The Evolving Leader

‘Building X-Teams' with Deborah Ancona

• Deborah Acona • Season 7 • Episode 11

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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)

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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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Jean Gomes:

Given that the team is the primary operating unit of value creation in an organization, it's staggering how few companies have a successful and reliable blueprint for how teams should function given today's realities. In this show, we talk to Deborah Ancona, the Seeley Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, about the need for X teams and how they create the DNA of high performance and adaptive organizations. Tune in to an important conversation on the evolving leader. You

Scott Allender:

Hey, folks, welcome to the evolving leader the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender

Jean Gomes:

And I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender:

Mr. Gomes, how are you feeling on this Friday afternoon?

Jean Gomes:

I am feeling in need of this conversation. Our guest wrote a book time ago that I absolutely loved, and it's come out of the library several times every year to help us think about challenges facing our clients. So I'm really excited about about this conversation. How are you feeling, Scott?

Scott Allender:

I'm feeling grateful that it's Friday afternoon and the weekend is here, because I definitely could use a bit of rest and renewal, but what a wonderful way to sort of cap the week with the conversation we're about to have, because, as you alluded to today, we're joined by a wonderful guest, Deborah ankana, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management. She is best known for her binary research on high performing teams, distributed nimble leadership and leadership signatures. She is also the founder of the MIT Leadership Center, which is revolutionizing traditional leadership to solve the toughest problems in the world of management. Her book that you just mentioned a moment ago, Jean, X-teams, gives deep insights into how to create innovative, successful teams, using examples from Microsoft and Takeda and the Museum of Modern Art. She's also founded X lead, which develops research based tools to encourage creative leadership across management levels. And her work bridges Theory and Practice, bringing novel ideas into practical leadership application. Deborah's been with MIT for over 20 years, and in 2018 was awarded the Jameson prize MIT Sloan's highest teaching honor and her widely acclaimed research on how family upbringing affects workplace behaviors, was published in the Harvard Business Review titled family ghosts in the executive suite. And I'm going to want to hear about some of these ghost stories. So Deborah, welcome to the evolving leader.

Deborah Ancona:

Well, thank you. It's great to be here.

Jean Gomes:

Deborah, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

Deborah Ancona:

I'm feeling great. It's a beautiful, sunny day in New Hampshire. I have a nice walk in the woods planned for later on. Had a great class last night, going to be working on my book today, a new book that I'm going to be writing. And my kids are all off and running and flourishing on their own, so life is good.

Jean Gomes:

That's great to hear. So Deborah, what was the moment in your career when you decided that leadership and team performance would be the focus of your life? Was there a kind of an aha moment, or was it just a gradual process of realization?

Deborah Ancona:

I think for me, those two things are a little bit different. I started my career on teams and teams has. Teams have always fascinated me from the time I was young, and teams being families or groups or 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 in those entities? And when I went to college, I learned that actually they would pay you to study teams this. This was an incredible idea that you could have a career doing this. So I went to grad school and and got to dig a little bit deeper, and then just followed the data, and that took me in all kinds of interesting directions. So that's the team side, on the leadership side. I really think that one of the most intriguing questions we have is, is, how do people work? What makes people tick, and how do we then unravel who? Well, who we are. Are and then work on change that That, to me, is a kind of quintessential, quintessential question and task for all of us. So that's why I really love this leadership piece, where we can take knowledge of organizations and knowledge of psychology and really dig into what we call people's leadership signatures, how they came to be. How do we change them? So that's just an intriguing question that I don't think I'll ever get tired of trying to answer.

Scott Allender:

So just to set the stage, so what is an X team?

Deborah Ancona:

So an X team, x is not cross functional. X is externally active. So it's not only what teams do inside their boundaries, but also how they go out across their boundaries, they're externally active.

Jean Gomes:

So that was the kind of the core idea here is that why, when you were looking at why good teams fail, it was because of this kind of this kind of introversion. Can we talk about that a little bit unpack it?

