Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we’re joined by Keith Ferrazzi, Author of Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship and Founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, to unpack the 10 powerful shifts every leader must make to thrive in the age of teamship.
Keith shares the core idea behind his book, why traditional leadership is broken, and makes a bold case for moving from command-and-control to a more co-elevating, collaborative way of working.
🎓 In this episode, Keith discusses:
The 10 core shifts from Never Lead Alone
Co-elevation as a new model for transformation
Why HR must lead the shift from leadership to teamship
Why teamship outperforms solo leadership in today’s world
How to foster psychological safety that leads to high performance
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Keith Ferrazzi 0:00
There's some social contracts that's like, I would never challenge my peer, that's throwing them under the bus. There's other social contracts that say, I will, of course, challenge my peers. I would never let them fail. Yeah. And so you need to recreate that agreement, that social contract, and then when you do stress testing, you're easily showing that that social contract isn't scary, so it's difficult. If you have a group of 12 people and you expect somebody to raise their hand and say, Chris, I disagree with you. You're missing this. That's audacious, that's challenging, that's probably not going to happen. But if you say to folks, okay, now we're going to stress test Chris. Chris's work every because we're not going to let Chris fail. We're committed to Chris. We're committed to this project. Everybody go in the breakout room. Write down what you think Chris is missing. Write down an idea for Chris. Hand it back to Chris. Now Chris owns that feedback. One of the important things we teach in the book is when you move from hierarchical feedback, which we've always gotten, which hierarchical feedback is a directive. It's not feedback. It's a directive. Yeah, when you move to peer to peer feedback, which is what I was researching in my book, who's got your back 15 years ago, when you move to peer to peer feedback, it's a gift. You
Chris Rainey 1:20
Hey, Keith, welcome to the show. How you doing? My friend, Chris, I'm well, I'm looking forward to this. What you've been up to, like, last time we saw each other, I was in New York. It's been a while. Gosh,
Keith Ferrazzi 1:42
recently, I was at the TED conference, and we had 60 CIOs and CHROs together talking about that partnership and how that partnership needs to be different in a world of AI. And that was absolutely mind blowing in terms of some of the awakenings that we had in terms of the future of HR processes, so I'm excited maybe to share a little bit about that as we go through this call too. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 2:05
before we get into that, just very quickly for our audience, give everyone a little bit of a background for you personally in your journey to where we are now. Yeah,
Keith Ferrazzi 2:14
well, I don't know how far we want to go back, but my real motivation came from as being a poor kid in the crash of the steel industry in the 70s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my family suffered from the lethargy and the in unwillingness of the large steel industry to adopt a new ways of working, and I made a commitment when I was a kid at 10 years of age, that I was going to grow up someday and help fix American manufacturing where that's taken me. In my path is really better understanding constantly new ways of working. It was interesting. The steel industry crashed because the Japanese picked up total quality management, Six Sigma, new processes of working. And then that was actually an American academic set of managerial philosophies, and brought them over Japan and used in the topple the US steel industry. We're at the same inflection point today. Chris with AI and steel organizations clinging to old ways of working in a world that's calling with radical volatility, calling for radical adaptability and radical new ways of collaborating. And so that's been my work for 24 years. I was the chief marketing officer and head of the growth practice at Deloitte. I was chief marketing officer and head of sales at Starwood Hotels, and I decided to start this research institute, very much focused on high performing teams, because I believe that's the missing layer. We focus a lot on employee engagement. We focus a lot on enterprise strategy, but really it's the team effectiveness that unleashes the value in transformation, and we're under curating our focus there. Wow,
Chris Rainey 3:57
I love that. We kind of share that in common as kids, by the way, I grew up in in the poorest part of the UK, in Manchester. No, it was actually East London, but a specific part of East London where we had the highest crime rate, you know, council I lived in, sort of council housing, single parent, four kids, and kind of had this sort of chip on my shoulder against the world of, you know, I don't really want to be a victim of circumstance, and I'm going to are going to go and change, and I'm going to take charge of my destiny. And that was sort of my motivation as,
Keith Ferrazzi 4:32
I mean, that's absolutely the fuel that fueled me. And then I spent an entire lifetime of unbundling the insecurities,
Chris Rainey 4:39
oh, man, we could get into that. I don't think it's that my wife will tell you that they're still not gone, and I don't think it ever goes. And I think part of that is, you know, I wouldn't wish my childhood on many kids, because it was rough. You know, unfortunately, there was also a lot of drugs, domestic violence and stuff like that in the household. But that. A level of resilience that I didn't know at the time would serve me very well in my career.
