In this insightful discussion, Keith Ferrazzi talks about his new book, "Never Lead Alone," and its relevance in today's workplace landscape transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has introduced varied work setups like remote, hybrid, and in-office environments. Ferrazzi emphasizes the need for a shift from leadership to 'teamship,' focusing on the collective role of the team rather than just the leader. He highlights the importance of practices that enable team members to give and receive feedback, accountability, and energy-sharing to cultivate a more effective and supportive team culture.

The conversation also addresses how individuals, even those not in leadership roles, can use certain practices to assert their presence and influence team dynamics positively. Keith shares insights into 'stress testing' and other key practices from his book, which illustrate how team members can foster collaboration, innovation, and mutual support without alienating colleagues. Additionally, building authentic relationships and overcoming traditional workplace boundaries to ensure team success are pointed as critical aspects of modern work dynamics.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. paradigm [ˈpærəˌdaɪm] - (noun) - A typical example or pattern of something; a model. - Synonyms: (model, pattern, example)

...because in the past few years we've really seen this paradigm shift in the workplace from COVID happening...

2. unicorn [ˈjuːnɪkɔːrn] - (noun) - In business, a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion. - Synonyms: (start-up, enterprise, venture)

...those fast growth unicorns, et cetera.

3. heretical [həˈrɛtɪkəl] - (adjective) - Believing in or practicing religious heresy; opposed to accepted beliefs or standards. - Synonyms: (unorthodox, sacrilegious, unconventional)

...I know that's heretical to say we're focusing so much on the role of the leader...

4. candor [ˈkændər] - (noun) - The quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness. - Synonyms: (frankness, honesty, openness)

You talk about that candor, you talk about making sure that everyone's voices are heard.

5. assert [əˈsɜːrt] - (verb) - To state a fact or belief confidently and forcefully. - Synonyms: (declare, affirm, state)

How do you make sure your voice is heard and assert your opinion without feeling like...

6. initiative [ɪˈnɪʃətɪv] - (noun) - The ability to assess and initiate things independently. - Synonyms: (enterprise, drive, motivation)

I've got this initiative, I would love it if you all would be willing to stress test it.

7. contagious [kənˈteɪdʒəs] - (adjective) - Likely to spread to and affect others. - Synonyms: (infectious, transmittable, communicable)

Hopefully this is the kind of thing that contagiously could catch on...

8. aperture [ˈæpərtʃər] - (noun) - An opening, hole, or gap. - Synonyms: (opening, gap, space)

Everybody has their own aperture of how they want to conduct themselves.

9. serendipitous [ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪtəs] - (adjective) - Occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way. - Synonyms: (fortuitous, unexpected, coincidental)

Purposeful Bond Building versus Not serendipitous.

10. perfunctory [pərˈfʌŋktəri] - (adjective) - Carried out with a minimum of effort or reflection. - Synonyms: (cursory, superficial, unthinking)

But this Purposeful Bond Building is not perfunctory.

This New York Times Bestselling Author Cracked The Code On Transformative Leadership

Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is Keith Farazzi, author of Never Lead Alone. Keith, thank you so much for joining me.

Brittany, this is going to be a lot of fun. I've been looking forward to it. It is going to be a lot of fun because I want to talk about all about your new book, Never Lead Alone. So first I want to extend a big congratulations. It just came out but in the book you lay out what you describe as a roadmap to having an extraordinary team.

So first I want to talk about the timing of this book because in the past few years we've really seen this paradigm shift in the workplace from COVID happening and everyone was forced to work from home to pre Covid when everyone was in the office. And now some teams are hybrid, some teams are remote, some teams are full time. So talk to us about where we are right now and why it was important for you to write this now.

Well, this book is after 20 years of research. Since 2000 I have been coaching high performing teams and in the last 10 years I doubled down on my research associated with teams that are in what one would call the disruptive sector, those fast growth unicorns, et cetera. But interestingly enough, you mentioned virtual work. In 2010 I did a five year research project or what are the new rules, particularly what are the new people rules in a virtual world. All of that information is in this book.

And what I want to really awaken people to, what's most important is that I think we've over indexed on leadership. I know that's heretical to say we're focusing so much on the role of the leader, we've forgotten what the role of the team is. I need, we need to focus on teamship. And to that I'll give you a quick for instance.