Deborah Ancona:

Yeah, I'm always surprised, maybe because I've been talking about ex teams for a long time, and with my colleague Henry fresman, we co wrote the book and continue to work together. It always surprises me when I get in front of a group of executives. And I've done this hundreds of times, and I say, what makes for an effective team? And outpour all these answers, clear goals, clear roles, synergies across team members, trust, good communication, 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 half right, you can be very, very wrong. The fact is that all of the best selling textbooks on teams, all of our corporate programming and training is on, how do we improve the internal dynamics of teams? But the truth of matter is we're living in an exponentially changing world. We're living in a world where it's not just what you do in your team, it's what you do across teams in your organization, and increasingly, the world has moved to dealing with the external ecosystem. It's how do you learn from and collaborate with and partner with, not just others in your organization, but other organizations and so x teams, and we've got a ton of data on this, are not just focused on those internal dynamics that everybody thinks about, but are also focused on, how do We go what we call out before in in order to figure out what's going on in that external world, who do we want to partner with? What do we want to learn from others? How do we gain legitimacy in the internal environment? All of those things require an external approach. And so why do good teams fail? Good teams fail because they only focus internally. And when you focus internally, you build up a very strong boundary for the team, and you lose out on that external learning, getting resources and getting buy in from other parts of the organization you aren't learning except from dated, existing knowledge, and that can bring you very easily into a failure pattern.

Jean Gomes:

So what are the capabilities, then, of the X team? What are the that helps them to externalize? What do they need to do?

Deborah Ancona:

Yeah, three things that they need to do. One is sense making. So again, if you're working in a world that's changing more and more rapidly, so we're accelerating the pace of change, sense making is figuring out what's going on in that ever changing world. So it means learning about changing technologies, changing political factors. It's understanding more about your customer, your customer wanted last week may not be what your customer wants this week. How do you track that? How do you how do you look at that? How do you look at changes in the economy or the political environment today, every day, is a new announcement on the political environment in this country and around the world. That's even more intense. So sense making is, how do you keep up with that world? How do you figure out who's best to partner with, who best to get information from? So sense making making sense of the context in which you're operating is a major function. The other thing is ambassadorship. So ambassadorship is going up the organization. We live in hierarchies. We live in a world where you have to get resources from on high. You have to get buy in from other parts of the organization. You have to. Line, a team is more likely to succeed and get those resources if they've got the blessing from senior leaders, and if they can align what they're doing with the strategic imperatives of the group 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 believe in the revolution when it's necessary, but at any rate, it's ambassadorship. Is the second piece, getting that buy in and alignment, and the third is just coordination. There's a huge amount of coordination. Most teams can't operate as solo entities, they have to work with and through a lot of other groups, so managing those interdependencies is a core part. So three things, scouting, or sense making, ambassadorship and task coordination.

Scott Allender:

So, so interesting to me. So because there's a lot of this that I think you're right, I think I think, I think there's this myopic focus on the internal but I hear you saying that you kind of have to look at both, right? But you said go out before you go in. Why is it important that a team looks outside of themselves before they sort of look in on team time, team dynamics?

Deborah Ancona:

Well, because if you're building a new product, for example, and you're building it on old data, then you be maybe making a product that nobody wants anymore. So you have to be up to speed on what is it that our current clients want? And that's that's part of why you want to go out before in. You want to understand the priorities of the senior leadership so that you know whether or not you're going to fit in and align with where they're going, or or not, or you want to, want to fight it so out before in, because you want to understand the context before you set your goals. Your goals have to fit that new environment, and if they don't fit, you can more easily go off course. So it's a course correction where you say, Okay, this is the world we're living in now. I decide what I want to do in that world, as opposed to what I want to do in a world that doesn't exist anymore.

Scott Allender:

So what have you discovered about distributed leadership and how that can help organizations achieve this become more agile?

Deborah Ancona:

Distributed leadership means different things to different people. What I mean by industry or we mean everything I do, by the way, in case I am not clear about that, is in groups. I love working with other people and have great colleagues. So Elaine Backman and Kate Isaacs on the on the work on nimble leadership and distributed leadership, by which we mean leadership at all levels, not just leadership at the top, but leadership is distributed. You need people leading at the bottom, the middle and and the top of organizations. And what we have found is that in again, we start always with it's an exponentially changing world. How do we survive in that world? How do we figure out how not to get blindsided by it? And so one of the ways to do that distributed leadership is basically you flip the hierarchy on its head. It's not just the top sending orders down. You are empowering people at all levels of the firm to also invent and come up with ideas, new business models, new products, new ways of organizing and sending those up. So it's both top down and bottom up. And what our work has found is that you you want to have three different types of leaders in those distributed leadership organizations. So you want on the bottom, which, if you flip it, is really the top, are your entrepreneurial leaders. So everyone in the company is thinking, how do we do this better? How do we innovate? What's a new way of doing this, or a new way of doing that? So you want a set of people working on that, then you want a set of enabling leaders. So your middle level is not saying, Do this, do that, etc. They're enabling the entrepreneurial leaders to be better. So, so many examples, but one example would be a team says, look, we've been missing one particular group out there in the market, and we want to create a product for that group, but there's a little bit of resistance, then the enabling leader might say, Okay, we need to make the case to this, this, this and this person, why don't you put together a presentation? I'll look at it. I'll make sure that that you get that meeting, and I'll help you to prep so you have the skills to make convincing arguments. So that would be entrepreneurial leaders coming up with new ideas, enabling leaders, helping them out. And then it's not that you get rid of the top of the organization. The top of the organization still extremely important, but they're what we call the architects. They're architecting the system. Um, in which x teams thrive, in which all kinds of leaders thrive. So they're figuring out what's the culture, what is a way to have a an innovative, agile culture, and what structures and processes enable that. So they're creating, we call it the game board on which everybody is acting, but you need those other people to be able to act in it, so it's simultaneously building the structure and empowering people to inhabit it.

