Keith Ferrazzi is Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and its Research Institute. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Who’s Got Your Back and bestsellers like Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, and Competing in the New World of Work. He is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, and other many other publications. He is also the author of a new book, which launches today, called Never Lead Alone.
In his third appearance on the Elevate Podcast, Keith joined host Robert Glazer to discuss his new book, the move from leadership to teamship, and much more.
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Keith Ferrazzi On Why You Should Never Lead Alone
Introduction
Our quote now is from Leonard Sweet, “The essence of leadership is relationship.” My guest, Keith Ferrazzi, is joining the three-time guest club on the show. Keith is the Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and its Research Institute. He’s the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Who’s Got Your Back, and other bestsellers such as Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, and Competing in the New World of Work. He’s a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., Fortune, and many other leading publications. He’s also the author of a new book launching soon called Never Lead Alone. Keith, welcome back to the show.
Robert, so much appreciation for you. How many trip ticks do you have on this if people have been here three times? Am I part of an elite club?
I can do it on one hand at least, so it’s a small club. We judge past performance before we give new invites.
I’m looking to see my Yelp reviews.
Your first 2 episodes were number 84 and 174. You can check those out. For those who may not have read those, can you share a bit of the work that you and your team do at Ferrazzi Greenlight?
I will speak about what we do in our day job, which is very simple. We coach executive teams. We feel that coaching isn’t for executives. We don’t even do executive coaching. We only coach teams. Think about it if a couple wanted to be in a great relationship, would they both go to independent therapy, or would they have couples counseling? We believe that a team needs to get collective coaching on the behaviors, processes, and tools, to make them high-performing. That’s what we do for a living. I’ve got my research institute, which feeds my books, my writing, and my IP. These days, it’s pretty exciting with the reinvention of work through AI and enablement, which everybody is talking about, but I like to keep it out of the hype and more into the practical.
That cuts out a lot of options.
How are we taking very epic roles, how are we blowing them apart we call it pixelating and how are we putting those roles back together again with AI partners that maximize the benefit of the human? How do you do that in a marketing role? How do you do that in HR? How do you do it in engineering? We are working with a partnership between HR and IT. How does that partnership work differently? It all comes back to my belief in teamship. Teams have to work better together, and teams have nothing to do with org charts.
Teams working better together seems redundant since that’s the goal of a team. Going back to something you said. The reason why people push to do couples counseling is because you can’t win if you are doing it separately. You can’t win your couples counseling.
That was a provocative or maybe a throwaway comment, but I want to stick to it. The fact that teams work better together because that’s the objective, but it’s not what I see.
I’m not disagreeing with that.
I sit in rooms every day with teams that are stretching themselves to be mediocre. We have a 3,000-team data set or data our work comes from. Most teams don’t even utilize the team to crack the code of their most difficult problems. They tackle them in their silos and then plug them into the work of the team.
Most teams do not utilize the team itself to crack the code of their most difficult problems.
Until you said that, I never thought you needed a definition of a team versus a collection of pieces on the org chart that have all been filled out. What is the word for that?
Key Shifts For High-Performing Teams
The book we wrote, is twenty years of IP in development. We have a 3,000-team data set. The book is full of very specific practices that we observe from successful teams. We take those practices out, apply them to other teams, and then measure whether it moved the needle on a new team, and then we call it a high-return practice. We believe that there are fundamentally ten shifts that most teams need to make to move from mediocrity or worse to success. Only 15% of the teams that we had in our data set have achieved that level of a high-performing team.
What’s interesting is they tend to be startups. They tend to be these kids out of Stanford who are founders and they all focus on winning together because that’s what matters. They are not focused on maximizing their turf in marketing. They are not focused on whether or not their role is HR or thinking more like policy people and they are not reinventing work.
You are tied to that North Star. I wrote an article and it was like, “Do Not Refer to Your Team as a Family” for a variety of reasons. First of all, if you have to get rid of some of them, then you say, “You told us we were family,” and families put up with a lot of bad crap. The uncle doing inappropriate stuff at the wedding. There’s not a lot of consequences. The high-performance sports team has always been a much better analogy for me. You love the people and you work with them, but if you are over 26 and shots that game, you are going to the bench.
Let’s pause for a second on high-performing sports teams because we have done a lot of studying on this. A team is as important as the coach in transforming the team. You need the coach. You need the leader to make sure that the team’s North Star is there and that there’s a mood set. However, what happens in the huddle and what happens in the locker room when the coach isn’t necessarily there is equally as important.