It's one thing leaders have to give feedback. We know that that's tough to do and getting leaders to give good feedback is rare. However, we've got to get the team to give each other feedback. Leaders have to hold the team accountable, the team has to hold each other accountable. The team has to lift each other's energy up. So this is a roadmap for what should we expect from the team to do.

And I loved this roadmap because it talks a lot about things that are really important in a team. You talk about that candor, you talk making sure that everyone's voices are heard. I guess my question to you on that point is how let's say you Aren't the leader on your team? Let's say you're entry level, mid level. How do you make sure your voice is heard and assert your opinion without feeling like, hey, am I stepping on anyone's toes here?

That's a great question. So a couple of thoughts. First of all, the way the book is structured, we believe that there are 10 critical shifts. After 24 years of research, we have seen 10 critical shifts that a team needs to go through. Each of those shifts is a chapter. Each chapter has a hero story of an individual that we would admire, like Terang, the CEO of ELF Beauty, et cetera. These individuals are crushing it. And then after that, there's just some very simple practices.

So if you're an individual coming into a team and you want to make sure that you're actually the tipping point to change the team's culture, you can volunteer to do some things, simple practices that are recommended for the team as a whole, but to yourself. So one of my favorite practices is called stress testing. It's when something you're working on, you would like to get the team's input on, right? So you go to the team and you say, listen, I read this book and I really, I found this cool little practice called stress testing. I've got this initiative, I would love it if you all would be willing to stress test it. By the way, I'm not asking you to take over or hijack this work. I'm just asking you to give me double barrel feedback.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to present what I've been doing, where I think it's been successful, where I'm struggling and where I'm going next. And what I want you to do as a team is to break into small groups of two and write down after about 10 minutes of conversation, what challenges do you have for me? What am I not seeing? What innovations would you offer? And if you have any offers of help, that would be super.

Now that's a process that of course it would be great for leaders to start instituting in teams where every member of the team is stress tested on their critical threads of work. So that what you start to do is you start to breed the team to be better at giving each other feedback, breed the team to pointing out risks, challenging each other, giving each other ideas, giving each other support, et cetera. But in this case, you brought it to the table and hopefully this is the kind of thing that contagiously could catch on because you could then show how valuable that input was. And other people could do the stress test process as well. But that's just one of 37 practices in this book.

My hope is that people will consume them like popcorn on a movie night. Well, before we get into more of them, I want to talk about you a little bit, because in the book you describe your background. You're from Pennsylvania, just like me, a blue collar family. You're from Philly though, right?

Yes, right outside of Philly, Bucks County, but so opposite sides of the state, but still Keystone. Say, I'm sure you're Steelers, I'm Eagles. But you go from a blue collar upbringing, you go to Yale and then you eventually go to the C suite. So when was the moment for you where it clicked, hey, this is how I build a successful team. This is going from leadership to teamship. What did that look like?

What a super question. Thank you. So I wrote a book 20 years ago called Never Eat Alone. And that book has global success. And it's really all about how you as an individual need to build your authentic relationships, to open doors, create possibility for yourself in your career, et cetera. But at the core of it, it's all about how relationships work and the criticality of authenticity, the criticality of mutual support and generosity.

This idea that as individuals we reach out into the world, we create an environment around ourselves through being generous to others, being authentic, opening ourselves up, et cetera. Well, I started researching relationships and then along the way I found that the closest, most intimate relationships we have, the two or three of them, I call them co elevating relationships. Relationships that lift us up and that we lift each other up, those relationships are fundamentally defining for our success.

And that became the instigation for me to realize that so few teams were that so few teams were truly at that co elevating standard. And so in my work coaching, I really navigated very much toward high performing teams and giving them an inoculation of what I found at the time they really needed. They needed real butt kicking accountability with each other, they needed high degrees of candor, but they needed that out of care, out of commitment to a mission, but commitment to each other.

And little by little, over the last 24 years, I have grown a methodology that is now used in the turnaround of some of the most successful, well known corporations in the world, even governments. We're using this in governments right now to really try to get to an entirely different level of performance.

As anyone who's ever been on a team knows, building a successful team is all about those relationships. And you point out in the book that it's harder relationship building is a little different than it was pre Covid because before you would walk to the water cooler, you would see a coworker, maybe a colleague. You're not in the same team and that's how you. You meet, you have a conversation, you have a shared interest, you build a relationship that way.