Jean Gomes:

Since you wrote x teams, a lot has changed in the world, and one of the things that you notice is just how many teams people are part of. You might be part of three or four or five teams, even. And team composition is often never stable, you know, the the kind of past version of teams where you're going through the kind of storming forming, you know, and that sort of that seems like a bit of the old world. What are you seeing now in terms of the challenges of creating an X team?

Deborah Ancona:

Yeah, well, so just for everybody's information, we actually have a second edition of the X team book, which came out in 2023 so it's all been updated, and if I think of what are the challenges that exist now that didn't exist, then one of them is even post COVID. Post COVID, we found that there's much, much more work being done across boundaries and in the broader ecosystem. So even moderna, moderna did an amazing job during the pandemic coming coming up with this vaccine, but they didn't do it alone. They were talking to experts at different universities. They were talking to people in the government, because they had a to work on, how do we get these drugs delivered, and how do we deregulate some things or change the way that that that processes we have to go through to move this ahead, they have to talk to people in manufacturing so they're working across boundaries in ways they never had before. So in some ways, I actually think that the X team model was ahead of its time. There's even more of a need for it now because of the way in which we're working. Again, we do a lot of work in pharma, Novartis and Takeda. We're partnering. These are these are rival organizations, and yet they're now cooperating in certain spheres and competing and others. So how do you work across those boundaries? That's a challenge that nobody, or many fewer organizations, had to deal with early on. So setting that up teams of teams, crossing those those organizational boundaries, is a new challenge, and X teams have to evolve to deal with those. The second is a much greater need for sense making that was always important. It's part of our individual leadership model as well. But if the world is is moving more slowly, then you can rely much more on what you already know and what you knew before, and you can't do that anymore. I mean, AI every day is a new application. Every day is new data. Oh, it's great. You improve performance and quality, but at the same time, people lose their creativity. People become too dependent on the technology. I mean, there are all kinds of things coming out every day, so sense making and understanding that new world becomes a much bigger part of what teams need to do now than it was a while ago. And I think in some sense, related to that, and related to your, your point just very well taken that people are on multiple teams, and they're all over the place, and team membership is changing that to deal with those conditions and the speed you need something that Anita Woolley at Carnegie Mellon, she calls burstiness. We call it pulsing, that you need to figure out ways to pulse work so that you can focus people for a given period of time, and then they can go off on, on and do their other things. So pulsing might be okay this week, everybody's going to interview three customers, and then we're going to come back and figure out what we're going to do, and then you can go off again. So we go out into the world, we come in and we process and learn from what we did. We go out and learn again. We come back in, so out and in, or it might be together apart. But the other big trend is that not everybody's in the office right. So we know that if nothing's going on the office and you come in, you're going to say, Oh, why did I come in? I'm not going to come in anymore. But if you have a lot of interesting things going on the office, then people have fear of missing out, and they want to come in more. So you pulse All right together, but when we're together, we're doing really important things. We're doing strategic planning, we're doing problem solving, we're doing team building. So all those people all over can come together, build the team, deal with important problems, and then they can go back into their virtual world or into whatever else. So this pattern of together, apart outside, inside, doing versus learning are all ways to kind of deal with that situation of, how do you build a team when it's always changing, when people are coming going well, when you get together, you do an intensive team building, and that holds the team together while it goes out and does the other work it has to do.

Jean Gomes:

Given everything that you've been learning about all of this, how does this influence how the C suite operates? How do they the team of teams to 10 of X teams?

