It’s Halloween! Speaking about X teams and leadership ghosts with MIT’s Deborah Ancona

Our conventional wisdom about teams is that factors internal to the team mostly determine how well they will operate. My LinkedIn Live guest, Professor Deborah Ancona from MIT, begs to differ. No matter how great the clarity of roles, alignment on deadlines or otherwise suitable a team’s internal structure is, it isn’t until they bring in the external environment that teams truly begin to perform at a high level. Some notes from our conversation follow.

The original insight behind the book: We don’t understand what makes a team outperform

What prompted the original writing was a stream of research in which we learned that a lot of what we thought accounted for team performance wasn’t working. When I was working on my dissertation, we studied a number of sales teams. We thought that what would drive good performance was clear goals, clear roles, good problem solving in the team, all the things that we learn about as key to team success. And when we looked at those variables compared to team satisfaction, we got very high correlations. If you do all those things, people would be satisfied.

But then we looked at the actual revenue that the sales teams brought in and lo and behold, zero there was…