Now it seems to be more strategic. You have to go out of your way a little bit more because of this hybrid, possibly remote setup. So talk to us about how to build a relationship now, not out of happenstance. Oh, that's fantastic. There's an entire chapter called Purposeful Bond Building versus Not serendipitous. So you're right. Prior to the pandemic, we were bumping into each other in hallways, coffee rooms, etc. And during the pandemic, many CEOs felt that that was lost and as a result they wanted to drag people back to the office. I'm not here to argue policies of how many days in the office, etc.

But what I can say is that many leaders decided, and this is what we've done, we have observed some of the highest performing teams. We watch their practices, we extract their practices, and then we make sure that statistically significant, they work in other companies and then when that happens, they become a high return practice.

What we realized was the companies that practice things like energy check, once a month, everybody in the team goes around and says what's really right now, draining your energy. And by doing that and by having a social contract that the team says, we have each other's back. When somebody is lacking energy, we're going to be of support to that person. If it's personal because something's going on with the kids, or if it's professional because of struggling on a particular project, that energy check becomes a very important safety net.

Companies and teams that practice these regular energy checks statistically have a higher relationship score than what we did prior to the pandemic. Using serendipity alone, bumping into each other accidentally in hallways.

So regular purposeful energy checks is one of the practices and that's one of the practices in one of the chapters. But as I said, there's a ton of them for you to try on the energy checks. Anything from a sweet and sour, then a professional, personal professional check in to an intimacy dinner. And this really, you know, you talk about professional as well as personal check ins. So how do you get someone to open up about their personal life?

Because as a colleague, you might think someone is you know, answering an email, a little short. They're a little curt when they're talking with you, but really, they have something going on at home. Maybe their mom is sick or something like that. So how do you dive deeper and get personal with people in the workplace?

You know, I feel that during the pandemic, we broke through that wall pretty seriously. You know, when we would come to a meeting on a video conferencing, we would stop and would say, just checking in. Is everybody okay? And, you know, you would know that somebody's mother was struggling in assisted living or et cetera. So I think we broke through that wall.

Now, I know that we've rubber banded back to old behaviors mostly, but I think we're in an era where people want to bring their authentic self, their full self into the workplace. Now, that said, I was at a session the other night where we were doing a long, slow dinner, and the team.

The point was, when the team is together, let's use that precious time to really go deep. And we were doing one of these energy checks in a dinner format, which tends to be a little bit more vulnerable. And one of the ladies said, you know what? I just don't believe in this.

I don't believe in bringing your personal life to work. And I was like, that's fine. It's perfectly fine. If you're feeling comfortable enough that you can sit and be present in this, we totally welcome you. If you want to chime in, feel free.

By the time it got to her, she was very comfortable sharing. It doesn't mean that she has to be. Everybody has their own aperture of how they want to conduct themselves, Their own social comfort, their own security, insecurity, all of those wonderful things that make up us as humans. And it's perfectly fine. You let people come to the practice as they'd like.

I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about meetings, because everyone's been in a meeting where you leave the meeting and you say, you know, that meeting could have been an email. I don't feel like we got anything done. I feel like we wasted some time here. And you want to shatter the myth of the meeting. How do you do that?

Your questions are so fantastic. It's clear that you read the book. You picked out some of the critical shifts that we would start if we were coaching a team that we would start with. And this is called meeting shifting.

So let's. Let me give you a scenario. Somebody comes into a meeting, let's say it's a big one, 12 people in the average meeting of 12 people, four people think that they're heard. And let's say the topic is a cost reduction effort that we have. So we get into the room, we start talking about this, four people are fully heard, people are having the meeting after the meeting, talking behind each other's backs, DMing each other, et cetera.

On the other hand, if we had started this meeting in an asynchronous document, let's say a Google sheet, and somebody writes into it, the question, what's the real problem we're trying to solve here? What is a bold solution to solve it? I'm just making up the question. There's a chapter with a bunch of these really good meaty questions we've heard and people write that stuff down in a shared document where everybody can see. Now you read that document before you come into the room and you've actually done an entire round of collaboration where everyone's voice is invited to be heard fully.

Not even even the introvert or the person that needs a little bit more contemplation time than being called on quickly in a meeting. And now you can land the plane in one meeting. You can actually get to the decision making in one meeting. So you've taken the cycle time of collaboration, which is like many meetings and it's not even that thorough because people are backchanneling and you've moved it to a transparent, healthy, one type cycle.