Deborah Ancona:

Yeah, well, the senior team has to be a core part of making this all work. So as I said, they have to do their own sense making and their own work to say, how do we build the organization that we need to have and what strategic directions are going to be most important? And that's going to involve an out before, in kind of mindset, best, or one of the best examples of this is, is Satya Nadella. There was just an article we teach his, his case and so on. But a new article just came out about, really, how he practices what we call an out before, and he doesn't call it that, but he's doing sense making all the time he sets up. I don't know if it's twice a day or twice a week. He meets with other CEOs around the globe, whether it's customer CEOs, partner CEOs, whether it's CEOs who are working in industries that he wants to learn more about. That is built into his calendar. He spends time with venture capitalists to say, what are you funding? What are the coolest new companies? What are the coolest new technologies? He asks everybody, who do I need to meet, who's doing interesting, daring things that I need to learn about? That is built into his modus operandi. So senior leadership teams need to do that as well. The first team meeting he ever ran, he sent people on customer visits. He said, Go out there. We need to understand those 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 they feel freed up because of that learning culture, because of that out before, in culture that that that team has created, they feel free to go out and say, okay, customer, what do you do? What gets in the way of what you're doing, so they can start from ground zero on how we can deal with the situation on the ground right now. So that senior team is following the same out before in learning sense making, but they're also then crafting the culture and structures that enable the whole organization to move forward in learning mode.

Jean Gomes:

I'm fascinated by that, because I just wonder how many C suite teams are actually doing that, because it doesn't sound very much like the agenda of a lot of the I know.

Deborah Ancona:

Well, and that's why that first meeting was meant to shake up the team. That's that's a very visual, okay, get in those vans and go out and see your customers. The other thing that he did was he invited the CEOs of companies that Microsoft had acquired, and said, meet with these people, because we acquired them, because they can do something that we don't know how to do. Why don't you figure out how they did that? Right? It sets up a very different mindset inside the company. And yeah, I would agree that probably, probably not that many C suites are operating that way.

Scott Allender:

So in addition to the mindsets that you've mentioned that they need to adopt, what are the sort of, maybe legacy mindsets they need to lose.

Deborah Ancona:

Well there, yes, good, good question. There are a number of legacy mindset one is in some companies, you still can't talk. You can't do a skip level meeting. You can only speak to the next person up there. So that's bad. You have to have open communication. Of going around the organization. Another thing is that you don't pay any attention to input from below, and you have to figure out ways to do that. So a part of legacy systems is there people always have ideas. They've always had ideas, but what you need isn't to enable those ideas to move up the hierarchy, and that's much harder so creating something like a funneling system. So we say to the people we want you to innovate. You're you're talking to the customers, you're figuring out the processes. You know what's going on. We want your ideas, but not every idea is a good one, so you have to have some kind of funneling or choice process. Not many organizations have that. So you need to create a mechanism by which that happens. At Takeda R and D, they have the dragon contest. You come up with new ideas, and there's a team that evaluates those ideas along set criteria. They pick the best ones. The best team gets a dragon. It's a very cool dragon sculpture. But they also get time with the head of R and D, so that there's a mechanism to take their idea through the organization. Their legacy organizations don't necessarily have that ability to move ideas up. Southwest Airlines, at least they used to have a choice process where there was a committee that took new ideas and evaluated them and decided, okay, these don't go up front, but these will move ahead. So you need those kinds of of mechanisms to come through.

Scott Allender:

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 of inversion of the hierarchy. We're sort of moving from a power over to a power under, right? It's an enabling force.

Deborah Ancona:

Well, I prefer to think of it as a power from a power over to a power with so it's not that, it's not that one rules and the other. It's not that we're turning it around and everybody rules at the lower levels. It's that we're figuring out how to bridge the upper and lower levels so that Innovation and Learning can thrive. And it's not the article we wrote on nimble leadership was called walking the line between creativity and chaos. What you want to do is have this empowered, thoughtful, innovative set of people, but not chaos. That's why you need the structures and processes to to control what's going on, as opposed to just anyone can do anything. It's not anyone can do anything, right? That would be bad. So it's power with so that you can work together to create that's good.

Jean Gomes:

I am just changing the topic now for a little bit, I read a couple of years ago fascinating article you wrote about how our family ghosts influence our leadership. Can we unpack that a bit and understand what what that means and how are some ghost stories.