Keith Ferrazzi 5:07
Many people know me for my first book Never Eat Alone, which is about the power of relationships in our life and and the power of relationships in organizations to breed productivity and and advancement. But my next book was really my turning point. It was called who's got your back. I studied small groups and how small groups can change and transform individuals. I looked at AI programs. I looked at Weight Watchers programs, I looked at YPO and just talking about individuals capacity to unbundle insecurities and step up and be the best that they can be. I found the power of the small group, right? That was actually the tipping point for me to start really diving into high performing teams. I believe that high performing teams can actually be transformative, not only to organizational success, but in but in fact, to individual performance and individual psychology, I have seen individuals change once they have a small tribe that they are committed to. I call it co elevation, where the team is committed not only to a mission, but each other's success. And when that occurs, when that team reaches that it has escape velocity, and it has high degrees of challenge culture. It has a high degree of curiosity, less defensiveness, willing to swing for fences, of innovation. And you know, that's it's been beautiful work, because I've seen people personally transformed through the work we do with teams. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 6:43
I love to hear your thoughts on this, actually, because you're the perfect person to ask this question, too. So the first 10 years of my career was in it was building high performing sales teams, so I didn't go to school. I actually started at 16 years old to help support my mom with my younger brothers and sisters, and very quickly realized sales was an area that I loved, and one of the things that we were known for, Shane and I was when we there was under performers in the business, they would actually put them on our team, and all of a sudden, over a couple of weeks, they will become high performers. And we created this little, all sort of ecosystem. We had 300 sales people, but we had our own little, small group of sales, and then we had our own set of principles, values, and a sort of subculture in there. And you couldn't be part of that team unless you really contributed to it. And you there was no us versus them mentality. There's a we mentality. And that was always something it was really interesting. And I love to hear your thoughts around around that, because, well,
Keith Ferrazzi 7:45
first of all, you've already launched the first chapter of my book. So the book that I've written called never lead alone. Yes, 10 shifts from leadership to Team ship. It really pays attention to the reality that we can ask teams to level up by 30% in their performance, to meet the leader in leadership. And what you did when you brought somebody new onboard, you onboarded them into something that I called RE contracting. And re contracting is when the group agrees to a new set of behaviors. You know, you mentioned you had a small subculture. And by the way, what a great what a great way to start this conversation out. You mentioned you had a small subculture. Every team has the opportunity to create its own subculture, and that subculture can actually be the defining culture, ultimately, for the company as a whole, we know what we are looking for in culture, and culture, to me, I call it a social contract. You created a social contract among that small group of individuals that was different than what other sales teams were doing. You probably had a social contract where you had each other's backs. Yes, you probably had a social contract where everybody agreed they would grow while they were working there. You probably had a social contract that agreed to candor and transparency, because if we don't tell each other the truth, we won't grow and we won't achieve the mission. You probably had a social contract of hidden and out of the ballpark of winning together, of celebrating together. So each of those things I just mentioned, you know, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, moving from individual performers to a co elevating commitment to each other, moving from sparse praise to to a celebratory culture. Each of those three are chapters in the 10 shifts of moving from leadership to Team ship. You know, in a lot of sales organizations and organizations overall, the leader is standing there like a maypole, and everybody's dancing around them. What we're needing is the team to step up. And it's one thing for the leader to give feedback, but let's have the team give each other feedback. It's one thing for the leader to hold the team accountable. Let's have the team hold each other accountable. Once you start to unleash that, and this is something that most organizations are missing relative to their leadership training, their leadership coaching, they are not teaching leaders how to expect more from their team. How do you expect the team to hold each other accountable, the team to lift each other's energy, the team to push each other higher so that is an entire lost, lost aspect of productivity and performance, which is high performing teams that almost no leadership courses teach.
Chris Rainey 10:32
Yeah. Now I wish I could say I planned all of that, but if for me, it was just I had a very bad manager, kind of old, sort of command and control. And so when I became a manager, I just wanted to lead the way. I wanted to be led. And so that's all that was. It was, I wish I could say I planned all of those things, and I had this, you know, huge aha. But it wasn't. What we did
Keith Ferrazzi 10:56
is we went out and for 24 years now, since frazi Green light was started with this mission of being the number one Research Institute for high performing teams and coaching service for high performing teams, we've done 24 years of research of teams like yours, and we've observed the practices. So that's the other thing. I want to be clear. The book is not a conceptual book. It's a roadmap, and it's a set of high return practices that teams can quickly adopt in order to start moving forward and achieving higher degrees of performance. Many organizations, HR leaders, have read the book and said, Wow, you have these 32 practices which we can just take out and lit and lay on top of our our leadership competencies, because most organizations, they put the pipe down the middle of the street. But the practices that bring candor to life, the practices that bring celebration to life, the practices that bring interdependencies and breaking down silos that bring that to life. They're missing those. And so we have curated research of 32 high return practices across 10 critical shifts which brings teams performance to life.
