10 Steps To A Team That Excels Without A Leader

0:00Get off the damn podium and stop trying to be a leader with authority, but being a leader that co-creates. Leadership isn't about having all the answers anymore. It's about unlocking the power of your team. And no one understands that shift better than Keith Ferrazzi. What you have is something that is emerging that's very interesting. Self-managed teams, where a team doesn't need a leader. It's called holacracy. Despite all of our extraordinary innovations and a brilliant founder, we failed. And the only thing that I can point to of significance is that we were certainly not a team. We do not work in org charts.

0:32We work today and always have worked in a matrix. I'm suggesting the teams once a month show up and say to each other, where is our energy and what's bringing it down? If you're sitting on a team that doesn't even have the strength of courage to speak truth in the room or challenge each other, how in the world are you getting the value out of that team? We're asking the team to step up 30%. If you're a leader today, I want you to expect more of your team.

1:00Leadership isn't about having all the answers anymore. It's about unlocking the power of your team. And no one understands that shift better than Keith Ferrazzi. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Marketing Trends. This is your host, Stephanie Postles. And you probably know Keith from his book, Never Eat Alone, the classic on networking and relationships. But in his new book, Never Lead Alone, he's taking it to a whole new level, showing why the best teams don't rely on a single leader, but on what he calls teamship. Today, we're going to talk about why the old leadership playbook is broken, how AI is changing collaboration forever, and why something called holacracy, a concept that Keith is diving into, might just be the future of work.

1:37Keith, welcome to Marketing Trends. Stephanie, great to talk to you. And what a thoughtful and lovely introduction. Thank you. Yeah, of course. I mean, to me, when I saw you were booked on the show, I was like, okay, legend, everyone used your book. I mean, it was talked about for a long, long time and relevant still to today. So I wanted to hear from you. I mean, that was 20 years ago. What had you get into the space now, like team building and leadership after all this research that you've done? Tell me more about that. Yeah. Well, when I left as chief marketing officer at Starwood Hotels, I was similar at Deloitte, moved over to Starwood.

2:12And it was very interesting to me as I juxtaposed both of those organizations. At Deloitte, we were the lowest of the big eight back in the 90s. And we aspired someday to be at par with Accenture and McKinsey. at Starwood, we were a fledgling brand. We had just started. We actually birthed Starwood out of nothing. And then we had absorbed Sheraton West and we created W, St. Regis, et cetera. And we had aspirations of really being the pinnacle of the hotel industry and reinventing travel. You spin ahead and Deloitte made it. It was a band of brothers and sisters taking hills together, really just crushing it.

2:53And I can discuss that journey, but it absolutely achieved its objectives. You look at Starwood and despite all of our extraordinary innovations and a brilliant founder, we had to end up selling to Marriott at below industry multiples. We failed. And the only thing that I can point to of significance is that we were certainly not a team. There was a lot of competitiveness. The culture was weak. There was a lot of back-channel conversations. We were not one amazing group of individuals trying to achieve an enterprise lift, an enterprise value. It got me thinking. I went and then worked as a CEO of a computer games company, and we sold that.

3:36I had some money and decided I wanted to do what I always loved, which is thought leadership. Always wanted to be a bit of an academic. At the same time, I wrote Never Eat Alone, which talked about how I got from a poor kid in Pittsburgh to all the jobs that I had and all the success that I had. It was really through a series of doors being opened through my network, that opportunity set that happens through great relationships. But I decided to start this research institute on high-performing teams at the same time that I started for Isaac Greenlight, 20 years ago. And that 20-year journey is now documented in this new book.

4:13So I've been doing this work for 25 years. It started interestingly when I wanted to look at why sales and marketing didn't find the interdependencies that they should. When I was at Deloitte, I ran marketing. When I was at Starwood, I ran both. There was a big difference when you had both sales and marketing, chief revenue officer under one roof, really having a cogent mission, collective mission, but also a team that was designed to hit it out of the ballpark together. Over the last 20 years, I've realized so much value in corporations is pent up by ineffective interdependencies and not finding the value between marketing, sales, product, technology, et cetera.