Now this is the kind of thing we see all the time and it's time to re enginee

r. Work is the real issue. And you had a case study in the book where one company actually keeps a running tab of hey, how much does this meeting cost? Because time is money when it comes to meetings.

But something that was important that I found really interesting was not staying in your lane. And this team can comment on this problem and this team can comment on the other team's problem. Talk about that cross collaboration and why that's so important. The breaking down silos has got to be one of the most important things we can do to contribute to shareholder value. Almost every corporation that I work with, unfortunately, even some of the fast growth unicorns that used to really work as small tight groups of founders, but now are starting to create silos and org charts that they think mean something.

The reality is if you're trying to get something done, you and I were talking about this off camera earlier. If you're trying to get something done, your first question is who's my team? And it's who you need to get the job. Done soon as you realize. And this is in the early chapters of the book we create. What is your relationship action plan? Who is your team to define that core team that you're working with on this project, to define a broader team that you want to be engaged on this project. And then that broader team is the group that you stress test with every month, not just your core team, not just the people on your org chart.

So redefining team becomes a critical element of the success of work as we move forward. And breaking down those silos that exist today will add so much value to the shareholder. And breaking down the silos of criticism in private. Instead, you're bringing your critiques to the public forum.

What is your advice to people that feel like that's a struggle for them to come forward into a meeting and critique someone publicly? And how do you do that in a way that's effective and not maybe detrimental to the relationship of the team?

Yeah. So there is a company called Elf Beauty. And Elf Beauty has absolutely been crushing it in a highly competitive beauty market where frankly some of the biggest organizations in the world consider this relatively new company. Right. But happens to be growing year over year, you know, double digits, major success. Their market cap is crushing it.

Their CEO just became named as one of the top 100 business leaders in the world. Touring this group recruits. And when they do, they say to everybody, you know what? While you're here, you're going to grow further and faster than ever in any other company possible. And in exchange for that, we want you to both give and get feedback fluidly because we're not going to let each other fail.

We have each other's back. Giving critique in public is not throwing each other under the bus. Giving critique in public is a commitment to not let each other fail. We love and respect everybody in this organization and we're going to make sure that everybody succeeds. So it's a shift of the social contract that ideally the leader, it gives.

Now the problem with that is that if you're in an organization where you haven't made that social contract commitment, it can be more difficult. And that's where you do need leadership. To start breeding teamship. A leader needs to institute the stress testing process.

Now, when the leader does, by the way, the leader can't hijack decision making from people. The leader can't dive in and hear that feedback and be negative or critical on somebody. We've got to make sure that all of this data is looked at, not defensively, but looked at as, as input, as, as an opportunity to to level up as I say, co elevate. So there is some work to be done around how we think about that input and data not as critical but as as the juice of success and innovation.

I don't want to spoil the rest of the book. Obviously it's a great read but you lay out over 30 teamship practices. These should and done. And just one that I've done over a decade ago was an intimacy dinner with a team and I'm still close with multiple of those colleagues to this day. So how do you incorporate these types of practices in your routine?

Especially with a team that's been together for five years, 10 years, a really long time and is seemingly stuck in their routine, stuck in their way, stuck in their once a week meeting or what have you.

Well, the book is really laid out as a workbook. The intention is you buy the book for the team and then chapter by chapter you read it and it's so small. I mean the book is was intended to be as bite sized as possible. And then by the way, if you buy it, if you go to my website and you buy it as a team, I've developed a bunch of videos per chapter that I give out for free for any team that wants to go through this together.

So the bottom line is you just go through it chapter by chapter and it tells you how to talk to the team about picking some practices that we're going to start using on a regular basis. And they're all in there, they're all simple few paragraphs. Hopefully it's a self guided tour and it's something you can pick up whether it be the sweet and sour, it's one minute or two minute per person to these longer practices.

But Keith, I appreciate the conversation. Where can people find your book? Everywhere and on audible et cetera. But Keithferazi.com is where you would go if you want to buy it in bulk for a team so that you get the videos.

Keith Farazzi, thank you so much for joining me. You're welcome back anytime. I had such a good time. Thanks a lot.

Leadership, Business, Innovation, Team Dynamics, Workplace Culture, Collaboration, Forbes