are your ghosts,
but what are the dynamics thatyou came out of? And how can you
be watchful of them. Sometimesthey're watchful, and we end up
in the same place anyway,because we didn't catch certain
things. But that's that. Theother thing is, I don't want to
(43:27):
think of us. There's a famousarticle, prisoners of childhood.
We are not prisoners ofchildhood. So what that means is
we do not have to replay thosedynamics all the time. What you
had to do as a child, you hadlimited resources. You were
young, you couldn't thinkclearly. You do not have to
(43:49):
respond the same way anymore asyou did as a child. You're an
adult, you have free you knowit's not easy to do it, but just
having people recognize, yes,this is what you did, and don't
be ashamed of it. Just becauseyou did what you did, you had to
survive well, but now you havesurvived, and you're an adult
with a lot of resources. Solet's figure out a different way
(44:11):
to deal with that samesituation. So I just wanted to
to denote that now we can goback to the question of this new
younger generation. Okay, so,yes, it's always the younger
generations complaining aboutthe old focus at the top. And
the top are saying, Who arethese people? And so I think
(44:33):
that there are a couple ofthings I don't certainly have
the silver bullet to solve allof it. There are many people who
work in this domain, who who aremore knowledgeable than I am,
but a few things, one is theyounger people are looking for
more meaning. They watch theirparents, you know, these
workaholics, go, go, go all daylong and and they have some
(44:56):
judgments about that. They. Wantto have a different kind of
lifestyle, so they want meaning,and so leaders have to think
about creating more vision. Whyare you here? How can I give you
a sense of why it's important?
Why do we have to work day andnight because patients are
dying? Why do we have to dothis? Because we're we're
(45:18):
helping. It's not just thatyou're doing the little things
you're doing, something big inwhat you're doing, and we have
to connect people to that largersense of mission and vision if
we're going to keep themmotivated. The second thing is
the work that we give them todo, don't stick them in a room
(45:38):
and have them working on theircomputers eight hours a day.
They are not going to want to bethere, and they are going to
leave. So give them more activeroles. I mean, x teams actually
enable you to do that, go andsend everybody out. You guys
know more about technology thatwe do. Let's say we want, we're
looking to how to change ourmarketing group to add more AI
(46:02):
into the marketing function. Allright, you younger folks,
everybody, go out. We want toknow what are the best sources
on AI and marketing, whatcompanies have done this before?
What can you learn from whatthey did? What mistakes do they
made? What's working the best?
Who are the best vendors of AIfor marketing right now? I mean,
give them a set of questions andset them loose, they will be
much more they will be muchhappier and much more engaged
(46:25):
and much more connected to whatthe organization is actually
trying to do. If, if you go anddo that, give them, as I said,
there are these pulsingactivities. So sometimes you
want everybody together. Andorganizations do this, not just
teams, but organizations dothis. Smuckers jam. You can be
(46:47):
anywhere in the world doingwhatever. Certain weeks of the
year you are at headquarters,because we're networking,
learning what other teams do.
We're hearing a guest speakerwho has some interesting things
to say. And then you talk about,how do we bring that into our
daily practice? Have a very fullset of activities, and bring the
(47:10):
younger people in to thosethings, get them motivated, and
part of the actual goings on, itshouldn't necessarily be only
for senior leaders. You wantengagement in in some very deep
ways, they are learning in avery different world than those
(47:34):
who are older ever grew up in.
And so when we think aboutteaching them, when we think
about engaging them, we have tothink about other media and
other modes of of teaching andlearning on the job and so on
and so forth. So that's why, forexample, x teams. I can talk
about x teams all the time. Ican, I can lecture. I can, I can
(47:58):
do things, but if we want toagain connect, then there needs
to be video content. We'vecreated a simulation so you
actually do it and then talkabout what you learned. We have
all kinds of we redid, as Isaid, the X team book, The
chapter six is a checklist sothat you know how to go and you
(48:20):
don't have to read anything. Youdon't have to just go directly
to chapter six and say, okay, amI doing this? Am I doing this?
How do I do this? So we need tocreate that learning
environment, not not just in inour training courses, but all
the learning that we need to doin a much more exciting,
innovative capture kind of way,because folks are on social
(48:46):
media, this is what they'redoing all the time. And so if we
want to capture them, we need tobe where they are. And oh, by
the way, it's not just for them.
I think everybody is more pulledin when you have more compelling
interactive at the moment, kindof learning going on.
Sara Deschamps (49:08):
If the conversations we've been having
on the evolving leader havehelped you in any way, please
share this episode with yournetwork friends and family.
Thank you so much for listening.
Now, let's get back to theconversation
Jean Gomes (49:20):
as you you look at the kind of world as it
currently is, and this isn't thepolitical statement or anything
like that, but there isobviously a lot of things going
on right now. If you were kindof thinking about the leadership
that we need in the world, andyou have a, you know, you have a
place where you can influencefuture leaders. What would you
(49:42):
say is really important rightnow that we need to be investing
in for the future, that perhapswe're not seeing enough of?
Deborah Ancona (49:53):
Yeah, that's a good, good question. I think
what we need to see more of.
First of all is the sense ofbelonging. Thing. Part of why we
are where we are is becausepeople don't feel part of
anything, and so they're moreeasily swayed and pulled in
other kinds of directions. So Ithink, you know, people, when
(50:13):
they're building teams orbuilding units, they the
workplace has to be a place thattakes up some of the slack in
the system, not all of it. Ithink there are other places as
well, but we need to create aplace of belonging. So people
feel that belonging two. I thinkwe need to, as I said before,
(50:34):
create more of a sense ofvision, more of a sense of
mission. Why is important whatwe do. I think that's important.
