Acknowledge that no leader can be skilled in all areas. Determine which areas you are skilled in, then reach out to others to complement your leadership. Distribute leadership according to individual strengths and weaknesses.
Thinking beyond your direct reports, you should aim to create externally oriented, flexible teams which breach traditional boundaries ("X-teams").
Distributed leadership means that individuals within the organisation are empowered to make decisions and move the organisation forward. By developing an awareness of others' leadership strenghts and inventing processes / structures which allow top-down & bottom up decision-making, you can profit from distributed leadership.
Teams often fail to meet their goals: this is linked by Ancona/Bresman to a poor understanding of what makes teams successful.
The traditional team model focuses on setting clear goals, assigning defined roles, team cohesion and conflict resolution. These are "internally oriented" concepts.
A number of different structures have changed recently:
- Knowledge structures
- Work structures - more interdependencies with outside teams
- Power relationships
The X in X-teams is "external outreach". External outreach is needed because team agility is now vital to success in our exponentially changing environment.
Stratege from X-teams - it cannot be prescribed by the C-suite because there isn't enough time or predictability for such an approach to be effective.
The good news is that you can train teams to do this. Be conscious of the cognitive and the emotional side of this approach. When people go outside of their comfort zones, reinforce that behaviour by complimenting it.
### The key principles of X-teams
- External activity
- Supportive internal dynamics
- Distinct phases
#### External activity
Reaching out across boundaries to gather information, understand context, coordinate with other teams and gain support for their initiatives.
It is divided into 3 sub-activities:
- Sensemaking
- Ambassadorship
- Task coordination
1) Sensemaking
This is gathering information which is critical to the task at hand. It can be observation, conversation, surveys, interviews or data analysis. Team members should look outside their immediate environment and connect with individuals who have the required information or expertise.
Teams should also monitor how much information they need, and beware getting stuck in search mode.
[Perhaps a counter to this is to clearly state the question to which we require an answer, and "we'll know we have enough information when....", to avoid recursive madness.]
Individuals who are skilled in relating and sensemaking should take the lead here.
2) Ambassadorship
Gaining support from those who have power in the organisation, aligning with upper-level initiatives, shifting management's views, maintaining the team's reputation.
Individuals who are skilled in relating are valuable for this.
3) Task coordination
Negotiating with other groups, getting feedback on the team's work, convincing others to do their part. Creating plans, schedules, structures and mutual commitments to manage collaboration between groups. This skill requires advocacy and inquiry. Individuals who are skilled in inventing are valuable team members in this activity.
Amy Edmondson of Novartis discusses "psychological safety" - the belief that you can speak up with concerns and that will be welcome. A sense of psychological safety at work is the ability to bring your true self forward. People may feel that the challenge of their work is important enough to put some of their "fragile-ness" aside. People should be willing to be interpersonally vulnerable.
Interpersonal risk: the risk that in some little moment, you might not think well of me. These small risks have big effects in team relations.
If people are more worried about others' opinions than the quality of the work, it is unlikely that the work will be as good as it could.
e.g. Eileen Fisher asks her managers to model "being a don't-knower" - owning up to not knowing something and the value of going to find out.
To build this kind of culture, call attention to the nature of the work and challenge which lies ahead. This is challenging, it will demand a lot from us and we won't always get everything right.
Frame the work as a learning task rather than an execution task.
Get into the habit of asking lots of open questions - avoid leading questions.
Reinforce the behaviour of people speaking up when they do it.
Adopt the mentality of a scientist: observe the data, but be willing to be wrong and ready to respond.
X-teams do not get trapped in one mode of operating. They move through:
- Exploring (discovery, new ideas)
- Exploiting (designing, translating sensemaking into visioning & inventing)
- Exporting (diffusion, integrating into organisation)
These steps are followed sequentially for each respective project.
### Extensive ties
Weak ties: useful for information gathering and gathering expertise. Strong ties: higher levels of cooperation and transfer of complex knowledge.
- Core members: Coordinate tasks, strong connections, work with other tiers.
- Operational members: Perform work, strong connections, can include core members.
- Outer-net members: Part time / as needed. Weak outer-net connectors. Strong connection to specific core/operational members.
- Keep pace with a rapidly changing environment
- Discover and take advantage of new opportunities
- Exchange expertise
- Understand complex challenges & invent solutions
- Facilitate cross-functional alignment
- Create partnerships with other organisations in the wider ecosystem
- Choose team members based on their network of external connections.
- Focus on external orientation from the beginning.
- Mentor team members to improve their leadership capabilities.
- Set clear milestones and deliverables for exploration, exploitation, and exportation to facilitate the transition between phases.
- Create a supportive learning culture throughout the organization.
## Takeda's use of X-teams
Focus, externalisation.
Previously, Takeda did all the work across the entire R&D process. Now, they play to their strengths but partner with other organisations.
Question from Dr. Ancona: What is in place now that wasn't in place when you started? All the signals & leading measures suggest that the team is moving the right direction. The organisation now has a deep set of shared values. "You can feel that in the room."
At the beginning, Dr. Plump found his focus was on vision and pace-setting. Now, he is working more on coaching, mentoring and developing the team. He now feels able to "let people wander", empowered with the organisation's values/principles. Other people are now instigators / "movers" who push things forward.
### Dr. Sorrell
...
Decision-making has been an interesting challenge because team members need to step up and take responsibility for driving this forward. This has been a learning experience for everyone. Again, stepping back has been key.
Results: employee NPS has significantly increased around all engagement indicators. Feedback on "to-be" culture state and progress towards it. Employee empowerment is a work-in-progress - giving people more personal ownership of their career path and decisions they make. On business progress, some progress is good, some areas present challenges due to external changing circumstances. However, people have left and returned to the company & commented that "this is a different company."
Be mindful of this world of exponential change when thinking about the kind of leader we want to be. We need to leave behind rigid, formal democracy and move towards a distributed organisation: networked, nimble, agile and learning. Leadership needs to change: from command-and-control to leadership at every level. A leadership format where everybody feels that he or she has an opportunity to lead. We can do this by incorporating 4-CAPS+ into our way of operating.
- Know and communicate your leadership signature
- Practice your 4-CAPS+: see where you can develop and apply
- Create X-teams
- Build a distributed leadership organisation