Chris Rainey 12:13
I love that. What would you say is the most important shift that teams need to make? 100%
Keith Ferrazzi 12:18
I can tell you, it's the shift from conflict avoidance to candor, conflict avoidance to candor. Now it's interesting, because a lot of people would say, Well, what about trust? And there's many ways you can achieve trust. I saw teams that did not have strong relationships, but they had a social contract that was born in hiring and onboarding, that said we are a challenge culture. You look at organizations, you know, like Ray Dalio organization, he wrote book principles, you know, that's extreme candor, right? Yeah, I love that, yeah. But they don't have a soft, squishy, relational underpinning. Amazon has a strong candor culture. You know, they don't have a relational culture. Now, what we've designed is a layer cake. The most important to performance is a team that puts it all in the table, tells the truth in the room, no meeting after the meeting, right? That's the most important layer that we have found in our research that is predictive to elevating performance, it decreases cycle time of getting things done if you have a meeting. And what our research showed is the average meeting of 12 people, four people have been hurt. Now, if you that, what that with the rest of those eight do is they have the meeting after the meeting, or subsequent meetings or private DMing, and you can't get high degrees of productivity with meeting after the meeting. So what we've found when we when, when teams adopt our practices, 10 out of 12 people feel that they're heard. The average candor score on a scale of zero to five, the average candor score is in the high ones, and that's answering questions like we challenge each other when it's risky to do so on a scale of zero to five, high ones, I can get a team into the fours in one meeting, adopting new, candid practices. So it's the practices that matter. Now underneath that challenge layer where you commit to giving each other feedback, you commit to pushing each other harder, you commit to putting it all on the table and having truth in the room. There's a relational layer that we coach to. We believe that to build relational safety, build trust through celebration, through bonding, through shared resilience. That bottom layer is really important for most teams. So we have three different chapters on building that trust and psychological safety, one on bonding, one on having the team share its commitment to resilience, and one and meld and well being, and one on on celebration. So you build that psychological safe layer, then you start practicing chapters two and 10, which is all. All about challenge culture and a growth culture. But then at the top, we have this thing called 21st Century collaboration, which is teams learn how to use asynchronous tools to build collaboration and not use meetings as the primary form of collaboration. So we have an entire layer of reinventing how teams collaborate so that they don't use meetings, which is the poorest form of collaboration, but we use 21st century tools to do so. So those are the three layers, and it's the 10 shifts across those three layers. I
Chris Rainey 15:31
love that. It seems like a huge shift right culture, shift in the way of working. What's the biggest challenge that you see that the teams have to and companies have to overcome, because that's very vastly different from the yeah, let
Keith Ferrazzi 15:46
me, let me stay focused on the history. You mentioned what, what the biggest, uh, opportunity was, and I said moving from conflict avoidance to candor. Let me just give you a couple of the simple practices. Because to be honest, Chris, um, this work isn't difficult, because all we have to do is adopt new practices. Let me give you two of them. So let's say a team is committed to go on this journey of being a high performing team. The first thing we do is we practice something called stress testing. So stress testing, you know, if a team normally does a report out of some initiative. I'll tell you how that goes. Prior to the meeting. People haven't thought about the topic. Everybody comes into the meeting. Everybody hears the 20 page report deck that just as is being, you know, shared, clicking through pages and probably sharing what the person wants everybody to hear. And then there might be a few voices, the boss and a couple of others, and then they go on to the next report out. We've watched this time and time again. That's how a report out happens. We turn stress report outs into stress tests. So what happens is, prior to the meeting, everybody knows what the question is. They, in fact, could have been given a question that they have to answer prior to the meeting. So let's say the person who's doing the quote report out might ask a critical question, something like, where do you what you know, what are the areas you think we're missing on this project, even before I show up? You know, do you have any innovations or ideas? So people will have thought about it and answered some questions prior to the meeting. Then you come into the meeting and the person does their report out, and it's a standard structure. It's only like 1015 minutes. It's, here's what we've achieved. Because you need to force people into speaking about outcomes, not just where projects are. Here's what we've achieved. Here's where we're struggling. You need to force people into sharing and opening what they don't know, so that it's not just everything's green light, green light, green light. You know, here's a yellow, here's a red. So force where they're struggling and then where they're going next. Then we ask everybody in the room they already know in advance that they're going to be asked to go into groups of two or three and challenge what they just heard. So what happens in most report outs is everybody's passively listening, because there's no assumption you're going to have to respond in a stress test, everybody knows they're going to have to respond with what I said earlier. What challenges do you see? What innovations would you offer, and what ideas and where could you be helpful? Right now, the benefit of this is everybody now is actively listening. Everybody is writing down in their breakout rooms what their challenges are. Everybody's writing down what their innovations are. Everybody's writing down where they can be helpful. We talk about culture. You've just assigned a challenge culture, you've just assigned a innovative, curious culture, you've just assigned a supportive culture. So the critical elements of culture can easily be turned into assignments using simple practices. If everybody started doing stress testing, it would be a superfood of high performing teams. Now, I said we got 32 practices that we coach teams through, but stress testing alone, we're working right now with many of the largest organizations in the world, even a government right now, implementing these practices. And I've got companies that are now finding themselves on a trajectory of doubling their market cap. One country is trying to double its GDP in five years, and we're using these practices among government and and the NGOs and the and the and the local businesses to actually look how they can collaborate together to increase GDP? Yeah.