Deborah Ancona:

Okay, so just, let's, let's clarify. I know that the ghost stories are the best. I have to say. This is the work I'm doing right now, and it is just so interesting and fun. And you know, my students who are able to kind of tackle the darker sides of their ghosts. There are positive sides of ghosts too, but just have amazing change in their lives, and that's been incredibly rewarding. But so what is a ghost? Ghosts are attitudes and behaviors that you learn as a child in your family system that you carry into the executive suite or work, it doesn't only executives that we carry into work. So that's what we mean by ghosts. And ghosts can be really, really good. So we've started cataloging ghosts. So we have the people pleaser ghost that comes from a family system in which you want to be the good child, and that means pleasing the parent and doing what the parent wants and doing what the parent says, and not contradicting anything or fighting back so the people pleaser ghost can get you really far ahead in the organization. You know how to please your boss, you know how to please your peers. You know how to you know work in the organization. So that's the good, the good side. So most ghosts have both the positive and a negative side to them. The negative of the people pleaser ghosts is that one, if you're so busy, please. Others. Sometimes you don't have time to think about well, what do I want? What do I think is the best way? What is my strategy for moving forward? You don't develop those critical thinking skills or strategic skills because you're so involved in helping other people, or because it's respect for the elders that's part of that ghost. And people all have different ghost stories, but that particular ghost is, you don't question authority, you follow authority. And so those folks have are, they're great. They work really well. They're good with their teams, but sometimes they're not so good at speaking up to authority, of saying, I disagree, saying no, that's that's not what we should be doing here. So speaking up in those executive meetings becomes hard for the people pleaser. Another common ghost that we have is the the can do performer ghost. The can do. Performer ghost is wonderful. Okay, you set the bar. I'm gonna make it I'll make it happen. I'm gonna I'm gonna go. And that often comes from family systems, where everything was about get educated and succeed, and you're representing the family, and we want to represent our community and and so your job is to learn. Your job is to be good at education. Your job is to succeed. And so you become a can do kind of ghost. And again, that is amazing. You. You know, a lot of my my students are executives, and they're successful executives, or they wouldn't be in my classes, and they have risen up the hierarchy, really good. But then there can be a dark side to that kind of ghost too. One is perfectionistic. I'm never enough. I've always got to do more. I'm always trying to please more. Sometimes it's about getting love. I think that the road to getting appreciated and love my family is by performing. So I'm always trying to get more. Never can stop perfectionist tendencies. It's never enough. And some of those folks burn out. You You can't keep that post that pace going, you can always raise the bar. So there's burnout, there is an inability to delegate, because maybe they won't. Others won't do it as well as I can. So I'm going to take over this, and I'm going to take over that, and then you spending too much time at work, your family suffers because you're in this, this escalating faster moving cycle of more, more, more more.

Jean Gomes:

What's the ghost that does the most damage?

Deborah Ancona:

That's an interesting question. I think, I think the biggest So, a couple come to mind. One is the for people who have learned that they're worthless. For a child, let's say who a girl born in China when there was the one child policy whose father walked into the room, learned it was a girl, was so upset, walked out and basically paid no attention, that person is just constantly searching for some way to prove themselves. There's a lack of a kind of an inner sense of self. And I think that those ghosts also those who have been abused or have had really and I don't use the word trauma readily, I think it's an overused term. Everybody who I failed a test. I'm traumatized. No, you're not traumatized by failing the test. You said you suffered a setback, but, but there are people, I don't mean to say that. There are people who have been traumatized in fairly dramatic ways, and those can leave a lot that sometimes is very, very hard to to to over, overcome in some way. The other ghosts that can be there is one where you're you've learned to be toxic. You've learned that the way to succeed in life is to take advantage of others is to you. Know, it's all about me and what I need, and the heck with everybody else. And so I have the great ideas, and let the rest of the organization or my team just figure out how to work with me, because I know, and just come with me. I'm brilliant. And. You guys have to just deal with my temper tantrums and deal with whatever it is I have to spew out at you, and that can also be a dangerous ghost, if not to that person, certainly to the to the environment.

Scott Allender:

This, this resonates so deeply with me. This, it's very close to some of the modalities I use and some of my coaching work. And I love your ghost framing. And in the I want to pull out what you're saying, though, about people being very successful, almost motivated by these very ghosts in some ways. How do you help people see the risk and the downside before maybe they have a catastrophe or some kind of massive setback, because they have this unwieldy ghost that they're unwilling to even notice or see, that it's even there.

