Editor's note: Joe Rydholm can be reached at joe@quirks.com.

I’ve been thinking a lot about teams lately. Not sports teams – after all, our local Minnesota professional squads have been paragons of futility for several years when it comes to advancing out of early playoff rounds (except for our WNBA team, which has four recent-ish championships to its credit; thank you, Lynx!) – but work teams. 

The pandemic showed us that teams and team members didn’t need to all be in the same (physical) place to succeed but in reading various articles about the awkward transition back to office-based work I’ve wondered about the effects of all of these fits and starts on insights teams.

From purely remote during the pandemic to hybrid to everyone mostly back in the office, I imagine it’s a struggle for managers to get the gang back together and working toward the same goals. If that resonates with you, I think the book “X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed” ($32; Harvard Business Review Press) might be worth investigating.

Originally published in 2007, the book was recently updated for our post-pandemic reality and reissued in August. Authors Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman are still professors at their same respective institutions – Ancona at MIT and Bresman at graduate business school INSEAD – but as they state in a new preface, the world is a vastly different place from when they assembled the first iteration of the book and, far from being obsolete, team-building skills are even more necessary today, given the dizzying pace of change and our often-disconnected workplace structures and systems.

Their definition of an x-team, in a nutshell, is that it is externally focused, with input coming from within and without (in other words, not insular); it has robust processes in place to enable team members to coordinate and execute their work; and it enforces and encourages timely transitions among team members to move to different aspects and processes to expand their skill sets and also encourage fresh thinking and new perspectives.

To be sure, marketing research teams, unlike some of those discussed in the book, are often already externally focused, working on a project for someone else in the organization (an insights-gathering project, a new product launch or line extension for an internal client, etc.) rather than ideating and building a new product as a group for consumers from start to finish, so the external-facing mind-set is nothing new for them. 

But the book is more than just an elaboration of their x-team concept, offering clear, no-nonsense advice on strategies for assembling and managing a winning group. (You know how we love all things practical here at Quirk’s so of course I was overjoyed to see actual checklists in the chapter on “x-ifying the team,” covering everything from setting up the basics for smooth operation to creating an environment of psychological safety.)

Ancona and Bresman offer three strategies or paradigms for how teams can boost their external focus and awareness and thereby deliver work that meets internal needs while also enhancing their internal standing. All three are likely well-familiar for insights professionals:

Sensemaking, which involves understanding others’ expectations, identifying key stakeholders and learning where critical information and expertise reside, whether that’s inside or outside the organization. Teams need to monitor and assess how the world is changing and any new threats or opportunities that have emerged. And they need a good model of what the outside world is like so that they can change and react accordingly.

Ambassadorship, which marketing researchers will no doubt be very familiar with, as defined by the authors: “[T]eam members need to lobby for resources, get early buy-in for their ideas and keep working for support from top managers.”

And task coordination, which involves managing the interdependencies with other parts of the organization and groups outside it rather than focusing inwardly.

Sensemaking, of course, is a researcher’s bread and butter, as it’s all about information-gathering, whether that’s through formal interviews or informal chats over coffee. It’s asking questions, listening to the responses and analyzing and synthesizing all of the things you’ve been told so that you can determine how to move forward, what the path ahead might look like and where the landmines might be.

Maybe this team-building stuff isn’t so hard after all!