Chris Rainey 19:40
I love how simple and practical everything that you do is in that you just said as well, and having that framework. And then people, I'm assuming, once they build in the reps they kind of get, they get better at doing it. The
Keith Ferrazzi 19:56
answer of what's the biggest challenge? It's just getting started. These practices are so simple, one meeting that we facilitate. Or if people just buy the book, it's it's written as a workbook. You know, every chapter like this chapter, from conflict avoidance to candor, every chapter has an anchor hero story. There's a there's a guy who's a CEO of a company called XFINITY who crushes it on this candor piece. And so there's a simple few page story about about that team. And then there's the practices
Chris Rainey 20:28
I need to get this. I need to get I need to get a copy of your book as soon as possible.
Keith Ferrazzi 20:37
Free coaching. If you want to do it, I'm happy to
Chris Rainey 20:39
help. No, I love it. I think the interesting thing is, we're doing some of what you're describing, but we don't have a framework. And I love, I love the idea of having a specific framework for each of these things. I was just winging it. I'll be honest, it sounds like you did a pretty
Keith Ferrazzi 20:52
good job of winging it, so I'm just probably going to catch up with you, because, like I said, we've observed your teams. We've observed Jeff Bezos his team back in the day. You know, we've gotten input from Jamie Diamond's team, some of the highest performing teams in the world. We consumed their practices, dusted them off. We have a 3000 team data set, wow, 3000 team data set that we've curated over 24 years that has led to the shortest book I've ever written. Look, Oh, wow. Oh, wow. So like, this is, this was never eat alone, my first book
Chris Rainey 21:29
that's amazing. So you've condensed everything into there with this, with the stories and with the
Keith Ferrazzi 21:34
press, the shortest book ever. This is, this is stepping up to what Ben Franklin said, If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. I had 24 years to write this book. So it's only, it's only the meat that you need.
Chris Rainey 21:49
What are the most sort of debilitating behaviors that you see on the team,
Keith Ferrazzi 21:55
the debilitative behaviors? Well, look, I mean, I don't want to stay on this conflict avoidance piece. And you know, I'll tell you what it is. It's siloed behaviors. It's working in your silos. So one of the things in chapter two we talk about teaming out and teaming out is when you stop thinking about your team as your org chart. One of the greatest debilitative behaviors of teams is that they think that their org chart is their team. We shift that mindset and start coaching teams to realize your teams are aligned to your KPIs, your key performance indices, is where your team is, so for every big rock. So Chris, if I think about this upcoming year, you've got a new software platform you're launching in the AI world, there's a that there's big rocks associated with that, right? Each of those big rocks is a team, and that's what you need to be teaching your organization. Forget about the fact that you've got a sales organization, a product organization, a technology organization, you've got big rocks, and each big rock is a team. And so when, when you ask one of your your teammates the question, Hey, how's your team going? In the back of your mind, you should be thinking, how's that big rock team doing? And they should ask you, well, Which team do you mean, Chris? That's when you start to wake up and the and so once you understand who the team is, there's a process. We call it a wrap, a relationship action plan around the it's building your team. Once that happens, as you did when in the sales organization we talked about earlier, then you create the social contract on that team. You lock and load it. Okay, while we work together, we're going to grow further and faster than we ever have. While we work together, we will never hold back the truth from each other. We'll tell you. So for instance, there's some so called social contracts that's like, I would never challenge my peer, that's throwing them under the bus. There's other social contracts that say I will, I will, of course, challenge my peers, I would never let them fail. Yeah, and so you need to recreate that agreement, that social contract, and then when you do stress testing, you're easily showing that that social contract isn't scary. So it's difficult if you have a group of 12 people and you expect somebody to raise their hand and say, Chris, I disagree with you. You're missing this? That's audacious, that's challenging, that's probably not going to happen. But if you say to folks, okay, now we're going to stress test Chris. Chris's work every because we're not going to let Chris fail. We're committed to Chris. We're committed to this project. Everybody go in the breakout room. Write down what you think Chris is missing. Write down an idea for Chris. Hand it back to Chris. Now Chris owns that feedback. One of the important things we teach in the book is when you move from hierarchical feedback, which we've always gotten, which hierarchical feedback is a directive, it's not feedback, it's a direct Yeah, when you move to peer to peer feedback. Which is what I was researching in my book who's got your back 15 years ago, when you move to peer to peer feedback, it's a gift. You don't own it. You're not You're not giving people directives. So when you're working in an organization where peers are challenging each other, they're not allowed to give each other directives. They're just giving each other input that will assure that that person has the benefit of all of our collaborative insights. It's it's bringing inclusion. We've