Keith Ferrazzi: Why Great Leaders Never Lead Alone

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0:49Good morning, everybody. This is Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People podcast. And as you know, we're on a mission to make you remarkable. So we go out and we find the most remarkable people we can to inspire you and inform you. And of course, today we hit it out of the ballpark. We have Keith Ferrazzi. Can it get any more remarkable than that? Many of you may remember him for this great book that he wrote called Never Eat Alone. And wow, that was a fantastic book. And now he's with us for the second time because he's got another great book. And now instead of not eating alone, we're going to talk about not leading alone.

1:32Right, Keith? Yeah, it's extraordinary to be here. And I'll just mirror right back to you. You are remarkable, my friend. It's been amazing to watch all that you give to the world. No, I don't know about that. You probably tell that to every podcaster. I don't actually. Nobody else has called the Remarkable Podcast. So this was my unique opportunity. So I have a kind of a weird question to start off. I read the foreword of your book and I thought, do you ever wonder, and this is true for me too, do you ever wonder where would we be if our parents were rich? Because you came from a poor family and I did too.

2:13And I'm not trying to say that we would be better off. I'm saying maybe we would be worse off if we came from a rich family. It's interesting. There's somebody out there with a name similar to yours that wrote this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I've had a chance to talk to him a bit about this. I thought you were going somewhere else with a question, which I'll come back to. I'm obviously blessed to have the drive, the inspiration, the desire to make an impact in this world that was infused in me in a very early age from my father. And also the gumption that it took for me to get where I am today and the resilience as a result of coming from real abject poverty in the United States.

2:50My old man was unemployed and it gave me that drive and ambition. Not only did it give me a drive and ambition to be successful and to dig out of the economic hole we were in, but it also gave me a mission, which is we grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania in the crash of the steel industry. and I saw how poor management made families destitute. And that's what I've been on for 20, 30 years is that desire to try to make sure the corporations stay ahead of the pack so that families like ours all over the world can thrive. Yeah, but thanks for that question. You know where I thought you were gonna go with it, by the way?

3:29I thought you were gonna go with it as if we knew when we were younger what we know now. I wish I was the leader that led this way all of my life. And that was the big lesson for me, which is writing this book and researching this book had woken me up to my own leadership needs. And you know what? I would make the case that it's better late than never, first of all. But also, it may take 50 or 60 or 70 years to figure out what's in that book. I don't think you can figure that out at 20. No, you're right. In fact, I wrote Never Eat Alone and it was about my life and how I achieved success through and with opening doors and relationships, networking, one might speak.

4:11And then I kept on that relationship thread and I started doing more and more research about how small groups of people support each other through transformation, which really evolved my passion for high performing teams. So for 20 years now, I've been researching, how does a small group of people perform disproportionately more than others? And it has been 20 years of research, 20 years of coaching some of the most extraordinary turnarounds like at General Motors, some of the fastest growth unicorns now, even governments. We're working with the country of Bhutan to infuse the principles of co-elevation and teamship in how they govern as they double their GDP and keep their happiness index.

4:52It's been 20 years of work. So first of all, could you define for the audience your concept? I think you invented this word, teamship. I love the word teamship. So what does it mean from Keith Ferraz? Well, I want to give credit. It was one of my teammates that designed the word teamship and woke that up for me. A teamship is the recognition. And I feel, I know this is going to sound heretical. I think we've over-indexed on leadership, under-indexed on teamship. Now, leadership, of course, is important. And I think it deserves all the credit it's been getting. How do you be a great leader? But there were no guidebooks out there on what to expect from a high-performing team.

5:37Lencioni's book, 20 Years Old Now, was a book about what are the dysfunctions of a team. I wanted to give a very prescriptive roadmap on how a team becomes exceptional. And what we did was we recognized that if you look at a good leader, they give feedback, but a great team gives each other feedback. If you look at a good leader, make sure that the team has good energy. A great team, make sure each other has energy. A great team holds each other accountable. A great team is responsible for each other's resilience, is responsible for each other's ideas and fortitude and giving them what I call co-elevation.

