3 X-Team Principle 1 Out before In: Engage in External Activity
BellCo, a telecommunications company that sells equipment to businesses, was undergoing a major reorganization. From now on, rather than offering products to a general market, the firm would sell sophisticated systems that bundled several products and had specialized features for specific customer needs. The shift was intended to help sell higher-margin products through industry specialization, thus improving profitability and hopefully increasing market share. As part of this change, the sales force was being reconfigured into teams to serve particular industry segments, like banking, software, and pharmaceuticals. One such team was called Big Bank (not its real name).
Big Bank consisted of five members: two salespeople (Jean-Yves and Vicki, who was the formal team leader), two implementers (Randy and Russell), and one systems designer (Roberto). While they were sitting around a table at a bar after the reorg was announced, Vicki put a stop to the conversation about “waiting for the new guidelines.” She suggested that waiting was a complete waste of time and said that the directives from leadership were not going to clarify things anyway.
Vicki was right, of course. While top management had a great new strategy, the implementation effort would have to fall to the teams themselves. Corporate directives could cover only so much ground; each team would have to invent its own way of meeting the challenges posed by the new approach. Leadership shifted from the executive suite to the teams that would breathe life into top management’s ideas.
To take on this leadership role, the team members would need to tackle a whole new set of questions. How would they go about getting all the information they needed? And once they uncovered that knowledge, how would members get senior management on board with the pitch they wanted to make to customers? After senior management approved their plans, they would face additional challenges like matching their product with customers’ specific needs, getting their bids accepted, and coming up with an installation strategy and process. These were just the basic tasks that Big Bank faced. Now Vicki and her team needed to find a way to accomplish them.
Up to this point we’ve looked at examples of groups—like the Northwest consulting team and the Cascade software development team—facing the same kinds of dilemmas as Big Bank, and we’ve watched them begin to resolve those dilemmas. But what specific actions did they use to accomplish what they did? How would a team like Big Bank begin to address the issues it faced while avoiding the vicious downward spiral we described in chapter 1?
A good place to start is by engaging in rigorous, continuous external activity in addition to managing internal team dynamics. High-performing teams work across their boundaries, reaching out to find the information they need, understanding the context in which they work, navigating the politics and power struggles that surround any team initiative, getting support for their ideas, and coordinating with the myriad other groups that are key to a team’s success. This is the first of our three x-team principles: x-teams engage in high levels of external activity.
But what does effective external activity consist of, exactly? As summarized in the conclusion of chapter 2, we’ve found that it falls into three distinct subactivities: sensemaking, ambassadorship, and task coordination.
Sensemaking, a term coined by Karl Weick at the University of Michigan, involves understanding others’ expectations, updating information about key stakeholders, and learning where critical information and expertise reside, both inside and outside the organization. Teams need to take stock of how the world has changed and what new threats and opportunities have emerged. They need a good model of what the outside world is like so that they can shift and adapt accordingly.
Ambassadorship brings in a political dimension, as team members need to lobby for resources, get early buy-in for their ideas, and keep working for support from top managers.
Finally, task coordination is crucial, as teams need to manage the interdependencies with other parts of the firm and groups outside it, rather than remaining isolated within their own confines.
Next, we’ll look more closely at what the first of these activities, sensemaking, does to help teams break out of their often myopic internal focus.
Sensemaking
Let’s return to our opening example of the Big Bank team. When Vicki, the official team leader, halted the conversation about waiting for more direction from the top, she had an alternative plan in mind. Wouldn’t it be quicker and more informative if the team members spread out and asked other groups in the company how they expected to work with Big Bank in the new design?
And so sensemaking began with small, careful steps. Members split into pairs and went to talk to people in technical support, installation, and sales. They asked lots of questions: When we have a potential sale and we need help, whom should we contact? What are you going to need to know? How can we best prepare to work with you on these kinds of accounts? Sometimes the people they spoke to had the answers, sometimes team members got sent to someone else, and sometimes no one knew and they started to make up some procedures that they thought might work. And then the team members met and pooled the information they had gathered. With a clear task of sensemaking and data flowing in about what their new world looked like, the Big Bank members began to feel less anxious and more confident. They started to create a mental map of how things might work and set out to learn more.