It’s one thing for a leader to give feedback, but great teams give each other feedback. It’s one thing for a leader to hold the team accountable, but great teams hold each other accountable. The book is a prescription for what the team needs to do to be a high-performing team, and the team needs to meet the leader in leadership. That’s why the book is called Never Lead Alone. The team needs to adopt levels of leadership in order to be high-performing. This is a prescription for a leader to give that to the team or for a team to wake up and realize what it needs to do to meet their contract in leadership.
Are there natural captains and assistant captains in that context or is it fully distributed?
It has to be fully distributed, and I will tell you why because at any given time, somebody is off their game at any given time, you’ve got two members of the team going into a rat hole or something, one of which may be the leader. You need to have the authority of a teammate to raise their hand and say, “We are off track here,” or “There’s a lot here that I know is not being said.” Every team member has to take responsibility for the team’s success.
To me, it’s like a two-by-two box. Let’s call it love for lack of a better word and standards. This is parenting, too. People fall on the wrong side of this, which is, “We need to have this trust and respect and mutual admiration, but I also need to be able to say, ‘You missed the last ten shots go to the bench.'” I see teams are too far on one side. There’s unconditional love or way too transactional.
I’m going back to our research. If I had $1 to bet on a team, I would rather bet it on a set of individuals who are highly accountable and very focused on outcomes. A group of people who think they are hugging it out all the time and are incapable of speaking truth to each other. The book is divided into ten critical shifts that a team needs to make. Chapter three is the shift from conflict avoidance to candor.
If you get that chapter, you are going to have a much higher-performing team. What’s fun about it is I don’t give a damn about fuzzy culture words. You are never going to hear me say, “Let’s go in and change the culture of the company.” I only want to change the practices of teams and there’s an old practice that we used to do back in the olden days when I was Chief Marketing Officer at Starwood, and it was a report-out. My guy running Star Preferred Guest would come into the team and say, “I want to do a report-out on where we are with SPG.” He would click through a twenty-page deck, and half my team is DMing me saying he’s full of crap. The other half of my team is sleeping or doing their homework or whatever it is.
He said 40 slides.
Instead, we saw high-performing teams do something that I called stress testing. It’s taking what would have been a report-out and turning it into a stress test. The person comes to the team. The SPG lead would come and say, “Here’s what we have achieved. Here’s where we are struggling. Here’s where we are going.” They don’t get more than five minutes to do it. Now, everybody goes into small groups of two in the room, and they open up a shared document Google Docs, Teams, or whatever and they write the following three questions.
They write, “What do I have to challenge this person? Where is his risk? Where are his challenges? What’s he wrong with? Where might I give him an idea or an innovation and an offer of help?” Three things. Now what we have done by turning what used to be a report-out into a simple assignment of this stress test, we’ve rebooted culture and I see it all the time. I watch these conflict-avoidant Midwestern companies.
This comes up a lot in Midwestern companies.
Redefining Team Accountability
There’s this Midwestern polite, and polite only means political because if you can’t say it in the room, you are going to say it out in the hallway. I’m looking at high-performing teams and one chapter and the adoption of a few simple practices. Every chapter has a hero story, and then it has a few practices the team can start to use to be transformative. Another practice is called a “Candor Break.” A Candor Break is when, in the middle of the meeting, as a standard protocol, three-quarters of the way in, you stop, and you say, “I want everybody to go into groups real quick, two minutes, and come back with the following answer. What’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?”
The old elephant.
It’s so powerful. It’s such a simple practice. There are 4 or 5 practices in each chapter. If you adopt those on a regular basis, your team will radically transform in its efficacy.
I know that we got right down into this, but if I track the arc of these three conversations, we have had some interesting dynamics from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic, and you and I know that the only constant in the world or business is change. I’m curious. Last time we talked a lot about adapting to remote work, the increasingly virtual world. What are your thoughts on the return-to-office pushes happening?
Now I have even better data than I did when I talked to you last. I understand. There are two big areas that we have missed going into the return to work. One of them is that we have had collaborative technologies available to us for decades, but we don’t use them. The only things we use in our teams are Google Meets or Zoom. Turn on, turn off. That’s it. There’s a rich, robust set of technology that would allow us to collaborate outside of meetings, much more impactfully.