6:16A purposeful mission, but forcing to lift each other up in the process. Now, if a leader can unleash that, it is asymptotic in terms of what can be achieved. I was about to ask you, what are the tells of a lack of teamship? But you just listed them there. Is there anything you left out? No, I did. The book is what we found. Our research is a 3 ,000 team data set over 20 years. And that's what you get when you get this book. And what we've done is we've broken it down into 10 critical shifts that a team needs to make. Each chapter is a shift. Each chapter starts with a hero story. And then right after that, around that particular shift, real simple practices that the team can try on.

7:01The intention is to use it as a book club and the book becomes your coach. I wanted to put myself into every team out there in the world that I couldn't get to using the book. So there are 10 shifts and I just mentioned a few that are really important. One of them is candor and the willingness for a team to move from conflict avoidance to real courage, right? Another one is very purposeful bonding and having each other's back, the connectivity of a team. Those two are very important. I would say of the 10 shifts, there's probably three or four that I can say are disproportionately predictive of a team's outcomes.

7:36So back up for a second for me. Let's say I'm listening to this and I even bought the book and I just want, give me the gist of how do I conduct team diagnostics? How do I assess the level of teamship on my team? Yeah. Let me just use one chapter. So the first two chapters are the forward to the book and the awakening that you should expect more from a team. That's chapters one and two. But let me dive right into a practical chapter three. And chapter three has a couple of questions that you ask your team. One of them is a diagnostic question that I have done with thousands of teams. And it's a simple question.

8:14Do we challenge each other in the room when it's risky to do so, even when it's outside of our swim lanes or areas of expertise? So that's a complicated question. But the bottom line is, do we challenge each other actively here, even when it's risky? Now, the average team on a scale of zero to five is actually only about two or less than two. I can give you a couple simple practices. One practice is actually called a candor break. Put onto your agendas of your meetings a simple line that says, we're going to do a candor break. That's when you stop in the middle of the meeting and you ask the team, what's not being said in here that needs to be said?

8:53Now, you don't just do it in an open forum with eight people. You have them go into groups of two and you have them chat for even 30 seconds. What's not being said that should be said. Then you restart the conversation. In that small group of two, psychological safety goes up by 85 % and people will begin to have a very different conversation afterward. That's one of four of the practices in chapter three called a candor break. Now, there are a few others and we can get into them if you'd like to, because they're really useful for your listeners to dive into. But the first thing you do is you diagnose where you are, you do a couple of the practices, and then a couple of months later, you diagnose again.

9:31And I promise you that what we find is the average candor score of a team is usually in the low twos, high ones. And then that goes up to the low threes in less than a few months. And it goes up into the high threes, low fours within six months if you do the practices regularly. So the intention is you do the practices, you change your culture, and you get different outcomes. I understand what these teammates are doing. But now, what kind of mental framework does the leader have to ensure the success of a team ship? Yeah, there's a phrase I love to use, and I might have used it last time we're together, but it's, we're behavioral scientists.

10:09We just study practices. I don't, I'm just like I said, I think we've over-indexed on leadership. I'm going to say, I think we over-indexed on mindsets. I believe that you don't think your way to new way of acting. You act your way to new way of thinking. I don't need a leader to adopt a different mindset in order to read my book and start to practice it. I just want a leader to have the courage to try a few of the practices. And if you try a few of the practices, you'll wake up and realize how much pent up value is in your team that you're letting sit there. So there's one of the practices is called a stress test.