Think of sensemaking as scouting in the wilderness to carefully explore and gather information about the surrounding terrain to see whether it is safe to move ahead. Sensemaking is aimed at understanding what’s out there so that team members know whether they can proceed or whether they need to make adjustments to what they are currently doing. It allows the team to predict the coming rough spots and to get a sense of how dangerous the terrain really is.
As Big Bank came to understand, sensemaking includes learning about the expectations of other key constituencies and gathering relevant information throughout the company and the industry. It involves extensive searching to understand who has knowledge and expertise and what the current trends in the marketplace are. It means investigating customers, new technologies, and the competition. It may even mean discovering that the firms you thought were the competition are not your biggest threat. In short, sensemaking means being open to new trends and updating your view of the world, enabling team members to make sense of the environment around them and to come up with a common map of that external terrain.1
Teams we have met and worked with use many different modes of sensemaking, from the ambitious and expensive (e.g., hiring consultants) to the quick and cheap (e.g., spending an hour browsing the internet or having a cup of coffee with an old college professor). While a lot of sensemaking is done through observation and conversation, team members also have used surveys, interviews, archival data, and consultant and analyst reports to learn more about what different groups are thinking and doing. The Cascade team did this effectively in its product development work. Members didn’t start with an idea for a product, but instead decided to learn about developer work as much as possible so that they could assess how best to respond to developer concerns from the bottom up. Consider Visual Studio Code, one of Cascade’s most successful innovations. It is an open product, so the team can take part in continuous customer interaction to improve it. Engineers are always in contact with customers about how Visual Studio Code can be adapted to better meet their needs, and since the customers are software engineers themselves, this open communication allows for thoughtful and detailed engagement.
Switching to external sensemaking mode may require a nudge and active engagement from the top of the organization. When Elcin Barker Ergun took on the role of CEO at the Italian pharmaceutical firm Menarini, she concluded that the R&D organization needed to scout externally for transformational ideas as part of an innovation-driven strategy. However, she also knew that this constituted a shift in mindset. To encourage the firm’s many talented R&D teams to go on sensemaking missions outside, she not only communicated that they were empowered to do so but also delayered the organization to allow direct communication and agile iterations between herself, the head of R&D, and the teams at the front lines. She further role-modeled the new modus operandi by joining the firm’s scientists at various events where they explored transformational opportunities. One result of these efforts has been a successful foray into breast cancer treatments, an area where Menarini had not previously been active.
Sometimes sensemaking continues throughout a team’s lifetime, because each phase of work demands sensemaking in new directions and changes in the environment may render the team’s work obsolete. But for other teams, extensive early sensemaking to get the lay of the land is all that’s needed. For these teams, too much sensemaking can lead to analysis paralysis and impede the movement from exploring an idea to actually implementing it.
In short, sensemaking is a multifaceted activity that involves three tasks: investigating the organizational terrain, investigating customers and competitors to uncover current trends, and engaging in vicarious learning. Let’s dig into each of these.
Investigating the Organizational Terrain
Here, the key goal of sensemaking is to understand what a team’s task actually is, who the key players are, and what everyone expects the final product to be. Sensemaking also involves uncovering the often tacit, unwritten cultural expectations that others have for the team. While team members may think they know the answers to these questions, their answers may be outdated, biased, or simply wrong. Starting with a fresh outlook, then, and spending the time to figure out how other groups view their work is critical.
For Big Bank, that meant doing some initial sensemaking and then getting in touch with corporate to ask questions such as how the new compensation system would work, how much team members would have to sell in order to get bonuses, and what teams were expected to do in what period of time.
During this process, Big Bank members came to understand that the corporate design group had created a new organizational design that would not just improve the company’s competitive position but also require cultural changes. Whereas customers who needed products used to come to the team, now the team would have to be much more active in searching out customers and tailoring solutions to their needs. This had never been done before at BellCo, and it was clear that the guidelines from corporate did not explain how team members would gain the expertise and cooperation they needed from others or how they would learn to sell. While other teams waited for instructions and continued to work in the old way, the Big Bank team decided to meet this new challenge head-on.
Investigating Customers and Competitors to Uncover Current Trends
Some sensemaking takes place within the organization, but a large part revolves around understanding what goes on outside the organization. This includes learning about customers, suppliers, competitors, technical and scientific communities, consultants, industry experts, and so on. The key is to figure out which groups team members need to understand and then to go out and learn what those people are thinking, feeling, considering, expecting, admiring, fearing, and wanting.