Let’s say you and I are on the same team. We are going to have a meeting in a week, and we are going to talk about the softening of our sales. What if there are twelve people in that room? Some of the marketing people, salespeople, you, me, whatever. What if we ask them in advance in a spreadsheet? “Go in there,” and the first question is, “What’s the real problem we are solving here and what is a bold solution to that problem?” Everybody would take a little bit of time and write up the answer to that question. We read it, and then we go into the room, having organized around what we read.
I’m working with one of the largest software firms in the world right now. They are launching a brand new platform strategy, and the execs were so frustrated that they don’t feel that they have urgency and ownership over the new platform strategy. I said, “Stop being frustrated. Let’s find out why.” We did what’s called a decision board, and we asked everybody at the executive level if there were 50 of them.
We asked all fifty people, “Tell us why this platform strategy doesn’t have cascaded urgency, and what are some solutions for it?” We got the richest set of insights that there’s no way in heck that would have come out in a meeting. If we shift to asynchronous collaboration, if we use the simple tools we have available to us and stop using meetings where only four people out of twelve think they are heard, that’s a data point that we have that’s game-changing.
That’s one thing that we say, that we need to get people back in the office. I’m telling you that being remote and collaborating asynchronously is a much more powerful tool. Now, separately from that, everyone’s trying to get everybody back to the office because they say the culture is diminishing. We don’t feel the same connection to each other. The data shows that during the pandemic, the relational strength of teams went down because you didn’t see each other but there were a couple of leaders that we benchmarked, and that are written up in this book like Drew Houston at Dropbox and Matt Mullenweg at WordPress.
During the pandemic, the relational strength of teams went down because people did not see each other in person.
Building Stronger Relationships Remotely
These guys, these guys went out and said, “How do I engineer for stronger relationships in a virtual world?” They started doing simple practices like monthly energy check-ins, where everybody shares what’s bringing their energy down right now, but you do it as a whole team. When people are saying, “Get back to the office,” They are advocating for what I call serendipity bonding. Walk down the hallway, and bump into each other in the coffee room. That’s serendipitous, and it’s not necessarily equal. If you have the whole team sharing their energy levels and why, what we found is over a 6-month period, on a scale of 0 to 5, the relationship scores went up a full point.
The data was, prior to the pandemic, when we were together, average relationship scores were 2.8 on a scale of 0 to 5. During the pandemic, that went to 2.3, which made people say, “Relationships are struggling to get people back to the office.” When you did it purposefully, it went up to 3.9.” My point is, that all of our data about high-performing teams says, I don’t have a dog in the hunt. You decide what you want to do in 2, 3, or 5 days in the office. If you are purposeful, you collaborate using technology effectively. You build purposeful relationships and connections. There’s no reason why hybrid work can’t work well.
Being in the office doesn’t solve all the problems. The thing I do find a little interesting is you have a lot of people who are like, “I want to work where I want, how I want, on what I want.” That’s not very team-oriented. There are some cultures that don’t know whether to tolerate having a collection of free agents or a team. You also have a lot of data where people are saying, “I’m lonely and I’m anxious.” I’m like, you are isolating yourself in your house all day. It’s like some people don’t realize the solution might be some of the being around people, other humans, which we need.
I would again respectfully comment on that in a couple of ways. First of all, the first scenario referred to me feels like the BS entitlement that I see up here in the Bay Area so much, where employees think that they don’t have to work anymore. They don’t have to work diligently and hard. Just independence is ridiculous.
I always say if you want to be an Uber driver or do Instacart, go ahead and do that. That’s a different thing than being part of a team.
What I believe is that teams are defined not by org charts but by KPIs. The first chapter in the book talks about how we are not on a team. We are neither leading a team nor are we on a team. The reality is we are on teams, and there are multiple things we are doing in service of business advancement. We are trying to accelerate digital leads. That’s a team. We are trying to re-engineer a product. That’s a team, and org charts are irrelevant. We need to start redefining the team as the first point.
Teams are defined not by organizational charts but by KPIs.
The second point is we need to function with peer-to-peer accountability. The team needs to hold each other accountable. The team needs to give each other feedback. The team needs to be responsible for each other’s energy, and that’s why I love this idea of never leading alone. The team needs to step up to its role as leaders, and there’s such victimization where teams feel like, “The leader’s not doing.” You have a role as a teammate to be effective, and here’s a roadmap for how to do that a leader can then give this to the team and say, “This is our new standard social contract as a team.”