10:46So a stress test, a lot of us do these things called report outs in our team meetings. We show somebody will show up and they'll say, worst case, they're going through a 20 page deck. Here's where we are in this day. Oh my God, it's horrible. I'm sure you've never seen that before, right? So instead we go through something called a stress test where the person shows up and on one page says, here's what I've achieved. Here's where I'm struggling. And here's where I'm going. Now, everybody knows what each other is doing anyway, but this initiative is now summarized this way. And you pause and you once again go into small groups of two or three.

11:20And in those groups, you open up a Google Doc. And in the Google Doc, you write, here's where I challenge you. You might be missing this. Here's an idea I'm going to give you. And here's some support I'd like to offer. A simple assignment has now rebooted your culture. I wrote an article about this in Fortune Magazine a couple of weeks ago. If you want to just go look at my name in Fortune, you'll see this article. And it talks about how one simple practice can totally reboot a culture. This stress testing, if you regularly practice stress testing and every associate shows up and is willing to get feedback from the team directly, you're priming the pump to open up the value that this team can give each other without you always being the hub and spoke.

12:03And in this world, does all of this have to be done in person or can we use digital collaboration? Chapter six. Chapter six recognizes that the tools that we have been sitting on, Microsoft Teams, Google, WebEx, Zoom, there's a robust set of tools. Now having AI complement those tools, your teammates are now expanded to include AI and these collaborative tools that are available to us are extraordinary. project management software, knowledge management software, the stuff that Drew Houston's doing over at Dropbox is amazing. Now, I want to make sure that we start to become what I call 21st century collaborators.

12:45Stop using damn meetings as the primary form of collaboration. If you're a leader that sees a problem, and actually there's a wonderful example of this. I don't know if you ever met Gil West, who was at United Airlines, went over to cruise, the self-driving car company. He went over there and he was looking around. He's like, you know what? I see a problem here. Let's have a meeting on it. And these kids out of Stanford, which is where most of these kids that birth these companies, they looked at Gil, this guy from the South, the Southerner. And he said, Gil, how do we have a meeting on it? We haven't collaborated yet.

13:23So these kids collaborate in the cloud, multiple cycles. They figure out what the big problems are we're trying to solve, what the big barriers are, what innovation innovative solutions we have then they have meetings to land the plane if they need it right so we've got to do what's i call meeting shifting where we ignore this idea that meetings are the primary form of our collaboration this book has been able to reduce the number of meetings by 30 in most teams i'm almost afraid to ask what do you think of these companies who are mandating return to office then okay look i i've got some very good friendships with some of these executives who are very well known right now for bringing everybody back to the office.

14:05So here's what I'll say. I don't want to have a dog in the hunt as to whether or not we need to be in the office or out of the office for a moment. But here's what I can tell you. I'm going to use two folks you probably know, Drew Houston, Matt Mullenweg, Drew from Dropbox, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress. The two of those folks during the pandemic found that they were feeling that their companies were suffering from a drain in energy, relationships. They sensed that the culture was eroding because they were virtual. Now, some CEOs, when they felt that, their natural reaction was, let's get everybody back to the office as soon as we can.

14:43And what I'm going to put words in their mouth, they're not saying this, but it's how they're acting. They're basically saying, let's get everybody back to the office to practice serendipity bonding, which is how we build our culture. We want people to bump into each other in hallways etc. Drew and Matt decided to say, you know what we're going to do? We're going to not practice serendipity bonding. We're going to practice purposeful bonding. Every week, we're going to do energy checks. These energy checks are going to act as a safety net where everybody's going to go around and say, here's what's draining my energy.

15:16On a scale of zero to five, here's where I am and here's what's draining my energy. These energy checks, the average relationship score of a team prior to the pandemic when they were doing serendipity bonding was in the mid to high twos. When you went into the pandemic, it went down into the low twos because people didn't see each other. When you started practicing purposeful bonding, it ended up going up into the mid to high threes. The point that I would make is if you're going to be virtual or hybrid, which any global company is anyway, then you need to use 21st century collaboration and you need to use purposeful cultural building tactics and practices, that will actually get you on a steady state.

15:57You can actually do a better job in a hybrid virtual world than you did just using accidental serendipitous ways of connecting and collaborating. If you want to bring everybody back into the office because there's an extra esprit de corps and you can recruit people who want to be in that office and still have that kind of an energy, I would still recommend you read chapter six, You still build that sort of purposeful collaboration tools and you build in chapter four those purposeful bonding skills and you'll crush it either way. The people that I know that are being forced to return to office, it's not this spirit of serendipity.

16:38It's more we're going to check your badge on the way in and we're going to know exactly when you came and when you left and you need to be there for such and such many days per week per minute. It's like punching a time clock for knowledge workers. I wouldn't say there's anything to do with serendipity. I'll riff for a moment, and I do in the book. One of the things that I realized when I finished writing the book, as I looked back on all the heroes that I celebrated in the book, almost all of them were engineers. And it made me realize something. And that was that the people who put their mind to re-engineering ways of working ended up thriving as leaders versus those who left the ways of working to be more accidental or legacy oriented.

17:26I'll say it a slightly different way. When the pandemic hit, we looked over at the HR department and we said, it's your job to figure this work thing out. And so HR people, like governance people, put a hat on around policy. So it was about checking the boxes of being in the office or how much Zoom time do you actually have? Could we possibly measure how much fingers are on keyboards during the day? All of a sudden, it was policy and auditing for it, right? But there was another group of people that said, wait a second, we're in a different world today. We have technologies we didn't have before.

18:03We have opportunity and potential to reinvent working. What would that look like if we reinvented collaboration? And that's what I've documented here. And that's an engineering, that's a re-engineering. Ask yourself in the average company, who is re-engineering work today? Whose job is it? Software engineers did agile. Manufacturing engineers did Six Sigma and TQM. Both of those were new ways of working that got re-engineered. Now we need to re-engineer collaboration and white collar teaming. how and I and look, I started out my life as an industrial engineer. That's what I'm trying to bring as a behavioral scientist, as an engineer, new ways of working new ways of teaming that'll help us crush it.

18:44Correct me if I am wrong. But in reading your book, and even just listening to you now, it seems that the concept of this lone genius, this superstar visionary cowboy, the The obvious examples are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I don't remember much. Team ship in the Macintosh division. So are these two people just outliers or should they be our heroes or anti-heroes? I love that question. And I earnestly ask that question myself. And because I went through and what I did was I studied people like Terang over at Elf Beauty, who has been absolutely crushing it against the, this is a small organization that is now eating market share significantly against the big beauty companies.

19:36And its entire culture is bred from TeamShip. It was chapter 10 and I can share a little bit more about it. But I just went and looked at companies that were crushing it and extracted their practices and I found TeamShip was embedded. I started doing the same thing for Elon Musk. About six months ago, I put a research team, our research institute, I assigned a research team of two people to really go and scour what are the practices of Elon Musk and why has he been successful? I finished that research and was ready to actually consider writing a book on it because I thought it was really intriguing.

20:09And I found out that a friend of mine, Dennis Neal, is also just releasing a book and was already going to press on the exact same subject. What makes this man exceptional? And I do think that we can do both. The social contract at a place like Elf Beauty from Terang is come here, you will thrive, you will grow faster and further than you ever have, but you have to be willing to let your team push you higher. Your team needs to give you feedback. Your team needs to lift you up. You're going to love on each other and you're going to grow and we're going to kick ass. That's the Terang social contract at Elf Beauty.

20:44The social contract over at a place like SpaceX or anywhere else that Elon Musk is purveying is come here, you're going to get your ass kicked and we're going to do extraordinary fucking things, right? That's a social contract that some people buy into, but I think you're quite limited to the number of people who want to be in that social contract. If you want to scale, if you want to create extraordinary products, yes, you could have an extraordinary visionary like Elon or like Jobs, and you can count on them to dictate the answer. Or we can start looking at innovations and crowdsourcing of insights where we can get inspired from diverse inputs, like things like XPRIZE and our friend Peter Diamandis espouses, which is the wisdom of the crowds to inspire great innovation.

21:33There's two different philosophies, and I think there's things we can learn from both.

21:54I'm going to ask you a question that maybe you don't want to answer. From you, I'm not intimidated. Bring it on. So let's say that Donald Trump's nominations all go through and Donald Trump's chief of staff calls you up and says, Keith, I want you to help me make a team ship out of this cabinet. Yeah. I don't know. What do you do? Did you just pull that out of the air or did you do some research? Okay. Interesting. I mean, what kind of research do you need to do to ask that question? The research is that at the beginning of the Biden administration, exactly this time at the transfer of power from the prior administration to the Biden administration, I wrote an article in Fast Company, which is my advice to the Biden administration for how he should run his cabinet and how his cabinet should treat the Hill.

22:52Now, they took none of it and I didn't get any calls. But I'll tell you, look, very interesting. I did study this as a result of writing this piece. You can go back and find it in Fast Company four years ago. And what I recognized was the cabinet is a bunch of very high-powered, brilliant people. And whether you like their politics, et cetera, they are what they are. And each of those individuals run their domains. There is no interdependency among that group of people. The simple practice of stress testing. Imagine Dr. Oz showing up in that cabinet and asking, here's my analysis so far of what I think Medicare and Medicaid has got to do.

23:34Here's where I'm struggling to figure this out. And here's where I'm planning to go. And then the team, the cabinet, would go into small groups and say, here's what you're missing. Here's an idea. Call me here if you'd like some help. That simple practice of stress testing would make that group so much more effective. Then the next question is, and this is the first thing I ask in this book is, who's your team? Look, the reality of government and the reality of business is that our teams have nothing to do with org charts. If you want to get something done, you need the people up on the hill. You need the bureaucrats.

24:10You need the congressmen, the senators. They're your team. And yet we think and we treat each other as these silos in business and in government. The work that I'm doing with the country of Bhutan is interesting. Because in Bhutan, you've got a very small country that is revered by people all over the world for being one of the happiest places in the world. They're looking to make leaps forward in their economic growth. And like every other government, they were traditionally thinking about it in silos. You've got the secretaries, you've got the ministers, one politic, one bureaucrat, very separate.

24:45And then you've got the private sector. We're looking at how those groups can come together as one team. one team, which allows the government officials to truly what I call teaming out and crush it in terms of innovative new ideas that they would have never been able to do before. So the answer to your question is, if I got that call, I would be surprised. But if I got that call, of course, I grew up as a kid wanting to make a difference in this world. When the steel industry was crashing, I wanted to be a politician and I wanted to grow up and be governor of Pennsylvania, President of the United States and fix American manufacturing.

25:22I'm doing it from a different lens today. I'm doing it from the perspective of thought leadership and the perspective of behavioral science around teams. I would, of course, serve my country in any way that I could. So you would say yes. I would say yes. And I would just invite me when you tell Dr. Oz to have this conversation with, I don't know, I can't say Matt Gates anymore because he dropped out, but that would have been a conversation I would like to hear. I can't say that these practices are easy to implement everywhere. If you've got a tin-eared narcissistic leader that is unwilling to open themselves to critique and open dialogue, which I have sometimes seen in my career, it's more difficult to get the team to be psychologically safe to do this.

26:15Although I remember a leader of a large telecom company, international telecom company, that was exactly that kind of person. And what ended up happening is the team applied these principles out of salvation for themselves. The leader was narcissistic, difficult, challenging. And the team rallied together to be the kind of leaders that they all were asking for, for each other. They were able to, I would say, not thrive because it was difficult, but they were certainly able to co-elevate as a team. But imagine if the leader embraces that journey. Okay, I'll let you off the hook now. Told you I didn't mind.