For Big Bank team members, the focus of external sensemaking became the customer and the competition. They were the new kids on the block, and they felt the pressure to move quickly up the learning curve. So, the team leader and her fellow salesperson started reading about the banking industry, looking for trends and needs. Since they were the ones who would have to do most of the selling, they had to know how to talk to their customers in new ways and with more knowledge than they currently had. They visited some of their existing clients, the ones with whom they had great relationships, and told them about the changes at BellCo. They asked whether there was a need for their specialized communications systems and what clients might want in terms of features and price ranges. They asked, “If we gave you something like this, would you be interested?” and “If not, why not?”
While this was going on, other team members were busy trying to learn about what kinds of systems their competitors were installing. They went to a bank that had switched to another vendor to get a more complex system and asked why the customer had made the change. They studied the system and compared it to what they could produce. Then they got on the web and looked at the offerings from all their competitors. This led to the creation of a comparison chart that the team would later use to show what the company could do that the competition could not.
While the Big Bank team’s sensemaking activity focused on the customer and the competition, members of Team Fox at the pharmaceutical firm Pharmaco, which we met in chapter 2, had to search for scientific knowledge outside its borders. Their challenge was to find the type of molecule needed for a new drug that was not available inside the organization itself. Hence, the first order of business for team members was to scan the globe for leads. This involved attending conferences, mining databases, and tracking down old friends in the industry as well as in academia for advice. In the end, the molecule that became the raison d’être of the project was found via a tip from a subsidiary an ocean away.
Engaging in Vicarious Learning
Sensemaking also involves what we call vicarious learning, in which team members learn how to do a task by observing others outside the team, both inside and beyond their organization, or talking to them about their experiences.2 In this case, sensemaking is not about understanding the expectations of others within the firm or incorporating information from customers, competitors, or suppliers. Rather, team members are learning ways to do their task by copying or modifying what other teams have done.
In doing so, they might ask such questions as: What mistakes did you make (so that we don’t have to repeat them)? Which team was most successful before, and what did its members do? Who gave you the best information, and whom do we need to talk to about this? How did you do this part of the task, or can we use your data?
Within their organizations, teams can build effectively on the work of earlier projects, creating a stream of learning. For example, team members can save time by borrowing machinery, copying documents and contracts, and adapting them to the needs of their task. Over time, we’ve seen this kind of vicarious learning help teams become more and more successful.
In addition to vicarious learning within their own organization, teams can learn from other organizations and even other industries. For example, when a team from BP wanted to learn more about standardization, members didn’t look at oil and gas companies but at car companies that had already developed the idea of common platforms across different car models. When a team in the financial services industry wanted to learn about improving customer satisfaction, members did not look at other companies in the industry but at Neiman Marcus, a leading department store known for treating customers well. When the product design firm IDEO wanted to redesign hospital operating rooms, it spent a day observing how a NASCAR pit crew worked together when faced with emergencies, time constraints, numerous experts, and safety concerns. This kind of vicarious learning can help teams take quantum leaps in innovation, since ideas that are totally new to the industry can be more quickly adopted into practice.
By learning vicariously, then, team members can avoid making the same mistakes as others, speed up the tasks they have to do, and start working at a higher level of understanding and competence than teams that don’t engage in this type of sensemaking activity.
When Sensemaking Goes Overboard
While this section has been full of examples of doing sensemaking effectively, teams can often get stuck in sensemaking mode or do a poor job of it.3 In the former case, team members never feel as if they have enough information, and they just keep collecting more and more. But at some point, deadlines kick in, and the team needs to segue from exploring the terrain to moving ahead. For some teams this transition is impossible to make, and they flounder.4 These groups get caught in a continuous search, start to let deadlines slip, and are never able to move on. Teams can also flounder because even if they engage in external outreach with new eyes, they don’t take the time to digest what they learn so that they can make use of the information. In the case of poor sensemaking, teams also can learn the wrong things, or innovation can be stifled as they simply copy old ideas without creating new ones. These groups fall into the one-mold-fits-all-situations trap, and then have a harder time in another facet of external activity: ambassadorship.
Ambassadorship
Let’s return to our example of the Big Bank team. After members combined all the information they collected from their sensemaking activities, they needed to turn that knowledge into a pitch for the customers whom they saw as having the highest potential for buying the systems they planned to build and deliver. As team members prepared to bid on a big project, they asked the vice president of commercial clients to go along with them to show that the organization’s upper levels were committed to the product. In preparing him for this meeting, they were able to showcase all the work they had done and demonstrate an ability to work within the new organizational design. The vice president, for his part, was relieved to find that there were teams in his organization that were making the changes that corporate required. He was able to report this progress to his superiors, while simultaneously using the Big Bank team as an example of success.