always talked about de, and I this is bringing inclusion to the table. This is making sure every voice is heard. It's actually interesting from an HR perspective. You know, I wanted to have a chapter on de, and I, despite at the time when I was writing the book, it didn't have the backlash, and even now, I think it's even more important. So I wanted to have a chapter on where is the future of de and I in the book. And it was funny, because by the time I got to that chapter, I realized that I had already included two critical parts of de and I as a part of the book already. We had a chapter around unleashing people's full voice in the room. We had a chapter on making sure that we did the relationship action plan and that we were inclusive in our collection of input. Yeah, right, that that nailed the eye of de and I, yeah. Then we had a chapter on shifting from accidental bonding to purposeful bonding, where teams that are virtual and hybrid have to double down on building real relationships, because if you don't, you're never going to have them. So if you're a hybrid organization, you don't have a face to face interaction, walking down a hallway checking in on a coffee room. You need to be purposeful about bonding. So we created a practice called a monthly energy check, where everybody says, Where is my energy these days and what's bringing it down. We found that the average relationship score of a team on a scale of zero to five was in the mid twos when you did monthly energy checks, and the team committed to helping each other lift each other's energy. We were able to move those scores into the high threes and lows fours in less than a few months. So the B and belonging. People's belonging scores went up. So it was interesting. By the time I got to the DEI B chapter, we had already covered two critical ones in actually re engineering how we work. And then I was able to do a chapter on practices of understanding otherness and sameness. So there's a beautiful chapter on how to bring the whole de and IB, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging to life in an organization through the work itself, which I believe is what we've always failed to do. We treated de and I and belonging as a program, and we should have been ingraining it into how we work and collaborate, which is what this book does.
Chris Rainey 27:52
I love, that I was actually thinking that as you were sharing examples earlier, that you were already doing that to your point, I'll tell you a story, actually from a few weeks ago, which is interesting. We I had a new employee joined from from from India, flew over. It's now a member of the team. And we had our first we do, meeting with the whole entire team in person every Monday. And I had a one on one after with this individual. And he said, I can't believe that, you know, so and so challenged you in front of the whole business, you're the CEO. How can they tell you that you're wrong, you know? And I was like, What do you mean? I was like, but they were just sharing their, you know, their perspective, and sort of giving me their insight. He said, Yeah, but you're the CEO. How can they tell you that day? And it was like, it was like, in India, you know, where all the companies I worked in, you'd never so I was wondering, like, from a cultural perspective, that's beautiful.
Keith Ferrazzi 28:46
We've implemented these practices in German cultures, in Indian cultures, in Asian cultures. We found that the natural inclination was not to do with that guy did so in your organization, Chris, you have a social contract where people can challenge openly. And here this guy was in a room full of people challenging you, right? Yeah, that is rare, as you know, but that's been conditioned over a number of years working together, and you inviting that kind of feedback as a as a creative to the business. So what you do, if you're in India, is you'll do a town hall, and you'll give a presentation. The CEO will give a presentation and say, Okay, here's what happened the last quarter that we that we've succeeded on. Here's where we're challenged, and here's where we're going in the next quarter. And then you snap your fingers, and everybody in the company goes into breakout rooms of two or three. They open up a teams room or a Google Doc, and they write, what is the CEO missing, right? What is an innovation or an idea that we should probably be doing, that we're not right? And then. When you take all of that and by the time everybody comes back, you use AI to summarize what the entire company could be. 1000s of people have said, and you read the feedback. Now, of course, you can get into the details and get much better feedback by analyzing the feedback. So what I just did again is the culture, Chris, that you naturally have, because you've organically built it, I turned it into a practice. So when I do a practice in India or in Asia, they will be acquiescent of that practice. They'll do what they've assigned to do. And so you can now assign a practice that speaks truth to power.
Chris Rainey 30:44
I love that. Yeah, just thinking this whole conversation, the cultural nuances that I was wondering, how they apply, what you just answer, they
Keith Ferrazzi 30:51
do. But this is just the issue again, if you don't turn it into a practice, these high return practices are the gold Yeah, this book is full of high return practices that change culture. I wrote an article in Fortune Magazine recently that just said, You know what? I have found, culture change isn't tough. You just have to change your practices.
Chris Rainey 31:10
When you when you speak to people that have read the book, what are some of the practices and that they did, they mentioned to you that perhaps surprised you did. They say, hey, this was the one that really moving.