Deborah Ancona:

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 of psychology for a very long time, so the fact that so many people say, Oh, I never thought about this, is it just shows we're all in our bubbles, and we don't see outside our bubbles, that people who just never took never look there, which is fine, or that look there in their personal lives, but then not in the work life, right? So therapy is fine for your marriage, but you wouldn't think about how that translates into into a work environment. So I think one of the first things is to see your ghosts, and when you see them, that gives you a lot of power. Talk about power. Power over if you've just got these beliefs and behaviors and attitudes that are running around in your brain, then it has power over you. It is controlling you, right? Those are deep set, right? So if it came from your childhood, you guys have looked at neuroscience, some of those neural pathways are buried very deeply. They're not in your in your thinking part of your brain. They're way down and automatic, and so you can't deal with them unless you see them. So bringing out, what are some of those attitudes that are in my brain, you have power over them when they're out there and you can see them, they're now what Keegan and Leahy call their object, not subject. Subject. It's part of you object. It's out there, and then you can begin to work on those things. So, in fact, I just had my class yesterday. One of the frequent things with ghosts in the class is this inability to be assertive, so inability to be assertive. So what are the what are the negative thoughts that you have in your mind that are getting in the way of you being assertive? You want to be assertive. You know you have to be assertive for your career, but in your brain, often unbeknownst to you, if I am assertive, that will mean I'm selfish, or I'm getting above my britches, or I'm not respectful of authority, I'm going outside of my role. And once you see that, you can say, oh, wait a second, let's test that out. Is it that I'm not respectful? Is you know, you can, you can test and you can begin to say, Okay, how do I move away from automatically acting, not assertively, because of these things. So first you have to surface it, then you have to look at it, then you have to maybe reframe it. So maybe we had this really good conversation yesterday. Maybe assertive just triggers you in a negative direction. I want to be assertive, but assertive means all of these things. I'm selfish. I'm going above myself. Maybe it's more about, oh, I want to represent my team and our ideas to senior leadership that's much more acceptable in in a frame than is. I want to be assertive. So one thing is just to do that. The second thing is to go and find people, women, or if it's a woman or people that you respect, who speak up and who don't seem selfish, you don't say, Oh, those people are terrible. They're doing what you want to do without the baggage associated with it. So let's learn what they do. You have to become like a detective and say, Well, how do they respond? What do they say? What is their demeanor, and look at them and then begin to say, Okay, why don't I try that out? So one woman in one of my other classes a few years ago, she couldn't speak up in the senior team. She never, 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 thinking this. She reasserted from being assertive to I need to represent my team here. That's what I'm paid to do. That's what we've been working really hard on this. That's a more acceptable pathway into this realm, and I've been studying all these other things. So she went in and I'm going to be an executive vice president, said something, and she said, we can't do that. That's terrible. That's what she's thinking. And she normally would say nothing, which she okay, I'm channeling Elizabeth. Elizabeth would remain calm, not interrupt, not get flustered. She just said, I disagree with that, and here's why, a very fact based this is what my reasoning is, and I think we can't do that. And that was the first time that she had done that, and she said everybody in the room looked at me had never said anything before, much less disagreed with this executive vice president. So it was a big move. So she was very nervous afterwards. Did I do the right thing? And what are these people thinking? But in fact, her boss said that was really well done and and I think we should pay attention to what you said. So that's step one, and once you get step one going, then you you build and build and build and build and then you take on something else.

Jean Gomes:

I love this whole area, because I think our, you know, kind of the the archetypes that we form as you know, young response coping strategies to to family dynamics, does play out to a massive extent in our in our lives. I'm wondering if you're noticing, because you're at the coalface of education, whether you're noticing any difference in the generational kind of progress, you know, how is that playing out? Because that's a fascinating, you know, thought on the minds of many senior leaders is, how do I cope with with, you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. I have no idea how to cope with this conversation.

Deborah Ancona:

So I want to first respond to the first thing that you said, which is, we replay our family dynamics and a couple of things there. One is, and this goes back, Scott, to what you were asking is, how do you prevent this? Is to begin to and we have a framework in that HBR article. How do you frame your family system. Because we're always attracted to the family system we come from, even if it's toxic, even if it's led to all kinds of bad things, we are drawn to that because that's what we know that's familiar. In fact, I was meeting with a student yesterday who said, I said, Well, you know, you're in an organization. It's just like you're you're a home organization. Everybody is attacking everybody else and and all these things are going on. She's like, Oh, I never thought of that so, so understanding that we are replaying over and over and over again these family system dynamics. So it's, it's not just what are your ghosts, but what are the dynamics that you came out of? And how can you be watchful of them. Sometimes they're watchful, and we end up in the same place anyway, because we didn't catch certain things. But that's that. The other thing is, I don't want to think of us. There's a famous article, prisoners of childhood. We are not prisoners of childhood. So what that means is we do not have to replay those dynamics all the time. What you had to do as a child, you had limited resources. You were young, you couldn't think clearly. You do not have to respond the same way anymore as you did as a child. You're an adult, you have free you know it'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 because you did what you did, you had to survive well, but now you have survived, and you're an adult with a lot of resources. So let's figure out a different way to deal with that same situation. So I just wanted to to denote that now we can go back to the question of this new younger generation. Okay, so, yes, it's always the younger generations complaining about the old focus at the top. And the top are saying, Who are these people? And so I think that there are a couple of things I don't certainly have the silver bullet to solve all of it. There are many people who work in this domain, who who are more knowledgeable than I am, but a few things, one is the younger people are looking for more meaning. They watch their parents, you know, these workaholics, go, go, go all day long and and they have some judgments about that. They. Want to have a different kind of lifestyle, so they want meaning, and so leaders have to think about creating more vision. Why are you here? How can I give you a sense of why it's important? Why do we have to work day and night because patients are dying? Why do we have to do this? Because we're we're helping. It's not just that you're doing the little things you're doing, something big in what you're doing, and we have to connect people to that larger sense of mission and vision if we're going to keep them motivated. The second thing is the work that we give them to do, don't stick them in a room and have them working on their computers eight hours a day. They are not going to want to be there, and they are going to leave. So give them more active roles. I mean, x teams actually enable you to do that, go and send everybody out. You guys know more about technology that we do. Let's say we want, we're looking to how to change our marketing group to add more AI into the marketing function. All right, you younger folks, everybody, go out. We want to know what are the best sources on AI and marketing, what companies have done this before? What can you learn from what they did? What mistakes do they made? What's working the best? Who are the best vendors of AI for marketing right now? I mean, give them a set of questions and set them loose, they will be much more they will be much happier and much more engaged and much more connected to what the organization is actually trying to do. If, if you go and do that, give them, as I said, there are these pulsing activities. So sometimes you want everybody together. And organizations do this, not just teams, but organizations do this. Smuckers jam. You can be anywhere in the world doing whatever. Certain weeks of the year you are at headquarters, because we're networking, learning what other teams do. We're hearing a guest speaker who has some interesting things to say. And then you talk about, how do we bring that into our daily practice? Have a very full set of activities, and bring the younger people in to those things, get them motivated, and part of the actual goings on, it shouldn't necessarily be only for senior leaders. You want engagement in in some very deep ways, they are learning in a very different world than those who are older ever grew up in. And so when we think about teaching them, when we think about engaging them, we have to think about other media and other modes of of teaching and learning on the job and so on and so forth. So that's why, for example, x teams. I can talk about x teams all the time. I can, I can lecture. I can, I can do things, but if we want to again connect, then there needs to be video content. We've created a simulation so you actually do it and then talk about what you learned. We have all kinds of we redid, as I said, the X team book, The chapter six is a checklist so that you know how to go and you don't have to read anything. You don't have to just go directly to chapter six and say, okay, am I doing this? Am I doing this? How do I do this? So we need to create that learning environment, not not just in in our training courses, but all the learning that we need to do in a much more exciting, innovative capture kind of way, because folks are on social media, this is what they're doing all the time. And so if we want to capture them, we need to be where they are. And oh, by the way, it's not just for them. I think everybody is more pulled in when you have more compelling interactive at the moment, kind of learning going on.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network friends and family. Thank you so much for listening. Now, let's get back to the conversation

Jean Gomes:

as you you look at the kind of world as it currently is, and this isn't the political statement or anything like that, but there is obviously a lot of things going on right now. If you were kind of thinking about the leadership that we need in the world, and you have a, you know, you have a place where you can influence future leaders. What would you say is really important right now that we need to be investing in for the future, that perhaps we're not seeing enough of?