As this example begins to illustrate, ambassadorship is aimed at managing up the organizational hierarchy. It includes marketing the project and the team to top management, lobbying for resources, maintaining the team’s reputation, and keeping track of allies and adversaries. When visiting the MIT Sloan School of Management, James McNerney, the former CEO of 3M and Boeing, told us the importance of integrating vertically—of linking the top level of the firm to the operational level (not to be confused with strategic vertical integration used in many firms). In this way, an organization can achieve alignment between those who set the strategy and those who must implement it. Ambassadorship supports this alignment by creating dialogue up and down the hierarchy.
Integration up and down the organization thus has important applications throughout the firm: it can allow for linking to strategic initiatives and getting early buy-in; it can be used to lobby for the team and members’ ideas; and it can aid in cultivating allies and containing adversaries. We’ll look at these three in more detail next.
Linking to Strategic Initiatives and Getting Early Buy-in
One of the major problems in organizations today is finding a way to link top management and its strategic initiatives to lower-level people who interact with customers, design and build products, and carry out the firm’s core work. Ambassadorship is one way that a team can be proactive in connecting its work to new strategic directions. By linking to these new directions, the team often finds it easier to get top management’s attention and support.
When teams don’t get top management’s attention and support, it can be disastrous. That was the case with a software development team we know of, which ended up not getting managerial support and buy-in.5 This software team heard that one of its Japanese customers was interested in a new version of its product, Entry, that would work on a recently developed platform. The six engineers in the team who were managing the project (known in the company as the “gods”) decided that such a step would be important to the team, so they stopped all work on the current version of the product in order to adapt Entry to the new platform. Team members worked long hours and weekends, but after weeks of effort, the proposal was rejected by top leaders. Members viewed the rejection as a declaration of war with management. They felt that the leaders just didn’t appreciate or understand their ideas. Shortly after, the “gods” left the company.
It is important to note that the Entry team members did bring their proposal to top management—but only after it was finished. Turns out that the timing of ambassadorial activity is extremely important. Getting buy-in and support early in the process is essential. Early involvement helps mesh new product ideas with top management’s directives, allowing input to truly be incorporated into the team’s work—before that work is a fait accompli. Perhaps the most critical element of early involvement is that once the top managers have had a say in the idea, they are more committed to ensuring its success.
The Entry team members did not think about getting buy-in and support, because they could not imagine that the top management team wouldn’t see this opportunity the same way that they saw it. It was so clear to them that this was the way to go that they slipped back into the old internal model. They worked to motivate all the team members and allocate work, and they met deadlines. Furthermore, they assumed that since they were engineers, it wasn’t their job to get buy-in; they thought it was their job to come up with good ideas, and top management’s job to recognize quality. Given these assumptions, the lack of funding came as an extra-hard blow and left a sense of betrayal.
Lobbying for the Team and Members’ Ideas
Beyond failing to get buy-in early, the Entry team also missed out on a key opportunity of ambassadorship: lobbying for the team and its members’ ideas. Often team members have unique views of customers, markets, products, processes, and changes in technologies that come from their sensemaking activities. They tend to be the ones who have direct access to shifting trends and to the people who do the firm’s primary work. Thus, sometimes the task of ambassadorial activity is to lobby for the team’s ideas, to fight for what members think is right, even if top management does not agree. The team members’ job then becomes one of converting top managers to their point of view; their task is to give voice to their passion and to paint a picture of their vision for the future. As noted above, however, these conversations need to start early, when top managers are able to provide input and suggestions on what the final proposal should look like.