Keith Ferrazzi 31:22
They love the energy check. Yeah, because, you know, I've been so shocked. I'm working with one of the largest 50 companies in the world in the tech space, and they love the energy check. This is an old, grizzled company that used to be deeply relational and deeply connected, but it's lost that right, and they love regaining their intimacy and connection as an organization through these regular energy checks with whatever teams they're working with. So I was surprised. I would have thought that a bunch of old grizzled engineers would have not wanted to do that kind of soft stuff, yeah, but that was one of the things that they gravitated to the most. Everybody loves the stress test. That's the thing that everybody jumps into very quickly. We have another practice we we call meeting shifting where, and this is one of the most important ones, I think, today where you shift the collaboration conversation outside of the meeting into a synchronous collaboration using our collaborative software. So before the meeting, you begin to debate in the cloud, and then you show up in the meeting to land the plane, not start the conversation.
Chris Rainey 32:37
Yeah, because that drives me crazy. Honestly, having meetings to discuss what's going to be. Taught, you're having a meeting about the meeting, and then you got and then you go away like because as founders like me and Shane for years, when when, when we have a meeting is to is to get the job done. And in our in large companies I worked, worked in in the past, it's like, we're having a meeting about what we're going to discuss in the meeting. It's like, crazy. It's like, what we're doing, and then we're expected to go away and then do the work. It's like, it's doesn't make any sense.
Keith Ferrazzi 33:09
Chapter Six of the book is all about this 21st Century collaboration and moving us away from a meeting culture. People love, love that.
Chris Rainey 33:20
Yeah. What would you say? Some of the misconceptions that you commonly hear about high performing teams or high performing that you come across,
Keith Ferrazzi 33:30
you know this is going to rock people's boat a bit. The reality is that I have observed, as I mentioned earlier. Remember our layer cake. At the bottom, you build the psychological safety. In the middle, you introduce the challenge culture and the commitment to peer to peer, coaching and growth. And at the top, you use 21st Century collaboration to speed up innovation and collaboration. I've seen many teams not have a relational layer. They just have a social contract that they're going to be butt kicking and they're going to get the answer, and they're going to drive a database culture, etc, and they crush it. So the relational layer, the layer of celebration, of caring, of bonding, that is necessary if you have a normal set of insecure people that need that connection, like I am, right? They need a connection to have the psychological safety, to be candid, to be a great note, to be challenging. But you can also just hire for it, like Ray Dalio, does you don't? You don't have to have Amazon hires for those kind of resilient people. I know a lot of folks have gone to work at Amazon and left because they don't like that challenge culture. Ray
Chris Rainey 34:51
deleu says it in a lot of interviews. He's like, this is not for everyone. Like, you know, I've heard him say many times, like, our we are very clearly, uh. Clear about what we want, and this is when we understand that this is not for everyone.
Keith Ferrazzi 35:04
Yeah, look. I mean, I I saw him at Davos this year, and I said to him, I said, Ray, you know, I love your book, and I'm bringing it to life with this new book of mine through practices with big old companies. I said, I'm so jealous of you. You you get you go to the shortcut, you just hire assholes.
And he just, he just looked at me, and then he laughed, and he goes, You know, I think you're right.
Chris Rainey 35:32
He got it. He got it. Yeah, I remember early in my career, I used to get a lot of heat from my CEO and about actually build it, building relationships with my team. And that sounds like a strange statement. So for example, I would, once a month, my whole team would do practices like we'd all have a meal where people are each member of the team will bring in some food that represents their culture and their heritage, and we'll have like a feast. And it was something like a monthly practice that we did, and then we would bond through conversations of family and, you know, just sort of or we were trained, there was a group of my team, we used to go and train and run together and work out together. And I remember being a boring a meeting with my CEO, and said, Hey, Chris, they're not your friends. What you doing? Like you're their boss. And I was like, how do you expect me to build meaningful relationships with it, with my team, if I'm not doing that, and I think looking back, that was one of the things that built that connection, that we went above and beyond for each other. We you know, we'll stay. I remember there's times where we stayed late to make sure that that one person who hadn't hit their sales target, that we all helped them achieve it, right? And we didn't leave until that person,
Keith Ferrazzi 36:41
I I had a major retailer last weekend coaching them, and they were so anxiety ridden about doing the bonding layer that you're talking about. They were like they had been experiencing some consternation among the team, some lacking of trust and but they felt that they they didn't have permission to bond. And I kept saying to them, Please, guys, you gotta give me, give me a Give me a break. Here, let me show you how we can begin to build that psychological safety through bonded relationships. I mean, look, I'm the guy that wrote, you know, the book on relationships. I'm, you know, sold a million copies, and the focus of building purposeful relationships has been my study for life. I promise we can do this. They said, No, no, we're not going to do it. So we get into the meeting, and instead of what I normally do is build that bonding layer, and then on top of it, I build the challenge layer. We went straight to the challenge later, and it was fine. We did pretty well and but they got comfortable enough challenging each other that I paused, and I said to the CEO, I said, are you ready now to allow me to do the bonding layer? Because now that you've seen that this group isn't so precious, we can push a little bit and start to care about each other. And he's like, Yeah, let's do it. So then we went to the bonding layer. It's normally, I start with the bonding layer and build the challenge layer. But in this case, the practices are so evident, we started with the challenge layer, and that loosened them up to realize, you know what, I can actually have a disagreement with Chris. We're not because the way that we're currently structured in meetings, it takes a lot of courage to challenge Chris in the room. But when you turn it into a simple practice, it doesn't, yeah,
Chris Rainey 38:25
so what's the practice for bonding, and What? What? Give me an example of our practice Do you can use for bond? Well, you, you did
Keith Ferrazzi 38:31
it, dude. Dude. I mean, seriously, I didn't have to research this thing for 24 years. I could have just studied your team, but you did it already. What we what we do is we do a bonding dinner, and a bonding dinner, we have two questions. One question is, what experience of your past helps us define how you show up and who you are today?