Talk about this term in the book The Teamship. I know you are talking about shifting from leadership to teamship. I assume leadership is still important, but how do you define this? What’s the same and what’s different there?
As I was alluding to earlier, we have struggled to teach our leaders to give good feedback. I hear about that all the time. I have heard about it for decades but what about a leader that not only gives good feedback but teaches the team to give each other feedback? Those are two very different things. One is traditional hierarchical leadership, which is what we teach but when was the last time a leader was taught how to get the team to give each other feedback? It’s not on the leadership roster, but it is in my book and it is in the role of a leader. One of the things we do is, define feedback in four different categories. Feedback on ideas, performance, and competencies. What you know, what you don’t, what you are capable of, and feedback on style.
All four of those feedback types should be able to be given peer-to-peer. The average team believes less than 5% that it is their role to give each other feedback. Less than 5%. A little bit more on ideas, where somebody might give collaborative ideas on something someone’s working with but I was negligible on performance.
I don’t understand how that is, based on what you said before again, because there’s people’s feedback and then there’s content feedback. A team that shares ideas and debates is almost a requirement. It’s not Keith. You are a jerk in the way you talk to people, but that plan has some major red flags, and I’m worrying about our marketing launch plan. I don’t even I don’t know how you don’t do that.
You would be surprised. It’s less than 25% on content feedback. People work in their silos. This is what we were talking about before. They show up and their job is to do their work in their silos, and there’s very little cross-talk. There’s a practice that could start to bring feedback on all of those, and I call it stress testing. That’s this idea where the team is responsible for stress-testing each other’s work. We talked about that. It’s like you show up, you say, “Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s where I’m going, here’s what I’m struggling with,” and the team says, “BS.”
No one gets to say, “I knew that was a bad idea” in three days, like.
On agile sprints, the team is regularly doing this, but this is the change management portion. There are some high-performing teams where they do this regularly. They are always giving each other this feedback. “Wait. You dropped the ball you were supposed to give it to me.” If you don’t have that team, you need to start prescribing it in new practices. The book is so elegant in its simplicity that we are giving people new practices to try, which will reboot culture. It was a good article I wrote in Fortune that was about how one simple practice can change your culture, and it was all about this one stress test.
In a high-performing team, we need to alternate between leading and following. We play different roles based on where we are in the team and what we are doing. It breaks down that hierarchy.
I’m excited about Ferrazzi Greenlight. We got a new president on board, and I’m excited as I’m launching the book to use it and let him step up. Even though he’s not the CEO of the company, I’m letting him step up as a teammate and help redefine the team structure of the group and what they are responsible for and it’s working beautifully. Sometimes it does take a new person coming in to help reboot the whole mindset of the group as a whole but that’s what’s so important. People always talk about mindsets being so important. Sure, if you are born with them, but the way to change a mindset is to change your practices.
We believe that if you change your practices, you change your mindset. You change your practices, you change your culture. As I mentioned, there are ten chapters, each chapter has a hero story, and then some practices. The simplicity of what I was saying about those companies that were doing those monthly energy checks, what’s your energy, what’s bringing it down is such a simple practice, but it adds a full point on a scale of 0 to 5 to your relationship scores. Simple practices can be game-changing and we have been watching these practices.
If you change your practices, you change your mindset and the culture you lead.
A lot of people admire Amazon’s success, and they look at some of the practices of Amazon, like the one-page memo at the beginning of meetings you might have heard about. I’m trying to work with Amazon on this to shift that one-pager to be sent out a week in advance and to have people have a cycle of collaboration where they comment on that one-pager or you show up in the room.
They were building the time for people to use it, but board meetings have this expectation. Good boards that I have been on have gotten better on this. You are expected to do an hour or more of work, prep, and reading before you show up. You shouldn’t even come into the room if you haven’t done that.
That’s a big shift. There was a major CEO, a very scary Dutch guy, whom I was coaching, and his team, at the very beginning. He was so excited about doing this pre-work for meetings because he was like, “This is going to change.” He sent out a pre-work assignment for all of his team. This was a scary Dutch guy whom I was intimidated by, and half the people didn’t do it. It was because the ritual is that people put such primacy on meetings but not on prep. Getting people to have a new practice.
I think you have a culture in the best companies I have seen like, “If you didn’t do the homework, don’t come to class.”