For example, the project leader of a computer design team engaged top management from the very beginning of a new project. As the work was being discussed by the operating committee (a group of top managers that led product development projects for the firm), the team leader met often with committee members, who wanted the new computer to be a slight change from the existing model. But the leader worked to convince committee members that they should go with a revolutionary design rather than a simple upgrade. Using data that other team members had pulled together in a report on estimated schedules and budgets, he insisted that they had the talent and motivation to make a great product and make it quickly. Furthermore, he thought that the competition was moving faster than any of them expected—they had to act now. In the end, the project got the green light. The leader asked the president of the company and the vice president of R&D to come to the first meeting to explain the importance of the product to the company and to communicate their support for the team. The leader remained in close contact with the president throughout the project—which was ultimately a success.6
In some cases, however, top management simply does not want to listen to new ideas or thinks that such ideas are not a priority. Here team members can choose to continue their lobbying efforts or move on to something else. There is a fine line between going after what one truly believes in and being labeled a visionary—and continuing to argue and being labeled as someone who doesn’t understand the word “no.” Since the latter is often viewed as career-limiting behavior, it can undermine attempts to change the system in a new direction. This is where being in an x-team takes courage and determination, whether the decision is to fight because members believe in the idea or not to fight because it is not in the best interests of the organization or the team.
Basically, the goal of lobbying is to create this vertical integration between the top of the organization and the operational level. Teams and senior leaders need to find a match that satisfies both levels. This is where companies can best leverage the work of the teams, and teams can have their ideas heard and implemented.
Cultivating Allies and Containing Adversaries
Organizations are political entities. They are arenas in which power gets played out between those who have it and those who want it. People hoard resources and hold grudges; they guard their turf and strike at those who try to take it away. Even in such a context, however, ambassadorship helps you find people with authority and influence who can protect the team from political machinations and manage the conflicts that inevitably occur as people try new things that upset the power balance.
For example, the Big Bank team members were meeting one evening in a conference room to brainstorm how they might approach a customer who was leaning toward a competitor. Members considered lowering their price or discounting future products that could be added to the systems. But the particular package that they wanted to offer fell outside the normal guidelines, and they were told that the pricing was unacceptable. This was when the team asked the vice president to step in and make an exception. And he did.
A Cautionary Note on Ambassadorial Behavior
While there is no question that ambassadorial behavior is a key predictor of success for many kinds of teams, there is one important caveat: not all teams that engage in ambassadorial activity are successful.7 If a team’s product or idea is a dud, then all the ambassadorial behavior in the world can’t make it a winner. Said differently, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
For teams that excel at marketing but do not come through on implementation, top managers eventually begin to realize that the team made empty promises. Unfortunately, the outcomes for these teams are often quite negative. Top managers are left feeling manipulated and as if they were not given the real story. They are often embarrassed about having backed a team that they thought was creating a real contribution to the firm, putting their reputations on the line. These managers then react in anger and may fire, demote, or transfer key members of these teams.
The core lesson here is that ambassadorship alone, with nothing to support it, is like a smoke-and-mirrors show that will eventually be exposed for the fraud that it is. Ambassadorship works well only when teams are managed soundly and tasks are accomplished well—and when ambassadorship accompanies sensemaking and task coordination.
Task Coordination
For the Big Bank team, selling communications systems to businesses would involve a fairly complicated set of steps. The team would have to meet with customers to understand their needs, create a solution that matched those needs with the firm’s technology, bid for the contract when there were other competing vendors, configure a solution if the bid was accepted, and then install the system at the customer’s premises.
Succeeding at all of these stages meant team members needed to rely on the input and cooperation of lots of other individuals and groups inside and outside the firm. In other words, the Big Bank team had to engage in task coordination. For example, at the very start of the process, team members often needed the help of the legal department to create special clauses in the contract. While the Big Bank team wanted to make the sale, the legal group was often very cautious and wanted to spend more time dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. It took a lot of compromise and coordination between the two to make timely progress.
The Big Bank team also needed help from technical services to design the system that would be shown to the customer. While the team received some technical support from a colleague, a systems designer, customers often needed specialized support that required the expertise of the company’s technical support people, who were in high demand and preferred to work on interesting problems. Gaining their attention and input was not always easy.
Once a system was designed, it needed to be configured and installed. There was a whole unit, separate from the sales unit, that handled installations. These people had their own set of incentives and queued orders in a way that was most efficient for them. This did not always result in a delivery date that would land a major product at the customer site when the sales team wanted it to be there. There was a need to negotiate.
All of this is to say that members of the Big Bank team had to spend a great deal of their time managing the myriad interdependencies with other parts of the organization. They needed to negotiate with other groups, trade their services, and get feedback on how well their work met expectations. They had to cajole and push other groups to follow through on commitments so that the team could meet its deadlines. Like sensemaking, task coordination involves linking to people throughout the company; it involves prioritizing lateral and downward connections.