5:02That's the journey that I've been on for 20-some years. Wow. Okay. When it came to those two examples, I'm just trying to think about having one company fail or to me, if you're the CRO, that's like to me how most companies are trying to operate now is like putting both under, you know, one leader who has insight into the entire org. And to hear that that one didn't work. And at Deloitte, you were mostly in charge of marketing. You said like that that one did. I mean, I'd love to explore that a bit more because a lot of CMOs that come on now talk about this role of the CRO and that being really like the cohesive, you know, structure now.

5:37It's not just the revenue interdependencies. Starwood was not just the fact that sales and marketing didn't get together, but Starwood had a real estate division, which had had its various brands and products. It had its regional organization, which is operations, et cetera. And that bigger interdependency did not come together. So it wasn't just the sales and marketing that wasn't effectively integrated. It's interesting, but at Deloitte, there wasn't an organizational design. And that's, I guess, one of the points I would make to anybody saying, well, I need to get control of sales as a marketer and be the chief revenue officer.

6:18The reality is you don't. You need to partner more effectively. There's massive changes going on right now with AI in the world of transformation. And those, and I believe very critically, leadership needs to be much more interdependent to achieve it. So for instance, I look at, there's trillions of dollars to be taken out of costs in supply chain. And if a supply chain leader is trying to engineer that transformation without sales and forecasting and marketing and customer intimacy and finance and manufacturing, there will be a total ineffectiveness of that supply chain. Now, the Sherpa might be the head of supply chain, but the team is a broad interdependent team.

7:08And as soon as we start thinking about our roles in silos and we start battling over who has control of things, we've already lost. The reality is that we do not work in org charts. We work today and always have worked in a matrix. And if you really look at an organization as a tentacled network, the question is, what goals do you have and who is your team? On every goal that you have, the team is whoever you need to get that goal done. and you need to begin to lead across those matrices to be an effective leader today. And it very much frustrates me when people say, well, I need somebody to give me that control of the organization, but you'll never have enough control.

7:58By the way, and I'm constantly talking about CEOs. I coach executive teams, CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world and their executive teams. And even CEOs have a vision that they can't land if they don't know how to get the most out of an interdependent team. So it's about the interdependencies of the team that creates value today. And it's not just the adjacency, sales and marketing, et cetera. Yeah. So my first question is like, how? How do you get these teams to talk? Because most, I mean, I think I've done probably over a thousand C-suite interviews now, and most people are still in org structures.

8:34It seems like a newer concept that I hear these executives being like, oh, big projects, you should have your CTL on board. and your COO and your CEO. Like this is a newer thing I've been hearing over the past six months, but it still means most people are still in org structures. So like, how do you get these teams to work like this? Well, the first thing is you need an enlightened leader who's read my book that recognizes that their job is to lead without authority, is to lead in service of a mission and then to enlist people in a team that is a volunteer army to go take a hill together. So, you know, right now, the idea that AI can be reinventing, whether it's our customer interface, right, and our customer exchange, that's going to have a technology component, of course.

9:25That's going to have a marketing component. It will probably, depending upon the industry, have a sales component. and it will also probably have to do with HR and others. And once somebody recognizes that the team that I'm creating is an interdependent team, then the next step is how do you reach out to those individuals and onboard them, right? And the most important thing is to onboard them with excitement, and onboard them with hope and possibility that we could go take a hill together, crush a new idea, break through some pre-locked up sense of ourselves as a company, etc. So there's a motivational piece of invitation, but then there's a humility piece to get off the damn podium and stop trying to be a leader with authority, but being a leader that co-creates.

10:19And that's a big part of the book, which is how do you get a group of individuals to co-create with a lot of candor, with a lot of transparency? I call it a social contract. Some people think that as soon as you get that group together, that some people are very delicate. They won't challenge each other in the room. Well, if you don't challenge each other in service of pushing the mission higher, then we're going to have, again, a mediocre solution. So I want us to start to shed. I actually, in the book, I talk about 10 shifts from traditional leadership to what I call teamship. And that, you know, that I'm excited about relative to, you know, this first one, shifting from conflict avoidance to candor.

11:05How do you get your team to agree to that? And then in every chapter, I give a set of simple practices that we can use that bring that shift to life. I've for over 20 years, I've observed 3000 teams in there and collected data about their their their practices toward trying to achieve high performance. And those practices, once I saw what looks like a good practice on a winning team, I took it out and I applied it to other teams and saw if it moved the needle. And if it did, it made it to the book. And the reason the book's so small, it's just a teeny book. It's because I've been curating these practices for 24 years.

11:48And they are just exactly as Ben Franklin used to say, this letter would be shorter if I had more time. I've had 24 years to curate the most important practices of a high-performing team. So we can even get into some of those if you want. Yeah. I was actually going to say, I'd love to go through just those 10 shifts. And you don't have to dive too deep into them because obviously people should be reading this book. But like, if you were to just knock out what those 10 shifts are, I'd love to hear them. Yeah, well, I can. Yeah, whip it out. Go through it. Bring it out. So the first and most important shift is what we've already been talking about, which is shifting from thinking about our team as an org chart to thinking about our team as a matrix.

12:29That's probably one of the most powerful and important shifts. Another shift is the shift from conflict avoidance to candor. and I give some real I found some fun teams that have really nailed that and there are a number of practices the way each chapter of the book is written is there's a hero story at the beginning of somebody who really does this candor thing well and then then I delineate some practices not only of of her or him that are doing those shifts well but others that we've curated and let me just give a couple on candor because I have to say yeah this has got to be one of the most important ones across the board, aside from redefining the team.

13:10Do it with me. I'm ready. Yeah, sure. Well, look, I mean, there's a practice that a lot of companies do called report outs. I remember when I was CMO, I would have a report out from the person re-engineering our loyalty program and they would show up and there'd be my executive team in marketing from many different functions. And the person would give a report out and they would show up and they'd say, here's what we've achieved. Here's where we're going. And then a couple of people would chirp in, particularly if there was some adjacency relevant, but frankly, not many people would engage. I would certainly engage as the leader.

13:50It was very hub and spoke to me. There's a new process that I want to institute. It's called stress testing. Every critical player on your team needs to constantly show up among the team and be stress tested. There's so much wisdom in the team that stays pent up, but people don't challenge each other. People aren't curious and ask tough questions. People don't necessarily help each other unless asked for help to collaborate. So we create a stress test where somebody now shows up and says, here's what I've achieved. Here's where I'm struggling. Very few people currently report where they're struggling and here's where I'm going.

14:26And then everybody goes into small breakout sessions and opens up a Google Doc or whatever and says, here's what you're missing. Here's where we want to challenge you. Here's a risk you're not seeing. Here's an innovation or an idea I want to give to you. And here's where I could help. Now, what we've done is we've taken an average room of 12 people on any given topic, four people are hurt. Now we've squeezed it so everybody's hurt. Right? That's a big shift. And we're not only that, but we've increased by virtue of going into the breakout rooms and giving people an assignment to challenge, we've increased psychological safety by 85 % and we hear more truth.

15:05So a simple practice called a stress test, moving from a traditional report out is game-changing to a culture of a team. Now, if that team isn't just the people that report to me, but it's the head of sales and all these other people, the other benefit to stress testing as you go is that these individuals may have points later that they would bring up that are reasons why your collaboration, your project isn't effective. But if they're engaged in the stress testing all along, you're going to hear those much earlier. You're going to get the insights from a diverse and more inclusive set of individuals for the collaboration that's at hand.

15:46So critical because as I was saying earlier, all of the big transformations are multidisciplinary today. You need to make sure you've all of the points of view involved and you don't have time to just drag everybody into meetings. By the way, that's another shift. Chapter six is shifting from meetings as the primary form of collaboration to collaborative software as the first form of collaboration where many more people can be involved in getting their point of view in, in a more thoughtful way in their own time and they don't all have to just be shoved in a meeting and you hear only the same four voices all the time.

16:26Right. So that's another critical shift. Now, another shift is moving from accidental relationship bonding to purposeful relationship bonding. You know, there's three layers to these shifts. One layer at the bottom is, can you create a team that's got each other's back? We did, we had that at Deloitte. We didn't have it at Starwood. You know, that team that, that both is bonded. That's chapter four, connected as relationships. That team that shares a commitment to lifting each other's energy up, resilience. We were also fatigued during the pandemic and we would show up in meetings and we would say, before we start, how is everybody?

17:07We don't do that anymore. That sense of collective shared, I've got your back. I care about where you are and I want to help, right? That is in chapter five, after purposeful bonding to shared resilience. And then the next one is celebration, high-fiving and making sure that the team is constantly giving each other the energy through celebration. Very few teams are truly celebratory. I think you might find it more in sales and maybe in marketing than you do in the average organization overall. certainly more than in operations or at the executive team level. But it needs to be a very purposeful shifting from leader-led praise to team-led praise.

17:52And by the way, Stephanie, everything I'm talking about today is that there's a macro point, which is we're asking the team to share in leadership. We're asking the team to step up 30%. If you're a leader today, I want you to expect more of your team. And this book is a formula for telling your team how to be in service of each other. Like it's one thing for you as a leader to give your team feedback. It's another thing for your team to give each other feedback. You know, it's one thing for you to hold your team members accountable. It's another thing for them to hold each other accountable, lift each other's energy up, et cetera.

18:31What we're doing in the book is we're giving your team a methodology for the team to own success with the leader. And it frees up the leader in a significant way. I love this. And kind of the thread that I'm hearing with all of this is really teaching emotional intelligence. And like, I mean, to me, these are human principles of like how to support each other's energy and check in on each other and have each other's back and learning to celebrate each other. And I think if I were to look at the job market for a while, that wasn't as maybe necessary for a while because skills really outweighed many of those things.

19:06Like if you were a high performer in a skills mindset that you didn't really need to do some of these things. I think that's my story around this. But now it seems like this is like we're having to teach people this again, like how to be human, how to love on each other, how to support each other, how to check in on people's energy and seeing where they're at and caring. Like these are all just human things that I think maybe were lost for a little while. Yeah. I would say, as again, there's three layers. The bottom layer is everything you're talking about. How do you get a team to be that relational, connected, bonded, caring, supportive, energy-laden team?

19:42That's the bottom layer. The next layer is now how do you turn that on? How do you turn the heat up and make sure that we have butt-kicking accountability? We have real challenge culture. We have a sense of getting coaching from our peer group, that second layer. The third layer is practicing the tools and process and techniques of what I call 21st century collaboration. We need to be collaborating much faster, quicker cycles of change. We need to be adopting agile as a general operating system for the company, no matter where you are, not just in software development, but in how we project manage, we need to be working in short sprints and getting lots of new information, doing pivots as needed, working in another short sprint.

20:29So it's all three layers. That bottom, it's interesting, your perspective on that bottom layer. I actually do think that as AI begins to take on more and more of the core competencies and skills of marketing and other things, it's going to elevate the human component to us and making sure that we have that. If you think about it, AI is the amalgamation of all great thinking into a point of view. That doesn't mean that there isn't a role for an individual to challenge that to level up. The insight of finding that pristinely right thing to do has been squashed in this AI mush of a single voice that then can be challenged by a human to pull out a particular vision or point of view of that and go higher.

21:24And that requires that humanity in that process. Yeah, yeah. So when also thinking about this, do any of these concepts change based off the job market we're in? Like I think about we were in like the silent resignation and people quitting, silent quitting. Now, pretty sure I read a couple like job reports the other day and it's like, we're the opposite. People are holding onto their jobs. People are losing jobs. People can't find jobs coming out of college. Like do any of these mindset shifts and how you're thinking about this change based off the environment? Because like when I think about leading my company, it feels like it'd be harder to invest from a like, you know, everybody's standpoint when it's shifting like this.

22:05At one point people are silent quitting and you're like, man, if I'm like giving a lot of responsibilities to the entire workforce. That fear feels like risky because they're silent quitting. And then now shifting into this space where it's like now they're holding on, but maybe holding on out of like being scared. It's like, how do you balance these? Interesting. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll just give a thought on those two markets. In the silent quitting, what I found when we were practicing these practices to companies that had that in the abundant job market at the time was we found a lift in engagement.

22:37You know, we're, we're asking a team to, like I said, back in Deloitte days, go take a hill together. We're asking a team to have a strong esprit de corps, caring about, you know, a mission, but caring about each other and pushing each other higher. That's exciting. It's engaging. Right. So I know I found that even times when we heard about this quite quickly, we didn't see it on the teams we were coaching because this team ship really levels everybody up. Now, the flip side is when you have the clinging to the job and maybe a little bit more tepid insecurity, a little less risk-taking, this team ship also pushes each other to take those risks, swing for the fences together.

23:26The psychological safety breeds more risk-taking. It breeds the ability to be bolder. And also the process of work that we bring into place, this 21st century collaboration, it inherently pushes us to be bolder and bigger in our collaborations, which of course we need in times when people may be more risk-averse. But I also think we're moving into a different phase, which is I think we're We're going to go through a very strange time. You think about Uber. And Uber right now, they've signaled to the market that they're investing in self-driving cars. But yet, their primary workforce is a driver.

24:07And as a result, drivers are sitting back saying, well, who are you that you're trying to engineer me out of a job? You obviously don't care about me. That's the conversation that I've heard had, right? Every company is going to be faced with that. I mean, imagine if you run a call center. I used to run the call centers when I was CMO at Starwood. Imagine if you run a call center. Pretty sure within five years, there won't be call centers. Yeah, for sure. And so how are you getting your call centers engaged and enlivened when the reality is our technologies are going to disaggregate them? Yeah.

24:45Yeah. What do you think then? How do you envision that? Because I mean, it seems to me that like people will have to be, their jobs will be lost for sure. But as a leader - Many jobs will be lost, no question. Like how do you also, I mean, if we have a five-year timeline, maybe, let's just say, because right now agents maybe aren't fully ready to take over customer support and success, maybe fully yet. Like you still need some people. We're piloting it within a year and within three years, we'll be up and running, et cetera. So yeah, three to five years, a hundred percent. So now we're in this like weird in-between stage.

25:13Like what would you do as a leader knowing that like you got to shift people out? Well, that, by the way, is a conversation I'm hosting the dialogue of a group of leaders at the TED conference in a few weeks. Both CIOs, CHROs, and leaders bring them together to answer that question. But let me look at that in a couple of different vantage points. First of all, I would challenge the folks in the call center today for those who would like to step up and be at the forefront of the AI transformation to volunteer to do so. So I think with energy, there's a subset of people, maybe it's 5%, that we're asking to be at the forefront of figuring out how AI will be transformative.

25:58Those individuals more than likely will still find a role. The innovators, the ones who are willing to collaborate, the curious, those individuals, it'll be a small subset. So I do think we can speak with positivity, growth, and energy. And I understand that if somebody chooses not to be a part of that movement, that they will suffer from it. But it doesn't mean that I, as a leader, need to just walk into a call center and say, in five years, you'll all be gone. Right? So we can focus on the journey between now and then with those who want to be innovators. The next point I would say is, I think that while I'm not going to get into the societal question of what happens when all the Uber drivers are laid off because of self-driving cars, long-term truckers are laid off because of AI and self-driving trucks, call centers are dismissed.

26:54Easily, we can go to the social disruption that might occur when we have that number of people that are not employed and the inequity that you see and some of the disruption that you might find will occur, right? Yeah. People with pitchforks standing in your doorsteps. Yeah. I've talked quite a bit about this. If anyone wants to hear about it, I talked to this guy, Zach Cass, who he worked at OpenAI and now he's like a futurist in this. We had a whole talk on this type of thing and where people are going to go when a lot of jobs just are gone. I'd be interested in hearing your point of view. I view that we have to have a societal option for that that looks somewhere close to universal basic income married to some form of public works so that people can be productive.