Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back!

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, I’m excited about the call. And I love the name, that’s my father’s name. So anytime I get a chance to talk to a Peter, a Pete, or a Pietro, it always brings a smile to my face.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, Pietro. A Pietro Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi
Si, è vero. È vero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, we already got some life, some energy in this. That’s good. Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and I am going to accidentally say Never Eat Alone, because I read your book back in the day.

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s okay. That’s what most people know me from 20 years ago. This is the anniversary, 20th year anniversary of Never Eat Alone, the book that redefined “How do you build relationships that open doors of opportunity for yourself?” And now, 20 years later, “How do you build the kind of relationships among the team that you work with that won’t let you fail?”

Pete Mockaitis
And just for funsies, we were talking before we pushed record, I want to know, Keith, are you still a conference commando?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, I just came back from Davos, which is probably the holy grail of conferences, and I had the blessing of facilitating a roundtable of the CEO of two of the largest high-tech companies, the CEO of one of the biggest banks, the head of AI for Salesforce. What an amazing place, and it was all utilizing the simple practices of “How do you deepen and build relationships in this crazy world we’re living in today?”

And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, the book Never Eat Alone was so successful because it was like eating popcorn. “Try this, do this, 15 tips to be a conference commando.” And this new book is the same way, 10 shifts from traditional mediocre leadership to having your team step up in high-performing teamships, and 10 shifts and a bunch of little practices and it’s not that difficult. You just got to pick up and start trying some of the practices.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I know your style, your practices are based on a boatload of underlying research. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and any startling discoveries that made you go, “Whoa!” when you saw it?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, 3,000 teams in our dataset. And what do you think the average team’s courage and candor is among a team on a scale of zero to five? What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
Two point one.

Keith Ferrazzi
You read the book. Actually, it ranges between 1.8 and 2.2, and that is just shocking. How we could be sitting in collaborative dialogues and people aren’t courageous enough or transparent enough or desirous enough to make each other successful to be telling the truth in the room? That’s just sh**. And the average team is mediocre at best. And what I just kept discovering time and time again was how mediocre the average team was.

Now, there are some teams that crush it. Amazon’s team does an extraordinary job on many of the most important shifts of a high-performing team, and so do a lot of the young unicorns that are coming out of Stanford, disrupting large corporations. These companies are doing incredibly well. But the average entrepreneur and the average big-company executives, pretty mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, courage and candor at a two-ish level, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice as compared to a dream state of a five?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, okay, we’re having a conversation about the lagging sales numbers this quarter, and we have a polite dialogue in the room, and then we leave the room, and the real talk happens, and that happens all the time. Or worse, people are DM-ing privately during the meeting, saying the sh** that they won’t say out in the meeting itself.

Keith Ferrazzi
So that’s in the average state. In the powerful state, and I’ll use a company that, really, is a lovely place to work, it’s called e.l.f. Beauty. At e.l.f. Beauty, everybody agrees when they’re hired that “We will have the fastest, most compelling growth as professionals while we’re working here. And a part of that is a commitment that we will always tell each other the truth. We’ll never let each other fail. It’s not throwing each other under the bus. It’s assuring that everybody is successful. We cross the finish line together,” all those kinds of words.

And as a result, in a meeting, somebody will say, “We’re lagging sales numbers,” and the head of sales will say, “You know it’s been very difficult to get the kind of leads we need for marketing because of our lagging competency in digital marketing.” And then the head of marketing will say, “You know, like I appreciate that. We’re down a gal that we used to have in that particular role, and it is an issue. But let’s talk about how we could reallocate resources.” And then the head of HR will pop in and say, “You know what? We’ve got an analytics person over there we could move.”

So, it’s that kind of a collaborative dialogue. Now, all of those one-off conversations would have happened in DMs or behind the scenes, and they wouldn’t have happened from a sense of what I call co-elevation, where people are collaborating in service of a mission, pushing each other higher. Instead, it would have been done in a more eviscerating-ly, kind of passive-aggressive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like whiny, defensive, “Can you believe so-and-so?”

Keith Ferrazzi
Pointing fingers, and that just happens. I am so shocked by the most prominent businesses in the world. So, I have another one. I’m not going to say the name of the company, but this is a company I’m coaching right now, Fortune 50 company. And this business has self-professed that their candor levels are at 1.3 on a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3. And in one meeting, we practiced some practices.

So, my practices are researched. That was the original question, 3,000 teams, I’ve observed practices of successful teams. I take them out, dust them off, package them, put them in other teams to a point where I can prove that “If you do this practice, you will move the needle on the diagnostic and likely move the needle on performance.”

And the 1.3 company did this practice called a stress test. So, we had three critical initiatives that were being, or that are absolutely important for this company to thrive. Three critical initiatives presented. The first one presented and said, “Okay,” and they all present in the same way, “Here’s what we’ve achieved. Here’s where we’re struggling. Here’s where we’re going.”

But everybody knew that they had to individually write in a Google Doc what the challenge was. Like, “I listened to you. Here’s what I disagree with. Here’s a risk you’re not seeing, something. Here’s where I might offer an idea. And here’s where I’d be willing to help.” The entire group is writing this in, and then they go into breakout sessions, and they corroborate as small groups in three. Then we come back in and have a conversation.

And then I asked the team, “What’s the degree of candor you just experienced?” They all put into chat fours and fives. So, literally, one practice moved them from a standard of polite, passive-aggressiveness, and political dialogue to full transparency where they got all the stuff on the table and we were at fours and fives levels of candor in less than an hour of the meeting starting. This is what high-return practice is, and what the book can do for any team.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m curious, what do we think is underlying the low levels of candor?

Keith Ferrazzi
First of all, there’s a wrongheadedness about feedback and candor that was born within our culture as children. So, when your parents gave you feedback, were they giving you input? They were telling you something. They were giving you a directive, “Sit up straight,” “Don’t eat that way,” whatever. Feedback has always come in the forms of a directive. And when you got it from your teachers, coaches, bosses, it’s always a directive.

Now I’m telling your peers to unleash feedback. But if everybody thinks that what they’re doing is giving each other directives, that is a cluster. But that’s why we don’t do it. Right now, we think that feedback and directive are intertwined. We don’t do it. We don’t like when we receive it because we assume that it’s coming with a directive.

I unbundle that when I’m working with teams. I say, “Listen, what we’re looking for is bold, inclusive, direct, challenging data from all of the points of view. In fact, let’s get more inclusive. Let’s go ask people who actually have a dog in the hunt down at the front lines. Let’s go ask innovators outside. Let’s get insights that just blow us away. And then let’s just treat it all like individual datapoints that we don’t have to do anything with, except use to analyze for better answers.”

So, one of the reasons why I think the feedback is so supercharged and the ability to get it more fluidly is to disaggregate what supercharges it. That’s the connection to directive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So, right there, it’s just like, “If you have a different perspective about what we’re doing, what we’re giving, what we’re receiving, that can be big right there,” because some folks might say, “Well, it’s not my place to direct this person because, I mean, I’m their peer, or I’m even at a lower level in the hierarchy of the organization.”

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s right. And instead, now it’s just like, “Oh, I want to give this person my data, my insight. They can do whatever they want to it,” but we start celebrating the desire to be bold and to throw out crazy ideas, and that’s the powerful element. Look, I think the other thing is, you know, in some places, there’s a sense of politicization, “So, hmm, if I make this person successful, do I look less successful?”

And the reality is that’s another reboot, which is the leader needs– and this is, by the way, everything I’m talking about, you can either learn it as a teammate and be the best teammate on the team, or you could read the book and learn it as a leader and get the whole team to behave that way. So, leaders lead differently when they’re asking teams to become high-performing teams.

So, if a good leader gives feedback, a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable; a great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable. A great leader will actually get the team to have each other’s back to the point where they won’t let each other fail.

Now, those are 10 shifts. I just gave you, three of them, you know, a shift from conflict avoidance to candor. The shift from accidental relationships, serendipitous relationships, walking down a hallway, to purposeful, engineered, more powerful relationships. So, there’s a whole series of these shifts. Everyone has simple practices that bring it to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us another, a couple shifts and practices that you’ve seen be tremendously transformational?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, so I became a venture partner at a company called Lightspeed. It’s one of the largest VCs in the world, and I coach their portfolio companies. These extraordinary, thoughtful, fast-growth unicorn companies born out of Stanford University or IIT in India. And these companies, they very much collaborate differently than most other teams. They don’t use meetings as the way in which they collaborate.

So, one of the shifts is from collaborating in meetings to collaborating in technology. So, if I said to you, “We’re running slow on the sales this quarter. Let’s have a meeting on it,” we all get in the room and we start having a dialogue. There’s 12 of us, and four of us would think that we’d been hurt. It’s just, you don’t have time to hear everyone’s point of view. Some people aren’t bold and aggressive in meetings, others are more introverted, etc.

But if I said, “Let’s not have a meeting on it. Here’s a Google Sheet, and here’s all 12 people’s names. First column, what do you think the real problem is that has caused the sales to slow down? Second column is what is a bold solution that could get us back on track? Okay, now everybody writes that up and reads it before we show up in the meeting. Now we show up in the meeting, we probably already landed the plane and all we have to do is agree that one of those solutions or a combination of a couple is the way to go, and we’re off and running.”

The old way would have been the meeting, the meeting after the meeting, the meeting we walked down the hallway, the lobbying behind each other’s backs. I mean, meeting shifting is a major shift that these young, hot unicorn companies, they organically know how to collaborate in asynchronous formats, not meetings. That’s another shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot because, you mentioned Amazon being high performing, and I understand that Amazon very much has a writing culture in which folks do some writing about some things and they might start a meeting with “We’re just reading the writing.” And to some, that sounds very intimidating, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write essays and pages and pages.” But what you’ve described sounds super easy, “I got two cells. I might be generating nine sentences, and we’re off to the races.”

Keith Ferrazzi
I love the purposefulness of the Amazon culture, but I do, on this particular issue, I see the value of it, but I would rather not read in a room. Also, I think that by the time you’re writing up a five-page document, you’re putting a stake in the ground relative to what this thing is. I’m talking about, like, that’s fine if you’re down here on the funnel of collaboration, you’re ready to close something. That’s editing where somebody, where we think we are.

But if you’re up here, and you’re trying to break through a problem, I don’t want you, I don’t want five pages of your opinion. That boxes us all in to your opinion and your solution. I want, “I’m up here. I want to hear what you think the problems are.” Because I’ve seen this where, in a large manufacturer that was retooling a significant part of its product line, they were falling behind, and everyone’s pointing fingers. And I said, “Let’s just do a meeting shift. Let’s everybody go online and we’re going to write ‘We are falling behind. But what do you think the reason is we’re falling behind and what’s a bold solution?’”

And, all of a sudden, we had all of these opinions from different functions. Some people said, “I want to send it down to the plant level and see what they think,” and etc. And, gosh, it just revealed itself. Truth came out of this tapestry of insight. And the person who came up with the boldest idea that worked, that we ended up implementing, was L4 from the people who were actually in the meetings originally, level four underneath the levels one and levels two that were naturally there.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, one, we’re exiting the meeting, and we’re getting all the bold thinking, just straight right out there in a Google Sheet or some sort of easy collaboration platform. Lay some more on us, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi
The word “agile” is a word that came up in the 2000s as a way to re-engineer how you develop software, and it, frankly, was a genius re-engineering of workflow that should be used by all of us in all the projects we do. And, ironically, even companies that develop software don’t practice agile on other project management solutions.

Look, agile can be pretty time-consuming and very in-depth. It can be a bunch of spreadsheets. But here’s what I would say if there’s a critical initiative that you have this year, a wish, a desire, a hope, have your goals for the year around it, but ask yourself very clearly, “What does success look like after month one?”

And after month one, pause and say, “Okay, what have we achieved in month one? Where did we struggle in month one? And what are we planning to do in month two in order to make sure we hit our year goals?” If you work in those short agile sprints, month by month, or if there’s a lot of volatility in what you’re doing, you could do week by week sprints, and at the end of those sprints, utilizing the practice that I’d mentioned earlier called stress testing, where the group of people who are involved in that project, beat it up at the end of every sprint.

They go into breakout rooms and they write, “What risks or challenges do I see that they’re missing? What innovation might I offer? Where would I offer help?” And now, all of a sudden, the whole team is on one page beating this thing up, all full transparency on the table. The person now says, “Thank you. I’ve got all this new information. Here’s how I’m adjusting my next month, and I’m now on track to hit my annual goals.”

Whereas, in the past, we’d wake up at the end of Q1 or Q2 realizing, “There’s no way in hell we’re going to make our one-year goals. We’re already so far off track and we haven’t been listening more and robustly to all of the input.” So, just using simple, agile sprints and adjusting through stress testing at the end of every one is an amazing operating system for the world we’re living in today, the volatility, the need for change, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, we have a big goal, a big timeline, we split it up into segments, so we’re checking in regularly and seeing, “Are we on track and how do we fix it?” getting all the wisdom from the people. Nifty.

Keith Ferrazzi
So, I’m going to harken back to my first book a bit because one of the problems I saw in our coaching of teams is that most teams, do not effectively define what a team is. So, what I mean by that is, in most large companies, the big problem is we think our team is who reports to us, and we’re constantly banging our head against the wall because there are so many other interdependencies that are getting in our way of achieving the things we want to achieve. Well, that is the first shift that I talk about in the book, shifting from hub-and-spoke leadership, where control is what defines a team, to a team being the critical network of people you need to get the job done.

So, as a leader, your team is who you need to get the job done. I don’t work in a big company, I’m an entrepreneur, and my team includes other entrepreneurs, like Peter Diamandis, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s a futurist in technology. He helped me design an entirely new business at Ferrazzi Greenlight that I hadn’t thought of, that was basically, it’s called Connected Success.

We take learners, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders. etc. who want to live the life of Keith Ferrazzi in terms of great relationships, transforming your life, transforming your career, etc., and we take them through an eight-week program. That is very different than the business model that I’ve always had, which is coaching executive teams. So, this is a very different business model.

And my teammate, Peter, incubated that with me, and he doesn’t work for me. I don’t pay him. I’m a partner of his and I do things for his and his teams, and he does things for me and my teams. All of a sudden, he’s a teammate, and if I didn’t define myself that way, I would have never tapped into his genius.

And in large corporations, you know, the software company that I was talking to you about earlier, the hardware and the software division are the same team in the growth of the business, and yet they think of themselves as other. And so, one team collaborates, and then they go try to get buy-in. Buy-in is BS. Buy-in is you’re trying to sell your ideas to people. You need to configure your team around the people you need to get the job done, independent of work charts.

And once that’s done, then you get that group to adopt what I call the social contract, “We’re going to be candid with each other. We’re going to push each other hard. We’re going to keep each other’s energy strong. We’re going to build strong, trusting relationships. We agree on this stuff, and then you do the practices.” So, just redefining team is such a critical component of high-performing teams and team-ship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I’m curious, when you lay out this contract, do you encounter resistance? Or do people sign up readily, and then later on have trouble? Or is it smooth sailing through and through?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, there’s usually, in every third team, there’s one a**hole that is just digging in out of self-preservation, fear, insecurity, selfishness, whatever, and they don’t want to really adjust to become a high-performing team. The reality is, in most teams, once they see, “Oh, wow, our score is 1.3? That’s pathetic. 

So, once you do the diagnostic, people are like, “Wow, that’s not who I want to be.” And now the question is, “It’s fine to be aware, but that doesn’t do anything. What are the practices? So, okay, I’m aware, now you’ve given me a stress test as a practice.” Or another practice is called a candor break, we’re in the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two, and they say, “Okay, what’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?” What a powerful question. They talk in groups of two, then they come back in the main room and they all share.

That’s turning the culture you wish you had into an assignment. It happens all the time in these practices. So, you become awake, you do the practice, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a better way to live my life. I’m not banging my head against the wall about my frustration about another peer. I’m able to have a conversation with them about it.”

So, I think that the adoption rate is very high. Very high. Every once in a while, you get one that’s not, but then it also becomes very evident that that guy is the jerk that probably doesn’t last very long in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
I do love that question in the candor break, “What’s something that’s not being said that should be said?” because it kind of reverses the emotional pressure dynamics, you know? Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable to say this thing because maybe it’ll hurt someone’s feelings, maybe I’ll look dumb, etc.” Then when you shift it, it then feels like the pressure is reversed. So, now the wrong answer is, “Uh, nothing. We’ve said everything.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Right. That’s the ridiculous answer. All I’ve done in most of these shifts, in the high-return practices, I have seen and curated practices that allow you to turn the kind of culture you dreamed of into simple assignments, and people don’t mind simple assignments, and in fact they’re pent up. You know, most organizations that are so overly polite that they don’t share what they’re thinking are usually highly political and they share behind each other’s back.

If you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to step up to a new standard of courage and transparency. Here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to go in small groups of two. You’re going to talk about what’s not being said. I know psychological safety is 85% higher in those small groups. Then we’re going to come into the main room. We’re going to have that discussion because you were assigned to do it so everyone has to have something to say,” and, boom, it’s all of a sudden on the table.

So, it’s actually, there’s a Fortune magazine article I wrote recently that says, you know, I’m tired of hearing people say, “Culture change is tough.” It’s not. Culture change changes when you just adopt simple new practices that change the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about the importance of praise, so this stuff isn’t necessarily all like, “Oh, say the hard courageous thing that’s going to upset people.” But also, we’re sharing some happy stuff, too.

Keith Ferrazzi
Praise and relationships, both are very happy. So, praise, there’s, “How do you shift from paltry limited leader-led praise?” which most companies don’t have enough praise. So, limited praise from leaders to abundant praise from peers. How do you create, and what do you do? If you’re a leader, let’s do a practice. Once a month, we’re going to do a gratitude circle where everybody goes around and shares one person on the team that they’re grateful for and why. Really simple practice. And you can do them even more frequently than once a month.

So, there’s a whole set of practices that shift from the leader being responsible for all the praise to the team. You can still do leader-led praise. You want certain behaviors dialed up on your team, you do an award for that kind of behavior, and you call out who that is. Very simple. It’s Pavlovian in nature, actually, right? It’s like the dog rings the bell; they get a treat. So, if you change your behavior, you get a treat, you get praised. So, that’s on the praise side. Very simple practices breed that kind of energy.

And relationships, you know, most teams have mediocre level of connection. I will go into a team, I’m like, I’ll do diagnostic interviews, “How close is your team?” “Oh, we’re so close. We grew up together. This team’s been together forever. Deep relationship. Deep caring relationships.” “Okay.” And we get in the room, and I ask the question, “Does my team have my back? Do I care about my team and what’s going on in their lives? Does my team know what I’m struggling with? And are they there to help lift me up?” “Oh, well. that’s kind of a high standard. That’s low twos, you know?”

And then I do a practice where everybody goes around and says, “What is my energy these days and what’s bringing it down?” And, all of a sudden, people come over to me, like, “Holy sh**, I’ve known this person for 10 years. I had no idea that their mother was suffering Alzheimer’s,” “I had no idea that they had an autistic son,” “I had no idea that they were struggling so much with this business leader that they serve in the business.” It’s amazing. We just don’t curate purposeful relationships.

Now when you have that, then you have a team that has more empathy, has more care, has more commitment. Yeah. So, I think of all of the interviews I’ve done, I think we’ve gotten through, like, more shifts here. Usually, I get to like three shifts. We got through, moving from candor, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, redefining the team itself as not an org chart but a network.

We moved from serendipitous relationships to purposeful relationships. We sort of threw in there the idea of moving from individual, “I got my own back. I’ve got to take care of my own resilience,” to team resilience. We talked about agile. We talked about celebration. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer growth.

That’s one that I love where teams actually give each other critical feedback on a quarterly basis using an open 360 where everybody goes around, and says, “Pete, what I most respect and admire about you in the last quarter is X. Thank you. And, Pete, because I care about your success going forward, I might suggest,” everybody goes around. And they go, “Keith, same thing.”

That kind of peer-to-peer coaching, I call it an open 360 practice, really starts to prime the pump for a team to become each other’s coaches. Anyway, you’ve been abundant in navigating around the book, so this has been a fun interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
”You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
I do a morning ritual, my fiancé and I, and I’ve just gotten engaged and we’re going to be married in June.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you. The alarm goes off, we push snooze, and over the next 10 minutes, we both lie and meditate on what are three things we’re grateful for at that moment and three things we’re looking forward to in that day. And the three things that we’re grateful for, we’re never allowed to repeat the same one twice, ever in our lives. So, it’s a beautiful way to realize what kind of abundance we have around us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Keith Ferrazzi
Look, this is more of a gift. If you’re excited about using the book, you can go to KeithFerrazzi.com, and we provided a video course around the book that you can certainly buy but you don’t have to. If you’re buying the book for your team, you get the video course for free. So, I think the challenge is just try some of these practices on. They’re so easy.

Can’t afford the book? Just go online and type “Keith Ferrazzi TeamShip.” I’ve published a lot of things on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, etc., so just try some of the practices. You’ll learn how game-changing they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you, Keith. This is fun.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time.