Let’s take a closer look at the three key activities of task coordination: identifying dependencies; getting feedback from other groups; and convincing, negotiating, and cajoling other groups inside and outside the firm to help the team get the task done.
Identifying Dependencies
The first step in task coordination is identifying the myriad groups that the team must depend on. Such dependencies occur when another group has something that the team needs to do its work, such as expertise. Or a dependency might arise when another group is going to take over the team’s project when it finishes, or when someone from that other group will join the team to facilitate an aspect of the work. The Big Bank team depended on installation, legal, and repair, to name a few.
After identifying a dependency, the next step is to determine the nature of the dependency and then figure out a way to coordinate. Coordination can take the form of setting shared deadlines, having discussions about how the two groups might work together, or establishing mechanisms to move work from one group to the other and back again. Whatever the mode, teams often need to spend time managing the workflow in and out of the team.
Getting Feedback
Coordination is facilitated when team members get feedback from other groups on what they are planning to do. To the extent that the team’s work will affect these other groups, or other groups will expect to be involved in the team’s effort, this work becomes even more important. Sometimes getting feedback can be a one-off activity. For example, when a brainstorming team at IDEO wants creative ideas, it brings in lots of employees who are not core team members but who have broad expertise. By drawing on different perspectives, these teams foster out-of-the-box thinking, thus improving the ultimate solution.
Other times, getting feedback is a continuous process. The product development team that was working on a revolutionary computer design, mentioned earlier, started its work in isolation. But before the design was written in stone, the team members knew they needed some input from colleagues if they hoped to coordinate with other groups. (Note, however, that this kind of coordination is different from the sensemaking that the team engaged in when it sought other groups’ input for the purpose of avoiding a flawed design.) The team checked that particular people in R&D could live with the team’s decisions and would be willing to commit to their part of the project work. With this input in mind, team members went back to their design work—but now they frequently consulted with other engineers who had provided them with ideas and critiques. This continuous feedback helped them improve their design and coordinate their work with others who were working on specific pieces of the design. The team went on to get feedback from manufacturing, the folks who would actually make the new computer. Team members wanted input on the ease of manufacturing the new components that they planned to put into the machine. If manufacturing thought that those components would impede getting the product out on time, then others might have to be used.
Convincing, Negotiating, and Cajoling
Perhaps the appropriate heading here would be “begging, borrowing, and beguiling.” So often, outside groups have other agendas, incentives, and priorities. They are not particularly concerned with the team’s needs, and even if they are, they’re not always clear on how to meet those needs. Sometimes the functional boundaries and divergent cultures within a firm act as barriers to cooperation. So the team must work to achieve cooperation.
The Big Bank team knew that one of its new banking customers was not happy with the product—and that the bank was looking at other companies for its next purchase. Since Big Bank didn’t want to lose this account, team members went on a major campaign. They got the technical folks to put a demo together and brought it to the bank. They pushed for a major discount even though it was not yet the end of the quarter. They even got one of their other customers to call the bank manager who made key purchasing decisions to tell him how pleased he was with his system and why. The team members constantly checked in with all the other groups to make sure that everyone showed up when they said they would and delivered on all the other commitments. On the day of the demo, they hired a minivan and drove the technical folks across town. They worked hard to pull everyone together. And they kept the customer—and rewarded all of the people who helped them with pizza.
As we’ve seen, team effectiveness is not just a matter of managing well around the conference table. Success also depends on reaching across borders to find information and expertise. Teams need to access information about key trends in the industry, markets, and technology; link to the firm’s strategic goals; survive the power dynamics and politics; get buy-in for their product; and manage their dependencies on other groups. Through these activities, x-teams practice distributed leadership—working with others in the company to shape new visions and make them a reality. All of this involves the teams becoming very adept at managing across their boundaries.
And yet, as we will show, effective external activity requires effective internal processes as well. A robust internal environment is needed to coordinate the team’s external forays, to strategize about how to deal with the new information that comes into the team, and to allocate work to the most appropriate members. Externally oriented teams not only need to get the basics of teamwork right but also need to establish a climate of safety and reflection, one that enables them to hold together the team members who must deal with the pulls of external viewpoints and internal conflict.
Thus, as we have already begun to show in this book, the key to high team performance is an integrated approach, combining an external and an internal focus. That requires sensemaking, ambassadorship, and task coordination, coupled with a robust internal environment—which is the focus of our next chapter.