Chris Rainey 38:53
Oh, I love that.
Keith Ferrazzi 38:56
I've curated 20 some questions, and that is the most powerful question. You hear about kids who were brought up and alcoholic parents, yeah, as you know, as you were and and feeling that they had to grow up too soon, right? You hear about people who had coming out stories where they felt shame at a young age. You feel. You hear about, you hear about loss, of folks who lost their parents early. You hear about these things that have happened to people that they've struggled with, that they've overcome, that immigrant stories of coming to the country when they were in their teens or even as adults. So that layer, that's one of the questions. We've curated 20 some questions, and I've ranked prioritized them, is that
Chris Rainey 39:39
in the book, is that question? Is that question in the book? Oh, that's such a good question. Chapter
Keith Ferrazzi 39:44
four. So, you know, it's interesting the organization of the chapters, because this book is a road map for business performance, elevation and for transformation. I didn't start with the bonding layer, because many business leaders like your leader, the. Want to get right to the guts of work. Yeah, so I started with the stress testing challenge layer, and then I built on coming back to similar to this retailer, you know, I wanted to get their business minds into the book, and then wanted them to see the value that was money oriented. And then once they started seeing that, then I moved to the bonding layer, even though, when I work with the team, I start with the bonding layer. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 40:23
it's so interesting, because when I was up AI in Vegas, we mentioned to you we did the see at Turo dinner, and one of the things that we started with was talking about kind of a sweet and a sort of sweet and sour question, you know what's right there? Yes, exactly. Is that,
Keith Ferrazzi 40:40
you know, Frank, learned that from our, you know, Frank worked at frosty green light. No way.
Chris Rainey 40:44
So is that where he got that wrong? You can't even make that up. You can't even make that used to be, used
Keith Ferrazzi 40:53
to be one of our right hand chairs at frozzy Green light. So his dinners, his intimacy dinners, yes, we're boarded for AI green light in the work that we do.
Chris Rainey 41:02
That's, I did not know that literally and Well, first and foremost kudos, because that was one of the most impactful dinners I've been to. Because he you are with, you know, 25 CHROs, representing the world's largest organizations, being very vulnerable amongst a group they never met before, sharing some of the toughest moments, personally and professionally they're going through. And it was really like, I felt like I bonded with that group more than some people I've worked with for years in the in the matter in a matter of hours. And in fact, I got probably, you know, 1515, plus messages from those leaders in the room saying, No, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story and being vulnerable with the group, and vice versa. I messaged everyone else saying, Thank you for sharing, and it built in a matter of hours, built such a strong bond. So I can attest to this personally for your work, like I was there chapter
Keith Ferrazzi 41:55
four, actually, yeah, Chapter Four in Frank's dinner. I'm very touched what he's been doing in the HR Frank conjure, what he's doing in the HR community is carrying on the legacy of that work at Friday green light that we've researched over 24 years. So, yeah, wow,
Chris Rainey 42:09
amazing. Okay, that was such a coincidence. Yeah. What as this book gets into people's hands, what are your What are your main hopes and goals that you really want. I have a pretty big
Keith Ferrazzi 42:22
aspiration. Well, first of all, my biggest hope is that the HR community will start to intervene in how work is done. I'm going to pause on that and say it again, as we move into a world where AI is prevalent, the way AI will work is that someone has to deconstruct the workflows and deconstruct work and reassemble it with AI, and that requires an engineering mindset, which typically HR approaches these issues from a policy perspective, not an engineering perspective. I've looked at how teams work, and I've unbundled the engineering of collaboration, and what I'm hoping is that the HR world will realize that their role in elevating how work happens, how collaboration happens, how teams perform, is a faster path to things like engagement and well being than any other tools they can use, teaching top down leaders how to lead, teaching or supplying employee engagement store scores, but Missing the team level, right? I want to unleash re engineering collaboration and work in teams as a primary lever for transforming culture, for transforming performance. And I think it will radically elevate the role of HR. So that's my that's a humble perspective. The big perspective when what I've seen happen is that as we move into this world of AI, where so much is going to be re engineered, we cannot afford traditional forms of collaboration that are conflict avoidant, where cycle times take meeting after meeting after meetings. I am a venture partner at lightspeed, and I'm seeing how these young companies, how they