Moving Focus from Leadership to Teamship
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“I use social contract in, in place of the word culture, ’cause I, I want you to think about the contract among people, which is really the culture.”- Keith Ferrazzi
In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with best-selling author, speaker and coach Keith Ferrazzi on why we need to move our focus from leadership to teamship.
A few reasons why he are awesome — he is a renowned executive team coach, keynote speaker, influential thought leader and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, where he has spent more than 20 years coaching Fortune 500 companies, unicorn startups, and even governments. He is a 2024 recipient of the Coaches 50 Award, which recognizes the world’s most influential executive coaches His columns are regularly published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and others. He is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author with familiar titles like Never eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, and Competing in the New World of Work. New Online course: Beyond Connections. ConnectedSuccess.com. His latest book, Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship.
Connect with Keith and learn more about his work…
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Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Keith Ferrazzi, and here is why he is awesome. He is a renowned executive team coach, keynote speaker, influential thought leader, and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, where he has spent over m- over more than
lots of years, 20 of them in fact, coaching Fortune 500 companies, unicorn startups, and even governments. Uh, 2024 recipient of the Coaches 50 Award, which recognized the world’s most influential exec coaches. His columns, you might have seen them in Howard, uh, Howard… Harvard. We’re really close to me and Harvard, we call it Howard. Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, and many others.
He’s the number one New York Times bestseller. You may have heard of his, some of his books, uh, “Never Eat Alone,” “Leading Without Authority,” “Competing in the New World of Work.” Uh, he’s got a new online course you may wanna check out called Beyond Connections at connectedsuccess.com. And his latix su- latest success, latest book in fact, that we’re gonna dig into today is called “Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts From Leadership to Teamship.”
I don’t even know what teamship means. I’m curious about that. Hi, Keith.
Keith Ferrazzi: this. You’ve al– we’ve got, we’ve got off to a fun start.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. Totally fair. Um, yeah, I’ve got questions about definitions, ’cause that’s one of the big things on this show is defining what the hell are we even talking about. But first, Keith, I like to ask all my guests this same question to kick us off, which is, sir, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Keith Ferrazzi: Wow. Um, you know, I’m living one right now that, um… Sorry, just getting over a cold. Um, I’m living one right now that I think, uh, I’d be happy to share because it’s, it’s real and it’s poignant. I had a business partner, um, who was a senior associate at, uh, at the firm that I, that I lead. And, um, from the day we hired him, um, there was something that I felt inconsistent or incongruent with, um, who I was and what I wanted to bring to the market.
That said, he got extraordinary results with clients. Um, and inside the firm, he was not an easy person to work with. Um, ultimately, the best way we figured out to work with him Was to, in a sense, isolate him, give him resource, let him do his stuff, and that was fine. Could not be more inconsistent with how our– what we teach our clients and our values.
Um, ultimately, I found out that, uh, that he was a thief. And right now, uh, we’re in a, a protracted legal situation. Um, you know, I, I, I’ll tell you, I feel like this situation is one that is, that rests on my shoulders for n-not having trusted my instincts and the challenges that this individual brought to me emotionally.
I tried so hard to make the relationship work. I had coaches, I had therapists. We tried so many different things to make it work. Um, and everybody kept, you know, suggesting that this individual was, you know, a unique personality psychology type. Um, you know, I knew it in my gut. I knew it in my gut. And because he was making money for the firm and he was making money for himself, et cetera, and it was all good, it was working, but it wasn’t working.
And, um, you know, it, it’s, it’s one of the more poignant lessons that I’ve, uh, that I, that I’ve had in business, um, staying core to my instinct and values.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you for sharing that. Um, one of the, one of the biggest roadblocks I talk about leadership ecosystems is sort of this gaslighting, which is
we see what’s in front of us, but because they do this and do that, and they’re a special case and they’re different, we justify the behavior. I, I know I’ve been with
horrible coworkers and leaders, but because they drive results, other people are like, “No, no, you must be wrong. They’re not bad leaders. They– Look at what they deliver. Aren’t they great?” So I, I kind of want to dig into the point that you were kind of gaslighting yourself to some degree, or people
Keith Ferrazzi: I was just gonna add that I, I was, I was smiling because that was one of the things that the therapists suggested, which is despite all of the evidence of this individual making people, making people cry, um, having people say they would never be- work with them again, et cetera, um, it was always somebody else and it was always, you know, victim from their perspective.
The gaslighting that they used and leveraged was ingenious, and almost it got me to the point where I was like, “Wait, what, what, what am I doing wrong here?” Um, and I’m sure there were lots of things. As I suggested, this was complicit, right? When you have, when you have an associate who, um, who makes you…
w-who creates deep anxiety inside of you, right? Um, y-your job is to make sure that- If you’ve, if you’ve tried repeatedly to manage that relationship, um, you have to walk away. And in this case, walking away would’ve been severing the relationship early. Um, and, you know, and, and that’s– I, I think that’s a good lesson.
You’re right. Gaslighting myself independent of what they were doing, um, that’s 100% right.
Russel Lolacher: How do you– I’m gonna ask a little personal, though, is that so you teach teamship, never eat alone, this is how we do. And to your point, you’re like, “I actually went against my own teachings, my own beliefs of what I did to justify and allow for this behavior.” From a mental health standpoint, from a moving forward standpoint, what are you taking with you?
Because this is a journey. I get it. Like, I’m right there with you going, “This is the right way to work.” But then when we’re presented with it sometimes, it gets super personal and super emotional, and it’s a lot… It, it can be a lot harder to go and, and for lack of a better term, practice what we preach when we’re in it. What are you carrying with you out of this experience?
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, look, this is a good segue, um, to, um, to the, to the book that I’ve written and what we teach. The, the reality is, and I was saying this just the other day, you mentioned my new, my new course, um, connectedsuccess.com. I was doing some real-time coaching to the members. I do it, do it on a monthly basis.
And I was mentioning to a particular individual, you know, if you want to be great in your life, you’ve got to be willing to work with people who are so good that they pull you up to greatness. And that’s particularly true of entrepreneurs who tend to hire people that support them instead of partnering with people who are better than them.
And in a workplace, we should be looking for… And also yesterday I was, I was coaching a team. This ha- this team was a, a major corporation re-engineering their supply chain. And I was saying to this group of individuals, “For you to be great, for you to be the leading supply chain in the world, you’re gonna have to partner with parts of the organization and AI native founders and et cetera, who scare the shit out of you.”
Because leadership today is, is we’re puzzle makers. And what I mean by that is our job isn’t just to do our job anymore. Our job is to be able to put together the group of individuals that are critical in cracking the code, in breaking through the glass ceilings, in achieving things we’ve never achieved with, by the way, a new technology that nobody fundamentally has mastered, AI.
And so our– in, in this case for me, the, I, I didn’t have a team That checked me. And this has been a journey of mine for a very long time. I mean, I’ve– You know, I, I, I write very humbly in my books that I am often the last individual to learn my own principles and bring them to life. Um, but you know, I have the, I have the pleasure and the honor of being one of the best in the world at coaching high-performing teams.
I’ve repeatedly done hundreds of them in some of the most powerful, prominent teams, some of the most important startups, and as you mentioned now, even governments trying to– small governments trying to double their GDP. And, you know, I see the cycles, and often I am blind to see the cycles in myself. So how does one do that with your team?
I have that today. I have an extraordinary president of our company who, um, is just no bullshit and puts the mirror up to me all the time. And, and I know that he cares deeply about our mission and he cares deeply about me, and we are what I call co-elevating partners. Co-elevation is a term that I created because collaboration isn’t enough.
We need to, in the process of working together, we need to be pushing each other higher. That principle of co-elevation. I have been in marriages that weren’t that. Uh, I’m in one that is that today. Um, and we all have to live– we all have to make the assumption that every damn relationship of our life needs to be co-elevating.
And that’s a personal choice, and that’s, uh, that’s hard work.
Russel Lolacher: And how many studies are out there that demonstrate the further you get up the quote unquote “ladder of an organization,” the more and more you’re pushed away from those you can trust around you, that you can… You, you self-isolate almost as you, the higher you get up in an organization. Tons of studies that even demonstrate sociopathic behavior of leaders because they’re being rewarded for delivery, not for being leaders.
So they’re actually pushing themselves further and further away from that team scenario you’re talking about.
Keith Ferrazzi: There is nothing that sa-saddens me more than when people say being at the top is so alone. That’s a personal choice. That is a personal choice. Um, you know, it’s interesting. Uh, I, I wrote– My early work around high-performing teams right after the book Never Eat Alone studied small groups that wouldn’t let each other fail.
I studied AA. I studied Weight Watchers groups. I studied, um, YPO forums. And what I found, interestingly enough, is people who fundamentally transformed their own lives in a YPO forum weren’t the ones who were bringing that back into how they treated their teams. And it’s like, it’s such a choice We should be, as I mentioned, every critical relationship, personal or professional, should set a new standard, and I call it a co-elevation standard.
And it really is– It’s a standard of intimacy, generosity, candor, and accountability. It’s a standard at the high– at the performance level, butt-kicking accountability, hold each other accountable, right? High degrees of candor and transparency all on the table in the room, not meeting after the meeting, back channel, conflict avoidance.
Those two attributes are the performance attributes. But to lead with a sense of generosity, of service to each other and to the mission, and to lead with intimacy and vulnerability so that we’re coming to the table with humility and openness. Those principles are defining of a high-performing team. Um, and we need to set that standard for all critical relationships of our life.
Russel Lolacher: You’re using all the right words, Keith. Like, uh, don’t get me wrong, like I agree with all those words. My challenge in any organization is that a lot of leadership will have their own definitions of what those words mean, and they will cater it to what works for them rather than what might work for the organization.
I’ll give you an example. How often is responsibility confused with accountability? I’ve talked to many leaders and they’re like, “Well, I’m responsible for this.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s your job description.” Accountable is if things go right or wrong and how you own it and how you tweak it to not do it again. But there is– But they can– But there’s a lot of that confusion with responsibility. Think it’s interchangeably. How do you work with teams that, that sort of like, “No, no, no, these are the guardrails. These are what they actually mean to define them”?
Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. I, I’m– I was actually looking to see if I could grab a slide to show your folks. But, um, look, the… I think I said this yesterday in front of this, this company, the top, top 100 leaders of this business. I’m gonna say something really bombastic, and it’ll piss off a lot of
Russel Lolacher: Go.
Keith Ferrazzi: I don’t believe in bullshit culture conversations.
Um, I find words vacuous, and despite the fact that I, you know, I have a significant part of my business that makes a living out of, out, out of creating these clever words and, and posturing them, I don’t actually believe that you make a difference in organization with words. I believe you make a difference in organization through practices and process.
And let me explain what I mean by that, and I’ll tell you a little story. I, I grew up in a very poor town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, um, Latrobe actually, during the crash of the steel industry. And what crashed the US steel industry was the arrogance of American steel management versus the Japanese that had actually taken American principles of, of manufacturing Total quality management, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, brought it to the Japanese and used American principles, academic principles of Deming, et cetera, used those to turn around and create better high quality, lower priced steel.
And if you think about that, the, the transformation of culture change came through process and practice. The process and practice of Six Sigma changes culture of a manufacturing organization from top-down to bottom-up, from t- p- from empowered teams to, um, um, from– to empowered teams from hierarchy, and it was process and practice that changed.
Same thing happened in the early 2000s with, with Agile. Agile, we needed more software. We created pro… E- engineers created process and practice change to be able to get greater software throughput through the adoption of Agile. Now, here we are today in a brand new world. Um, we’ve been in a brand new world for quite some time, but it’s a new, new world with AI, and yet we still work in meetings the same way we did in an industrial era as the mechanism of our collaboration.
We’ve had the Google software and the, and the collaboration stack and the Teams rooms for a long time, but if there’s a problem, we still throw people into a meeting where only four out of 12 people are heard. Now, if we collaborate asynchronously before meetings, you have an increased… I, I just got an award in, uh, London called Thinkers 50.
It was in, it was, I was honored to be inducted with people like Amy Edmondson and others, the top 50 thought leaders of the year. And, um, and I sat with her on a panel, and this is the woman that iconically created psychological safety, and I was able to give her some research that our research institute created.
If you collaborate asynchronously before a meeting, and you ask the question like, “What are we really trying to solve here?” And everybody write it down before you show up in a shared document that you look at. If you do that, your psychological safety goes up by 85%, and you show up in the room with greater, great, great- greater truth-telling.
And by the way, the cycle time, instead of starting a meeting where only four out of 12 people are heard, and then you need to go have subsequent meetings, you start it beforehand, where 10 out of 12 people feel that they’re heard. You come into the room and you land the plane. Shorter cycle times of getting shit done, higher authenticity and transparency because of, you know, introverts have a chance to think, not just speak up, et cetera.
Simple process and practice change of moving to asynchronous collaboration versus meeting-based collaboration, that is focused on in chapter six of my book Where I talk about 21st century collaboration. But what we’ve done in the book is we’ve curated a new set of processes and practices for how teams collaborate.
And I don’t care about the words. Like, I will go in front of many teams who have had, you know, their leadership principles ringed out of them in some wonderful way, and they’ve got posters on the walls. I’m like, “Fine, I’ll use your poster words. Let’s talk about the process of how we collaborate. Let’s talk about the practices of how we kill report outs and move to stress tests,” which I can explain, which is a really interesting shift.
Um, so anyway, the, the– it’s the process and practice change that changes leadership. And what I’m moving to is teamship, where we expect more from our teams. What’s the social contract of how a team works together? Most teams have mediocre social contracts. I use social contract in, in place of the word culture, ’cause I, I want you to think about the contract among people, which is really the culture.
And i-i-in one room, we don’t challenge each other because that would be throwing each other under the bus. In another room, we challenge each other because we won’t let each other fail. That’s a social contract. And so I ask the average leader, “What social contract have you created among your team?” Most s- leaders create a hub-and-spoke social contract between them and each individual, and they don’t get out of the way and create the social contract among the team.
The team should be giving each other feedback, not just the manager. The team should be holding each other accountable, not just the manager. So we– By the way, each of those is a chapter of the book. How do we shift from leadership to teamship, and we ask our teams to step up and meet each other in a different social contract?
Russel Lolacher: So is– were you influenced on n- looking at leadership as a way of, “No, this is too singular”? Is that what sort of pushed you into, “We need to fix this. We need to change this”? It was leadership in your mind looked at as something that one person does, one person moves up the organization, and that it needed to be…
I’m just trying to figure out what was broken in leadership that you felt Teamship was the answer?
Keith Ferrazzi: So I didn’t come at it from… I, I have never come at things from an HR perspective. So if you were use the word leadership or teamship, uh, one would presume that that was– I was coming at the world from the perspective of being an architect of, um, human behaviors or relationships. That’s not what I was trying to.
So I wrote Never Eat Alone, which mind you, that book, I never thought of that book as a networking book. That book I always thought of as what are the 10 tips to putting a booster rocket on your success? And the reason I wrote that book is because at the age of 30, I was chief marketing officer of Deloitte.
And somebody came along and said, “How in the world did you, at that young age, become chief marketing officer of Deloitte? How did you then move over and become head of sales and marketing at Starwood Hotels in your early 30s? What did you do?” And I sat back and I was like, “Hmm, well, these are the things I did that built success.”
So, and I, and I wrote a book on the practices of making success happen, now comma, through relationships, but that wasn’t the point. Then what I did with, with “Never Lead Alone,” the new book, and the principle of teamship, I, I decided to start my own business 20 years ago because I saw how the behaviors at Deloitte allowed us to thrive and succeed.
We were the lowest of the Big Eight in the ’90s, and we have now achieved parity with, you know, the Accentures of the world and McKinseys, et cetera. And I, I saw the climb of that at Deloitte with a band of brothers and sisters taking hills together. Over at Starwood, we were notoriously siloed, evisceratingly competitive.
It was not a, it was not a good set of behaviors among the team. Fear-based culture. And we ended up having to sell below industry multiples to, to, uh, to, to Marriott, our biggest competitor. So I recognized that there was a big difference. And, and I wanted to look at the practices. So when I started the business, I was invited into…
I, I had earlier in my career, I had been invited to apply to a job at this startup in, uh, in Seattle focused on selling books. Um, and so I had met this guy, Jeff Bezos. Um, and I, I was able to, when I started this business, to get invited into Jeff Bezos’s executive team. I’d, I’d, you know, happened to be giving a speech at, uh, Harvard Business School and, um, it was in parallel with Jamie Dimon, and I had ultimately was in- invited him to have a conversation about how Jamie Dimon’s team navigated the rough waters of the financial crisis in 2008.
And I started studying what were the behaviors of teams that were crushing it. And what I saw were very different practices than an average team that I would go into. And I would start to extract practices. Uh, so one of them is this thing called a report out versus a stress test. What I noticed in a lot of mediocre teams, teams from companies that were mediocre performers in their industry segment, is they would give these report outs And the dynamic would be something like somebody goes through a 20-page deck for a half of an hour, half the people in the room are checked out looking at their phones.
Um, and at the end of it, the executive and the– who is reporting and the CEO would have some conversation, maybe one other person would chime in, and then they’d go on to the next report out. And that was pretty standard. What I saw in places like Amazon was a, was a throw down, a wrestling match, where everybody was involved.
Jamie Dimon’s team, um, celebrated the fact that the lowest level person had the right to challenge and engage, and did. They were, like, actively engaged in every discussion. And so I, I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” So I, I, I designed something that I had witnessed. I called it a stress test. So instead of a report out, this is in chapter three of the new book, uh, Never Lead Alone.
Instead of a report out, the next time somebody is supposed to update the team on something, do a stress test. The person shows up with a very short presentation, no more than three pages, ideally one. And what it says on it is, “Here’s what I’ve achieved, here’s where I’m struggling, and here’s where I’m going next.”
Putting on the page, here’s where I’m struggling, that was the other thing Alan Mulally of Ford taught me, which was most people show up in presentations with all green lights. They don’t show their re-red lights, and teams aren’t celebrated for showing what’s wrong. So you have to force individuals to celebrate where they’re struggling, ’cause what you’re doing is you’re- you have an open invitation with a team to help you problem solve.
Then when the presentation’s done, everybody in the room goes into discussions of two, where if you’re sitting in the room, you turn to the person next to you, you open a Google Doc, and in that Google Doc there’s three columns. What is this person missing? Write it down. Like, what risk are they not seeing, et cetera.
What idea could benefit them? Write it down. What innovation or idea? And the third column, where might you help? Now, what we just did is what I saw in the Amazons and the Jamie Dimons, uh, JP Morgans. I s- what I saw there, I’ve just assigned to your team. You want a challenge culture. Some people have naturally, they have bred a, a, um, an engaged group of individuals that challenge each other.
If you don’t have that, assign it. So now when someone’s listening to the report out, they know that as soon as we’re done, they’re gonna have to write down, what’s this person missing? What idea do you have? Where could you help? The– there’s no phones open anymore Right? So what I’ve done is I’ve just created a process or a practice which fundamentally you could use your words, change culture, right?
And that simple shift, the average team has a candor level of 2.4. Interestingly enough, I’m starting to see those numbers oddly go down now to 1.9. I think what’s happened is, you know, we’ve moved from the great resignation to the great preservation. People are now fearful of keeping their jobs, so they’re becoming less psychologically safe, less challenging, et cetera.
Um, so we’re down low in the candor score. But if you do regular stress tests over a six-month period, I can get that number into the high threes and low fours. So process and practice change fundamentally transform the social contract and transform behaviors, and then ultimately transform outcomes.
Russel Lolacher: So I, I, I love that idea. I think that’s– I’m, I’m immediately thinking about how I can put that into practice for a lot of things that I’m doing right now. So what I’m super curious about, though, is we talk about meetings, traditional meetings, we gotta stop doing that. But the, the push has always now been, “We just need quicker meetings.
We’ll do stand-ups. They’ll be 15 minutes.” To your point that this is what I’m working on, no blockers, moving on. It’s almost an exercise in how quickly can you talk and get out of the room. You’re talking about something that could take m- two hours if it’s a– depending on the team, depending on what they’re talking about. Is it a matter of it’s not that we need less meetings or more meetings, we just need more valuable meetings? We just need meetings that actually matter.
Keith Ferrazzi: So one of the things I just talked about isn’t a meeting at all, it’s asynchronous.
Russel Lolacher: So this could be done over Teams, this could be done… It doesn’t need to be
Keith Ferrazzi: yeah. So what you do is you send out a video of five minutes that says, “Here’s what I’ve done, here’s where I’m struggling, here’s where I’m going.” And then each individual, now they don’t have the benefit of being in groups of two corroborating, but each individual can then write, um, “Here’s what you’re missing.
Here’s an idea for you. Here’s– Call me if, if on this if I, you, I can help.” So the 3M did ag- morning agile standups, and they’re a global organization, so they had to, they had to get people at ungodly times, you know, like nine o’clock in the evening in Asia, five o’clock in the morning in California, whatever.
It’s like they had to get these people together in an ungodly time to do a standup every day. And they looked at this work, our research, and they said, “Well, wait a second. Maybe we could do that once a week, but why don’t we replace the standup with a, with an asynchronous standup? Why doesn’t the person show up- Have a five-minute video and anybody, anytime during your normal day can watch it and respond, right?
So I, I, I– to me, it’s about the… I’ve been in plenty of standups where somebody shows up and gives their, their agile standup, but nobody gives any commentary. Even though they might have it psychologically in their heads, they don’t have the psychological safety to challenge each other in that standup. So again, it’s, to me it’s not, it’s, it’s about how do you ch- transform collaboration to be more effective, faster, um, higher, higher degrees of a challenge culture.
The challenge culture is what will change your business. Now, you can do it like Ray Dalio does, who wrote the book Principles, and they are a very difficult culture. A lot of people don’t wanna go work at Bridgewater. Um, so you can do it off of that, or you can do it like Elf Beauty does, where Tarang, the CEO there, has created a culture of love where we won’t let each other fail.
Both of them have a challenge culture. One is based on relationships, the other one just is based on being right and getting it right. So I, I have a model that I use in the book where the challenge culture is in the center and it’s the most important. It’s the meat of the behaviors and practices, chapter three in that book, chapter six.
But at the bottom, you have a relationship layer, which is the foundation upon which you won’t let each other fail. We’ll be a challenge culture because we care. And there’s a series of chapters about having shared resilience in, in, in creating bonding, creating celebration. And at the top layer, it’s how do we learn to collaborate in a 21st century fashion like the kids graduating from Stanford using tools and software to collaborate, not just throwing everybody into a boarding meet- boring meeting that doesn’t work.
Russel Lolacher: I, I’m, I’m looking at all these things, I’m like, action is everything. Like, you can talk till you’re blue in the face, but act– I actually even have it in my office, it says, “Action is the start.” Like, nothing starts until action actually is underway, whether it’s processes, whether it’s… Even conversations can be an action. However, I hear that and I see that, but there’s a lot of leaders that have no self-awareness, no understanding of the existing social contracts they have with their team, and I worry that they’re listening to you or they’re reading your book and like, “I’m doing this tomorrow,” with no concept that they have no psychological safety with their team or, or
Keith Ferrazzi: the book talks about that. You build it
Russel Lolacher: Yeah. Where do you start?
Keith Ferrazzi: So it’s an intertwined DNA strand, you know? It’s not just start here, finish here, then go to here. You know, it’s actually you need to build personal trust, you need to build professional trust, and they work interdependently. So for instance, I– if, if it’s a cynical team that has not had strong relationships and that the, you know, relationship stuff feels a little fuzzy, then I always, I always start with the stress test.
Because what I can prove to a group is that some of these conversations you’re afraid to have in front of each other, you can actually have, and people can handle it. We fantasize that our peers can’t handle the truth. What’s that, um, what’s that movie? “You can’t handle the
Russel Lolacher: Few Good Men.
Keith Ferrazzi: and it’s a good one.
But the reality is people can. I, I was working with one company recently where the, the CFO in most… I, I interview all– When I work with a team, I go around and I interview all the executives. I ask a few important questions. One question I ask is, “What are the conversations we should be having in the room that we’re not having?”
Such a powerful question, and everybody has an answer. Everybody has an answer. And for God’s sakes, why aren’t we having those questions? Everybody has an answer, including the CEO often has an answer. In this particular place, one of the, one of the problems was our CFO is curtailing our growth pace because they’ve got a chokehold on investment.
They’re too conservative. And, and I thought, “Okay, that’s interesting.” So I went around and everybody was feeling that, including the CEO. Now, this is a publicly traded company, so this happens a lot, by the way. There’s a lot of organizations that point to finance and the, and, and the process and practice and mechanisms of finance as being what’s controlling growth.
Now, if you go and talk to finance, they think that they’re saving your ass from, you know, from being stupid. And so I went to finance and I said, “Hey, just out of curiosity, what do you think your peers are saying about finance?” And this particular CFO laid it right out. “They’re saying this, they’re saying this, they’re saying this.”
I was like, “Yeah, you know what? That sounds familiar. Why aren’t we having this conversation in the room?” And the CFO said, “We should.” And I said, “Great, let’s do it.” I went back to the CEO and I said, “Okay, we can have this conversation. The CFO would like to have it.” And there was this sense of relief. And we had the conversation, and they got to a really better empathetic place because they both better understood and they started collaborating and working through some solutions that got to a better place.
And it’s shocking this happens all the time on teams. There are these unspoken things that sometimes it’s leader-focused, sometime it’s one particular member of the team focused, et cetera. My job is the easiest damn job in the world. You know, like I get heralded as being a savior of major corporations who are turning around because of the work that, that my organization and I do, and it’s not tough.
It’s, it’s sitting right there on the, on the, on the, on the surface. But part of it is, you know, this is in chapter six as well, every team could do an anonymous survey. What are the most important questions we should be asking that we’re not asking? And then put those on the table and, and look at them as a team transparently.