Here’s a little trick. Instead of sending it out and hoping people will read it beforehand, send it out with a clear question that we are going to talk about in the room. Make sure that everybody fills in the question before they show up so that everybody can read everyone else’s point of view before we start. We’ll also be able to see who didn’t do their homework. The accountability and a little bit of shame, you go through two cycles of that, and you show the spreadsheet and say, “Diane and Joe, why the hell did you fail?”
No one wants to be called on in a class when they didn’t do the reading. This goes back to that eighth-grade fear.
It works.
You talk about cycle safety in the book. I wrote an article on psychological safety. I got some funny responses to my things. Someone wrote to me and was like, “Can you write about something new? This has been covered.” It was a story of having been in a company’s planning session where I witnessed unbelievable psychological safety. It was not a lecture. It was a story of what it looked like in reality. I wrote back to the person, “I talked about it a lot. I understand it’s a buzzword.” The places where I have seen it, I can count on one hand because it’s not something you have or you fix. You can’t just add psychological safety. What are your thoughts on that and what are some of the tenets? You talked about the meeting is the meeting, but how do you begin to shift this? What’s the realistic expectation on time before people would believe that you have created that in your culture?
Psychological Safety In Small Group Dynamics
I have found that we want psychological safety, but it’s not something that you build until you have a reservoir of it that you can now leverage to have candid conversations. I can get a team to increase their psychological safety by 85% in 1 meeting and I will tell you, “If we are having a conversation in a group of 12, the cycle safety is X. If I send everybody to groups of three in breakout rooms and have the same conversation in groups of three,” their psychological safety goes up by 85%. Our data shows that in small groups of three, in the same team, with the same conversation, you have a significantly higher degree of courage, transparency, and belief that you can be truthful in that small group.
You run it like an NCAA bracket a little bit.
I’m not sure. I’m not a basketball fan.
It’s like the semifinals. Then you take the best idea or challenge out of that group, and you bring it to the whole group.
That’s the point. You’ve also used a synthesizing analysis of that group of three, picking one thing. They have already scrubbed three different people’s ideas, and then you come back. That could be something bold. If you ask the question, go into breakout rooms of three. Tell us what should be said that’s not being said. What’s the elephant in the room? You are going to get that. If I asked you in a group of 12 people, “What’s not being said?” You hear crickets. You go into groups of three. You turn it into an assignment. You come back into the room, and you get answers.
It’s so simple. We spend so much time on psychological safety and the environment. Turn it into a practice. What are you trying to achieve? Turn it into practice, and turn it into an assignment. That’s 15% less than 100% at the 85% level, but it radically goes up. It’s scary. The reason I wrote this book is because it’s so easy to coach a team into high performance.
I have been doing this for many years. We can ramp up a new coach to coach a team very quickly.
They are all in the room together. What is a coaching team session? Does it look like group therapy? What does it look like?
Using your basketball analogy, think about a scrimmage. We are going to run a meeting with Ferrazzi in the room when it’s game day.
You are observing.
I’m in the room with the real problems and here’s what I do. I will go around and talk to all team members before the session. I will ask questions like, “What’s the real conversation that this team’s not having that it should?” I get everybody’s input. It’s crazy. Everyone will tell me exactly the truth. They will tell me the truth because they want to. Everybody wants to have a higher-performing team. Everybody wants the truth to get out there.
That’s why people talk behind each other’s backs when they won’t talk together in the room because they have to get it out. I go and have that conversation. Then I design an agenda around the sensitive stuff, or I design an agenda around it. I’m there to make sure the boss doesn’t go off the rails, and to manage the meeting in a way that they have never been able to have these conversations before. All of a sudden, they are like, “This was easier than I thought. My team didn’t melt when I told them the truth, or I didn’t melt when somebody told me that I was letting them down. I realized they were right.”
It’s like having a facilitator and a coach in the room around the real business issues. We are not running case studies. I’m not training anybody in anything. We are talking about their business issues. We are focusing on their business success but at the same time, we are all doing little tiny exercises I will have everybody go around and say, “Personally and professionally, what they are struggling with the most. That’s important because it breeds empathy among the team and vulnerability. That connection we leverage that connection for psychological safety. What I have done in the book is I have given away all my tricks of how I coach teams in one book of all the practices and all the plays, and anybody can now run that play with their team.
There are two small things that I have seen that you need to have psychological safety. When something is said, you need to say, “Thank you for saying that,” not get defensive or interrupt, or all those things that shut it down, and two, the leader sets the tone. I was doing some training and I probably told a story I hadn’t told before that was very personal and then what people went on to share from that was noticeable. We had a facilitator years ago who tested and proved this. In a group, he asked a question like, “What’s something someone doesn’t know about yourself?” He said, “I’ll go first,” and then they went around in a circle. The second time, he took it about 5 degrees deeper, and the stories were different. It does seem that what gets modeled makes a difference if I’m willing to talk about one of those questions like, “Here’s something I screwed up last quarter.” It sets the table for that.
That’s that idea, that personal and professional check-in I was talking about. Also, this idea of defensiveness. One of the chapters in the book is about how to make people coach each other’s competencies. How to get teams to be good at coaching each other? I do an exercise called an open 360. Let’s say you and I are on the same team. The practice is, that Robert goes first. Everybody is going to go around and say, “Robert, what we most admire about you in the last quarter is X.”
I did this in my forum. We did this exercise and then here’s one thing, a blind spot that we noticed.
Everyone goes around it because of Robert, but here’s the position. Robert because we care for you and your success is important to ours. I might suggest and then we all give Robert that. Feedback and then the person can respond with 1 of 3 things, “Thank you, I’m going to take that advice” “No, thank you, I’m not” or, “Here’s why, and I’m going to go study that one.”
It’s called the Yes, No, Maybe.” Again, you said that it’s important for the person not to be defensive. You can’t say that without a formula. I boiled it down into a formula where it’s so practical everybody knows that they are not allowed to be defensive. They are not allowed to push back. They are only allowed to say yes, no, maybe, and Thank you. We have prescribed the practice at such a level of detail that you can’t screw it up. Systems, help processes, and practices 100%.
One of the things you talked about, which I’m fascinated to hear, is how it could fill the bucket of Gen Z, but you advocate for team-led praise rather than leader-led praise. What does that look like?
I don’t think there’s nearly enough praise in organizations. I know in my company there. I’m so born of traditional fear and scarcity as a poor kid from Pittsburgh that I’m so hard on myself, that it’s difficult for me to celebrate the wins. It’s very funny. I’m going to come back to your question, but there’s one of the chapters on candor led by a leader who has this phrase, “There’s no time to throw parades for each other.” He was talking about meetings he calls outlier meetings. The only intention of that meeting is for all of us to get on the table what we think isn’t working, any place we see it.
Our place, your place, it doesn’t matter. The whole intention is to come and talk about what’s not working and get it on the table so we can fix it. It’s called an outlier meeting. In those meetings, he would say, “There’s no place to throw ourselves a parade.” Now you go to the celebration chapter. How do we throw the parade?” You have to have a balanced approach to these things. It’s wonderful when you hear from the boss and the boss says, “Congratulations, Robert,” but it’s also very powerful when everybody goes around and picks one person every week that they want to thank for something they did very specifically.
It’s not that it’s praise for the entire team in its entirety, it’s more coming from your peers.
It’s coaching praise. If I said, “Robert, I appreciate you working with me at 5:30 your time because I know you have your kids because I had a deliverable that night. I appreciate you going the extra mile, and then somebody else goes around. There are so many benefits to this. Number one, if you are specific about what you are praising, you start to define for each other the behaviors people want to see more of but it’s also so exciting, because if I’m doing this, what if Keith doesn’t get praised in three months? It’s a note to Keith it’s like, “You are slipping in terms of the team’s perspective of your generosity and seamanship.” It’s an ancillary benefit to that regard as well.
Much of your work has been anchored around relationships. I’m curious. You never eat alone. There was your philosophy on building professional relationships but how does that extend? Have we lost the focus on the importance of this? This book is about a team and relationships and other people in a professional organization. What are the tenets from that first book that carried over?
Transforming Teams Through Relationships
I appreciate you asking because it took me a while. I wrote this book about networking when I was a successful entrepreneur. I had left a big corporate guy, running a company for Michael Milken at the time. It was a book about why this young person, stupidly young before he was 30, was the Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte. Why did this person get that job? It was all about relationships.
I wrote that book, set it aside, and said, “I’m going to start research and decided to start a research institute for the future of high-performing teams and organizations. There’s this networking thing that I’ve done, and I appreciate your appreciation for it, but here’s what I do now high-performing. Future-of-work stuff. I didn’t want to be known all my life as the networking guy.