collaborate, the disruptors like anthropic and glean, these disruptors are are working very differently than the companies they're disrupting. And I want you the average organization out there. Last week, I was with a large audience at the Association of manufacturing CEOs. I was with them, and I want these organizations that, like the steel industry of America, they got crushed, like we talked about at the beginning. I want them to wake up and re engineer how they work so that they can be competitive in this new world we're moving into. And, you know, like I said, we're starting to even coach governments and. How they co create across government, not in the for profit sector and the NGOs, etc, unleashing the power of interdependencies to create value. I'm hoping that this will have an impact on the world, well beyond just in organizational performance. Man,
Chris Rainey 45:21
I wish we had a whole series together to talk through this, asking, Why did you
Keith Ferrazzi 45:26
read the book? Why don't you read the book, start applying the practices to your team, and then why don't we have a session where we just talked about how it worked
Chris Rainey 45:36
with your team? That would be cool. I'm all over that. Let's do a fun experiment where you read the
Keith Ferrazzi 45:42
book you apply to your team. Have any questions, text me and let's come back and talk about, yeah, how these practices got got put to use in your team.
Chris Rainey 45:51
I'm on it, I'm on it, and that's going to hold me accountable as well. So I love that. I don't normally do this, but I feel like it'd be really interesting with you is, I normally ask a parting piece of advice question, but I'm going to flip it around to you and say, What's one question that you want to do you want to pose to our audience? And because I feel like it'd be really interesting that I'm going to post this on LinkedIn, you know, 200,000 plus HR executives, 400,000 on our newsletter. And what I'd love from everyone listening right now is actually to to give us some feedback. Keith on a question. So what's one question you'd want to pose to our audience so we can really get the get the conversation going on LinkedIn and all the other platforms?
Keith Ferrazzi 46:32
Yeah, I would like to go to this question that we we talked about around the advent of re engineering companies in AI, what do you believe your role is in HR, in the re engineering of work itself? And I want them to answer that question. And there's a there's a subliminal assumption underneath it, which is that most HR leaders are not re engineering work itself. They're thinking of this esoteric culture. They're thinking in this principles of leadership. I want them to bring it all into practice in re engineering, how work gets done. And you know, if you think about it, sales, you were a salesperson. HR has often lost the right to be HR for sales. They call it sales ops, sales training, sales commission compensation. There's sales ops. HR lost the opportunity to run sales ops right. That is because sales, which is very crass and very focused on getting the job done. Doesn't look to HR to help improve work productivity. And then there's also the area of manufacturing, total quality management, six sigma that came from engineers reworking work software engineers agile. That was a major cultural shift, but HR didn't design agile. Agile was designed by the engineers re engineering work. And so I would like to make, I would like to challenge HR to be out in front of this new wave that is called for right now of re engineering work, which then changes the culture, which changes leaders and their assumptions, all of that don't start up there in the ether. Get down in the weeds, roll up your sleeves and get into the guts of work that will change the culture, that'll change the leadership mindsets, but more importantly, it'll change performance. And you will be the Sherpa of that happening. I
Chris Rainey 48:37
absolutely love that. I'm gonna post this on LinkedIn, so wherever you're seeing this right now, comment below. I'm gonna tag in, Keith, so we can see all your responses. I'm really excited to see what people come back with. Last question, Keith, if people wanna work with you, reach out. Work with you personally and the team, where can they reach you? And also, where can they grab a copy of the book?
Keith Ferrazzi 48:56
Yeah, well, book's available everywhere. We've been blessed that it's done so well. So just grab it on Amazon, etc. And yeah, just go to Keith ferrazzi.com Keith ferrazzi.com and follow me on LinkedIn. And where we publish our research gets published all the time on LinkedIn and social. So I'll see you on LinkedIn. I will see you perhaps in person. And Chris, what a pleasure. Gosh, what a beautiful interview. Thank you for your time.
Chris Rainey 49:23
No, I appreciate you, man, and I'm gonna hold myself accountable to go grab a copy of the book and do what we discuss. And I'm really excited to get this in the hands of all of our audience. Appreciate the amazing what you do. I always enjoy our conversations, and I'll see you soon. My friend, cheers, brother. Thanks. You.
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Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Lead Alone and Founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight.