Both days of the Gartner CSO and Sales Leader Conference in May were loaded with messages about the importance of bold leadership and the competitive advantages it creates. In his Day 2 keynote address, Keith Ferrazzi, author, entrepreneur and thought leader, said the world’s highest-performing organizations rely on teams more than leaders.
“I want you to say to your sales teams it’s time for them to step up 30% and meet you in leadership,” Ferrazzi said.
It’s the message Ferrazzi presents in his 2024 book, “Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship.” The book, he said, is the culmination of 24 years of research involving more than 3,000 teams with a focus on one key question — what does it take to be a high-performing team?
It comes down to assembling a group of driven people who will commit to holding each other accountable, Ferrazzi said.
“We expect everything of the leader and give too little focus to the teammates and their responsibility to each other,” he states in the book. “Work happens in networks of teams. Upgrading teams and what it means to be a great teammate is one of the least-curated and underleveraged opportunities for accelerating business outcomes today.”
Co-Elevation and Candor
An imperative first step to develop a high-performing team is to create a work environment in which individual team members embrace the challenge to excel, encourage each other to achieve, and feed off each other’s successes.
Ferrazzi calls this co-elevation. It requires a shift away from the hub-and-spoke model of a leader who identifies goals and provides directives. It places an emphasis on collaboration and requires that every team member be willing to both provide and accept constructive criticism.
While Ferrazzi didn’t call for a complete pivot to holacracy, he did say within a decade, an organization chart will be a sign of a company that is not embracing more effective paths to improved productivity.
Co-elevation hinges on team members accepting a new social contract regarding how individuals work together. It requires agreement from everyone that there are old notions of behavior that do not serve the team well. Common tendencies such as reserving comment, avoiding conflict, resentment of a colleague, and allowing for less than a teammate’s best will doom co-elevation.
Good leaders provide regular feedback, hold their team accountable, and lifts the team’s energy, Ferrazzi aid. Great leaders assure that team members give each other feedback, hold each other accountable and work to raise each other’s energy.
Teamship is characterized by transparency. There is no room for fragile egos or whispered comments in strong team environments.
Ferrazzi states in his book, “The old team social contract is to not speak up for fear of throwing a peer under the bus, but the new social contract is not holding back for fear of letting your peer struggle and fail without the value of your opinion.”
The New Look of Collaboration
Counterintuitive to his team-first emphasis, Ferrazzi suggested that large team meetings are one of the least effective forms of collaboration. Younger workers tend to recognize meetings as a cart-before-the-horse approach to true collaboration, he said.
Breaking into smaller groups — he suggests three members each — opens the door to sharing more openly. It magnifies coworkers listening to and learning from each other.
“In the average meeting of 12 people, four people feel like they’re heard — and they’re always the same damn people,” he told the Gartner Sales Leader Conference audience.
Breaking into groups of three provides psychological safety. Ferrazzi’s research shows that candor in small breakout rooms is 85% higher than when teams meet as a single cohort. When smaller groups reconvene as the entire team to share insights, team members are less likely water down their group’s consensus.
But bigger isn’t always a bad idea. Ferrazzi argues that a key component of teamship is to broaden the definition of what constitutes one’s team. “We work in broad global networks inside and outside even the walls of our own companies, so we need to redefine how we think of ‘teams’ and collaborate liberally outside the limited org chart,” he states in his book.
Ferrazzi held up e.l.f. Beauty, a company he has worked with, as a model of co-elevation through a commitment to candor and peer coaching. Mandy Fields, CFO at e.l.f. Beauty, told Ferrazzi their co-elevation culture begins with hiring and onboarding. The company pursues workers who will be open to candor and healthy challenges in a respectful manner from peers — and offer it in return.
Feedback at e.l.f. is not top-down from managers to subordinates in quarterly or annual reviews. It occurs daily, Ferrazzi said, it comes from all directions, and it is coached and reinforced by leaders and teammates who embrace it as a cultural norm.
Practice Praise
Another key characteristic of companies that create co-elevation cultures is frequent recognition. “Our research shows that teams don’t celebrate enough,” Ferrazzi said. Here are some eye-opening statistics:
- 79% of the people who leave an organization cite a lack of recognition as the primary reason for deciding to exit.
- 40% of employees report never getting recognition on the job.
- 50% of managers admit they do not recognize outstanding performance as they should.
One sales team Ferrazzi worked with shared “exploits of the week” on a weekly team call. These were key wins, strategy decisions or teamwork that stood out.
Ferrazzi suggests making peer praise a formal part of meetings. Workers are asked to come prepared to share why they appreciate another team member. The expression should be specific and brief.
“Marathon runners need applause all the way,” Ferrazzi writes. “It’s especially important for young team members who need to know that they’re growing in the right direction, even though they’re learning.”
A Singular Approach to Teamship
Ferrazzi told the Las Vegas audience that while teamship is all about cohesion and co-elevation, individuals don’t have to wait for it to be introduced as a companywide undertaking.
“I’m calling on you to be the shepherd of it in your organizations. Your company’s culture is irrelevant,” he said. “If a small group of people that are committed to working together adopt this social contract, that is their culture. It’s one of the best win-wins that you can possibly imagine, and you can be the culture change agent.”