And then if you’re a decent leader, this is the problem. Many leaders are the reason that teams are mediocre, because they’re afraid of those tough conversations. At this one, the company, they– the, the CEO was afraid of the CFO conversation. So that if, if, if the anonymous poll had been done, the CFO might not have had the courage to choose that topic.
Now, as an outside coach, I’m able to come in and get them to the realization that they can hold the safe space to do it, and then we have it and they’re like, “Holy shit, this is amazing.” So it’s like what I do sometimes, it’s just I come in and I do a chiropractic adjustment to the team, and all of a sudden, “Holy cow, I can walk now.”
Um, but you can still do a better job of it. If you’re a leader and willing to have a little bit of courage and transparency and humility, you can make a long movement just using the book as a roadmap for how you start inviting teamship into your team.
Russel Lolacher: How do you know it’s working, Keith? ‘Cause, I mean, there would be a lot of people that will do the checkbox outcomes, straight up outcomes.
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, look, I mean, there’s two things. I can tell you, as I said earlier, I can move any team from a conflict avoidant, you know, candor levels between one and two on a scale of zero to five. I can move that in less than six months, guaranteed, into a team that has level three, level four candor. I can promise you I can do that.
Um, so I, I can measure it by behaviors and then mo- most importantly, you know, I, I– this process and practice, there was a major, uh, automotive manufacturer that went into bankruptcy during the financial crisis and used this strategy to pull itself through paying off the government funding, et cetera. And when it came out, the CFO was the first one that said, “You know what?
Of all the things we did, and we did a lot of things, this was one of the most important reasons we got out of bankruptcy.” In the f- same side, we– I’ve seen, I’m working with right now a very well-known brand company that was taken into private equity and you know, it needs to massively modernize Or it’s gonna have its, its breakfast eaten.
And we’re in the process of going public within a year be– in order– by, by virtue of this process and practice changes. So it’s all about results. And, um, but in the meantime, I can give you predictive metrics, which is the diagnostics that we use.
Russel Lolacher: My worry, though, is this can be some amazing work that’s done in a subculture, sub– so to your wording, social contract level. But corporate-wise, entire organizationally-wise, it seems to be a lot harder to incorporate. There’ll be somebody listening going, “I’m gonna do this with my team of 15 tomorrow,” and be very successful within a bubble of an organization that just doesn’t get it.
How do you connect the tissue for that?
Keith Ferrazzi: Most of my work does start at the executive team level. So I will typically, and more than 50% of the time I work with teams, it’s with the CEO and the executive team. Um, and then of course, once that’s done, it’s easier to cascade it down when everybody at that executive team level starts to see the value from it and starts to implement it.
You know, and then you can run layered workshops, and you can continue to cascade it. Um, but there are times when I’ll do it, like I work with a lot of CIOs, chief information officers. It’s– This is a massively important time for them. You know, they’re, they’re taking on massive investments in AI under a lot of pressure in a very short period of time, and it requires them to not only bring new technology to the table, but re-engineer entire workflows and ways of doing business that require them to think of teaming, not inside of technology, but with the business in a fundamentally different way.
Um, and yeah, sure, it’s more difficult because what happens is you’ve got this technology organization working that way, but the business doesn’t work that way. And so what you do is you start to invite people in. So the, the technology function would do a stress test on itself, and it would say to the business, “Listen, we’re rolling out AI in re-engineering supply chain.
Here’s where w- here’s what we’ve achieved in the last quarter. Here’s where we’re still struggling. Here’s where we’re going in the next quarter. Would you all as the business, please stress test us? Here’s a form, and I’d like to have you tell us what are we missing, what ideas do you have, and if you need us to give you a call, and we’ll talk about it in more detail, places where you can intervene or help.”
And then all of a sudden the, what happens is the business is like, “Wow, that was a really powerful exercise. Technology’s never done that for us before.” I’ve never gotten co-creative and engaged so early in the process. So you can start to coach your peers by using these tools, because they’re just practices.
We’re not waving some magic wand and saying you need to be coelevating, come to a training course. We’re just saying, “Hey, here’s where we are. Beat it up for me.” Oh, okay. And so people start to realize there’s a new norm here, which is we’re allowed to invite people in to beat up our work, and it actually advantages everybody.
Russel Lolacher: What would you say to somebody who’s going, “I hear you, I’m reading the books, I’m seeing a lot about adaptability, I’m seeing a lot about responsiveness,” but to your point, like things of AI and this constant change What do you say to somebody that feels like this is just reaction mode? This is just, we’re just getting barraged with all these things, and we’re adapting and responsive, but we don’t feel like we’re either getting ahead or we’re even strategizing to get ahead of it.