What I realized is that we are waking up now. To get crap things done, you have to work in networks. The themes from Never Eat Alone lead with generosity, leading with authenticity, and building accelerated trust in a purposeful way because you are thrown in a room with people from different parts of the organization, and you have to snap your fingers and lead. How do you create followership? You all of those same principles from Never Eat Alone, you will thread through all my books.
In order to get something done these days, you have to work in networks.
The tipping point for me was Never Eat Alone, then I wanted to study groups like Yo forums and how small group relationships transform people’s lives. I wrote a book called Who’s Got Your Back? That’s what started to make me realize the power of teams. Networking was about building relationships with Robert.
Why Teams Should Function Like Masterminds
A mastermind is a team on steroids. It’s a team that exists to help each other individually and collectively. If anyone has done the data on this, I don’t know any successful people who don’t attribute how much value they have gotten to it on being one high-performing mastermind, personally and professionally.
I’m shocked. There’s research I did while writing Who’s Got Your Back? I interviewed folks in YPO forums, a mastermind. I asked them a simple question “Do you treat your team the same as your forum?” The answer was uniformly, “No.” They didn’t have the same standard. My forum is like this, “Do I treat my team that way? Am I intending?” The answer was no.
Particularly the “no advice” standard, sharing stories without advice, and not trying to win arguments.
There isn’t enough research on this, and I want teams to be like masterminds. I do. It needs to be. That’s such an awakening.
Maybe that’s your next book.
Your Team is Your Mastermind is this book. The idea is that every company will get a master boost of acceleration if it approaches teamship well. If we double down on high-performing teams, we are going to bust through any of our performance levels from the past. Even good news can get better.
In a meta fashion, it’s interesting all of this against this backdrop of loneliness. What is loneliness? The person who says, “I want to work how, what, and when I want.” They are not going to be very happy. You talk to most people, maybe it won’t be the same with Elon Musk, but for people who worked for Steve Jobs, it’s like they are back in that room reminiscing about the amazing things they accomplished as a team. It’s like the college sports experience. People talk about team moments. They don’t talk about individual moments when they are relishing the good old days.
That was my recognition. I was in two very interesting teams. I was on the team at Deloitte where we aspired to someday. We were the lowest to the Big Eight.
It was eight at that point. When I came out of school 6, but now it’s 4.
We were at the lowest with no unaided brand recognition at all, and we aspired to someday be on par with Accenture at the time it was called Andersen Consulting. I went to Starwood, where our aspirations of beating Marriott and innovating in the industry at Deloitte, we were a band of brothers and sisters, holding together around the world, and we did it. Deloitte is now on par with the best consultancies in the world at Starwood, we had to sell below an industry multiple to Marriott. We didn’t do it. We were competitive, siloed, and despite great innovations and a brilliant CEO. We didn’t build a cohesive team. That’s what made me realize the difference between these two ways of working.
I look forward to everyone here in the book and what the next one will be because your bookshelf is growing behind you. Where can people learn about your work? I’m sure they can get the book anywhere books are sold.
Closing Thoughts
Get the book anywhere. If you want to get the book for your old teens, which I recommend, we’ve created a free video series around the book that’s free for you. If you order the books as a team, go online to KeithFerrazzi.com. We have an arrangement with a bookseller for placing group orders, and you’ll get access to a video series with me coaching you through each chapter. KeithFerrazzi.com is where you can learn more.
Keith, thanks for joining us. I can promise you that the four-time crowd is even smaller. We will keep that on the radar.
Thanks a lot, Robert. I appreciate you.
To our audience, thanks for reading the show. If you enjoyed this episode and you are a longtime reader, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a review or rating. That helps new users discover the show and hear from amazing guests like Keith. Thank you again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Ferrazzi Greenlight
- Who’s Got Your Back
- Never Eat Alone
- Leading Without Authority
- Competing in the New World of Work
- Never Lead Alone
- Keith Ferrazzi
About Keith Ferrazzi
Keith Ferrazzi, a #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, Competing in the New World of Work, and his newest book, Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship. Keith is an acclaimed global executive team coach, who stands at the forefront of transformative leadership having coached the transformation of Fortune 500 corporations, the World Bank, fast growth Unicorns and even governments of entire countries. The founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, Keith spearheads behavioral shifts in leadership and high impact teams, empowering organizations to thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of business.
Keith’s research can be found in prestigious publications including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company, and Inc. Magazine, where his columns serve as valuable insights for business leaders.