Deborah Ancona:

Yeah, that's a good, good question. I think what we need to see more of. First of all is the sense of belonging. Thing. Part of why we are where we are is because people don't feel part of anything, and so they're more easily swayed and pulled in other kinds of directions. So I think, you know, people, when they're building teams or building units, they the workplace has to be a place that takes up some of the slack in the system, not all of it. I think there are other places as well, but we need to create a place of belonging. So people feel that belonging two. I think we need to, as I said before, create more of a sense of vision, more of a sense of mission. Why is important what we do. I think that's important. I think innovation. What we're seeing, in some sense, is a decline in people believing that the way we work is good. There's a lot of throwing out of what exists. And so I think we perhaps need to think clearly about, well, how do we move forward in new and innovative ways that are compelling? And I think we need to underline values. This is not there are certain values that people, I actually think, want to believe in, and yet there's no way of saying, how do we invent to those, to those values and to those ideals in a way that works for more people? And I think there's a huge amount of inventing that needs to take place right now in a group of people who become committed and belong with one another and can begin to to reshape how we're approaching this world.

Jean Gomes:

And I really love that. I think there's a huge amount of importance in the things that you're saying there. And I wonder, from your perspective, as you're listening to this, if you're in a startup or a scale up, or you're just about to leave college, or, you know, where's the hope that we have that we can create a better world? What do you think are the things that we should be optimistic about?

Deborah Ancona:

Well, I think that right now, people are exhausted, people are depressed, people are going off into their little cocoons, and maybe we need a little of that. People need to just kind of process what's gone on. But then I think 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 we need to create? Go from we're stuck here into a sense of future visioning. What's the next chapter? If what we have hasn't worked, then let's get organized into creating and inventing the next chapter of this crazy life that we're all living and in this crazy world that we're living in, it's not okay to say it hasn't gone in a direction that we like. And so we're we're just opting out, which I think a lot of people are doing right now. And if we want them not to opt out, as I said, maybe we need some period of mourning, of of getting ourselves together. But then some folks out there have to lead, lead the charge in saying, what is the next chapter? What can the next chapter be if we don't like what it was before? Okay? What do we do? And some of that might be going forward is the resistance movement. If we don't like what's going on, part of it may be okay, Join the Resistance. How do we mean? How do we make it so that where we're going does not remain and the other side might be okay? It's kind of like Mike sushman and Charles O'Reilly's. We have to be ambidextrous. We have to both execute on what's today and innovate to what the next chapter is we need to be doing both of those things so that we have something to go toward. Vision is aspirational. It's inspirational. It means that you're pulling people into some new direction, not going against what is and so unless we shift into that aspirational, inspirational, inventing new thing kind of mode. I think it's a problem.

Scott Allender:

So speaking of new chapters, you're working on a new book. Can you give us the elevator pitch and when is it due out? When can we get our hands on it?

Deborah Ancona:

Well, so I'm working on the proposal for a new book, so you're not going to get your hands on it. Be a minute anytime. Time soon, although I'm working on it very diligently, and I'm on sabbatical in January, so the intensive Book, book writing, so it's it's working more on the ghosts work. So I have 10 years worth of data of students writing about their ghosts. So I have my research assistants hard at work to say, what are the clusters that we see in these executives? What are the most common kinds of ghosts, where they come from? What are the ways in which you can move forward? So it's it starts off with kind of stuck in the bog. Where are we stuck? Where are stuck patterns? And looking at, you know, one woman who is like, Okay, I was in this big bureaucracy, and people didn't like me, but I managed to get things done anyway, working from on high, but I it was toxic, and I didn't like it, and so she moved into a startup, and the startup, she ended up in the same thing where she had no support from her peers. Everything she got was from from working as she was successful, but, but it was hard, and it was it was isolationist, so stuck in the bog is looking again at why those stuck patterns exist. We repeat the family dynamics, and you have to first see that, and then we offer a way to begin to how do you see that? And what are the models? And what are these prototypical ghosts? They seem to be working students. They say, Yeah, I'm the I'm the go getter on the people pleaser rebel. And and then that. How do we get out of it? How do we do those provisional selves? How do we begin to see what our greatest fears are? How do we do that work that we were just talking about at the individual level? How do we create a future that's different? How do we create the next chapter, and what can that look like? And so that's, that's what the book will be.

Scott Allender:

Well, I want to read that. So best wishes on the whole process.

Jean Gomes:

So it's coming out on October 31 next year?

Deborah Ancona:

That's right, the Halloween edition.

Scott Allender:

Well, Deborah, thank you for for joining us, for sharing your your insights. I found this to be a really rich conversation, and I know our listeners will as well. So thank you so much for your time.

Deborah Ancona:

Well, thank you so much. You guys had great questions, and you're really fun and supportive and enthusiastic and and also probing. So so thank you for the interesting questions and for the interaction

Scott Allender:

Our pleasure, our pleasure, and until next time, folks remember, the world is evolving. Are you?

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Jean Gomes

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Scott Allender

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