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, I– when I’m coaching a team, I recommend that they set a meeting aside once a month that’s called the transformation meeting. And the reality is, even teams that I work with when I’m, when I’m coaching them, they’re all hands on this new set of behaviors, thinking bigger, taking a breath. And then they will say to me, “You know, this is amazing, you know, yet our operations meetings every day or every week are still mundane and in the weeds, and we don’t spend nearly enough time get– stepping back and doing the kind of work you’re talking about.”
And I’m like, “Why? S- hold the space for it. Have the transformation meeting when I’m not there. Bring these tools to bear in those meetings.” You know, it’s– we get into the momentum of working reactively all the time. But I recommend you, you, you need to hold a space for transformation thinking strategy time, and I use this meeting for that.
Um, chapter three of the book starts with a, a guy named Bill Connors from Comcast who used to host a weekly outlier meeting, which I love. Basically, the whole point of the meeting is once a week, I don’t give a damn what you’ve been doing well. He used to say, “This is not the meeting where we throw parades for anybody.
This is the meeting where everybody comes with the shit that’s not working. We get a list of it, and we fix it. And if you bring it and it’s somebody else’s group, it doesn’t matter. We’re all here to celebrate finding the shit that isn’t working so we can get it fixed.” And that it’s– there’s an esprit de corps in this out-outlier meeting.
So as a leader, you’ve got to create space for things. And if you don’t create space for thinking time, if you don’t create space for listening to each other, if you don’t create process for listening to each other, you will continue to run mediocrity
Russel Lolacher: I’ve– It reminds me of a saying, I can’t remember who flipped it, but that whole move fast and break things, and they’re like, “No, we should be moving fast and fixing things.” And I think this,
Keith Ferrazzi: There you go.
Russel Lolacher: this much, much more aligns with that. So we’re wrapping up. This is one of the horrible things about this show, Keith, is that we touch on so many things because we don’t have tons of time. Um, I wish I had seven more hours with you. But I do wanna wrap it up to the point we sort of talked about earlier, which not everybody is the top executive, the CEO, the CFO. There’s a lot of junior executives, middle management that’s listening to this going, “This is the kind of leadership I want and need and want to be a part of.” Teamship is the goal. What would you recommend they do just even starting tomorrow? Picking up the book, absolutely. But as we said, action is the start.
What would you recommend they start doing just tomorrow?
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, there’s a couple of things. O-one is join our Beyond Connections. You need a tribe of like-minded thinkers going on a journey with you around your own transformation, and you’ll get that there. The community of Beyond… of connectedsuccess.com is very powerful. Yes, pick up the book, it gives you the roadmap.
But listen, you could go to your boss and you could say, “Hey, listen, I read this book and I’d love for us to try some of these practices. Do you mind if the initiative I’m working on, could I come to the team and have it stress tested?” You become the tip of the spear, right? I mean, so in the book– And by the way, in the book I describe that when you’re asking to be stress tested, you make sure it’s clear to everybody that you’re asking for strong input.
You’re not asking for everybody to give you independent direction. I, I don’t wanna un- I don’t wanna open up a, a, a can, a can of worms here at the last minute, but a lot of the problems is we’re used to getting all of our feedback we’ve ever gotten is a directive from our teachers, from our parents, from our bosses.
When you start to open up argumentation among peers, you’re n- everybody’s gotta give up the idea that their ideas have to land with, with, um, action. We’re all giving input. So when you come to the team, the team needs to realize, “I’m gonna take all of your input, but I’m still gonna analyze it and figure out what to do.”
So that’s a different part of the social contract. We need to make sure that we let go of the entitlement of believing that all of our ideas need to be executed. They all need to be taken in and analyzed. Anyway, what a fun session. Thank you.
Russel Lolacher: That is Keith Ferrazzi. He is a renowned executive team coach, keynote speaker, influential thought leader, and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight. Uh, the man has a couple of books under his belt, but his latest is called “Never Lead Alone: Ten Shifts from Leadership to Teamship,” and he’s just started a, a new online course you may wanna check out.
I’ll put it in the show notes for the link. It’s called Beyond Connections. Connectedsuccess.com is where you find it. Thank you so much for being here, Keith.
Keith Ferrazzi: What a fun time. Thanks, Russel.