I think innovation. What we'reseeing, in some sense, is a
decline in people believing thatthe way we work is good. There's
a lot of throwing out of whatexists. And so I think we
(50:58):
perhaps need to think clearlyabout, well, how do we move
forward in new and innovativeways that are compelling? And I
think we need to underlinevalues. This is not there are
certain values that people, Iactually think, want to believe
(51:24):
in, and yet there's no way ofsaying, how do we invent to
those, to those values and tothose ideals in a way that works
for more people? And I thinkthere's a huge amount of
inventing that needs to takeplace right now in a group of
people who become committed andbelong with one another and can
(51:45):
begin to to reshape how we'reapproaching this world.
Jean Gomes (51:54):
And I really love that. I think there's a huge
amount of importance in thethings that you're saying there.
And I wonder, from yourperspective, as you're listening
to this, if you're in a startupor a scale up, or you're just
about to leave college, or, youknow, where's the hope that we
(52:15):
have that we can create a betterworld? What do you think are the
things that we should beoptimistic about?
Deborah Ancona (52:20):
Well, I think that right now, people are
exhausted, people are depressed,people are going off into their
little cocoons, and maybe weneed a little of that. People
need to just kind of processwhat's gone on. But then I think
(52:43):
what we need to do as leaders,and in a distributed leadership
system, anyone can be a leader,is begin to focus people on,
okay, what's the next chapter weneed to create? Go from we're
stuck here into a sense offuture visioning. What's the
(53:03):
next chapter? If what we havehasn't worked, then let's get
organized into creating andinventing the next chapter of
this crazy life that we're allliving and in this crazy world
that we're living in, it's notokay to say it hasn't gone in a
(53:24):
direction that we like. And sowe're we're just opting out,
which I think a lot of peopleare doing right now. And if we
want them not to opt out, as Isaid, maybe we need some period
of mourning, of of gettingourselves together. But then
some folks out there have tolead, lead the charge in saying,
(53:44):
what is the next chapter? Whatcan the next chapter be if we
don't like what it was before?
Okay? What do we do? And some ofthat might be going forward is
the resistance movement. If wedon't like what's going on, part
of it may be okay, Join theResistance. How do we mean? How
do we make it so that wherewe're going does not remain and
the other side might be okay?
(54:10):
It's kind of like Mike sushmanand Charles O'Reilly's. We have
to be ambidextrous. We have toboth execute on what's today and
innovate to what the nextchapter is we need to be doing
both of those things so that wehave something to go toward.
Vision is aspirational. It'sinspirational. It means that
(54:30):
you're pulling people into somenew direction, not going against
what is and so unless we shiftinto that aspirational,
inspirational, inventing newthing kind of mode. I think it's
a problem.
Scott Allender (54:45):
So speaking of new chapters, you're working on
a new book. Can you give us theelevator pitch and when is it
due out? When can we get ourhands on it?
Deborah Ancona (54:53):
Well, so I'm working on the proposal for a
new book, so you're not going toget your hands on it. Be a
minute anytime. Time soon,although I'm working on it very
diligently, and I'm onsabbatical in January, so the
intensive Book, book writing, soit's it's working more on the
ghosts work. So I have 10 yearsworth of data of students
(55:16):
writing about their ghosts. So Ihave my research assistants hard
at work to say, what are theclusters that we see in these
executives? What are the mostcommon kinds of ghosts, where
they come from? What are theways in which you can move
forward? So it's it starts offwith kind of stuck in the bog.
(55:41):
Where are we stuck? Where arestuck patterns? And looking at,
you know, one woman who is like,Okay, I was in this big
bureaucracy, and people didn'tlike me, but I managed to get
things done anyway, working fromon high, but I it was toxic, and
I didn't like it, and so shemoved into a startup, and the
(56:02):
startup, she ended up in thesame thing where she had no
support from her peers.
Everything she got was from fromworking as she was successful,
but, but it was hard, and it wasit was isolationist, so stuck in
the bog is looking again at whythose stuck patterns exist. We
repeat the family dynamics, andyou have to first see that, and
(56:23):
then we offer a way to begin tohow do you see that? And what
are the models? And what arethese prototypical ghosts? They
seem to be working students.
They say, Yeah, I'm the I'm thego getter on the people pleaser
rebel. And and then that. How dowe get out of it? How do we do
(56:48):
those provisional selves? How dowe begin to see what our
greatest fears are? How do we dothat work that we were just
talking about at the individuallevel? How do we create a future
that's different? How do wecreate the next chapter, and
what can that look like? And sothat's, that's what the book
will be.
Scott Allender (57:07):
Well, I want to read that. So best wishes on the
whole process.
Jean Gomes (57:11):
So it's coming out on October 31 next year?
Deborah Ancona (57:15):
That's right, the Halloween edition.
Scott Allender (57:21):
Well, Deborah, thank you for for joining us,
for sharing your your insights.
I found this to be a really richconversation, and I know our
listeners will as well. So thankyou so much for your time.
Deborah Ancona (57:31):
Well, thank you so much. You guys had great
questions, and you're really funand supportive and enthusiastic
and and also probing. So sothank you for the interesting
questions and for theinteraction
Scott Allender (57:45):
Our pleasure, our pleasure, and until next
time, folks remember, the worldis evolving. Are you?
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