The pandemic altered many things in our world, especially the ways in which we work. Keith Ferrazzi — author, thought leader and founder of the consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight — has been doing a lot of work on how organizations can and should shift their mindset for this new era of work, and he’s written a new book on his findings called, “Never Lead Alone, 10 Shifts From Leadership to Teamship.” He joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to discuss his book, and how the lessons inside it can help organizations build better teams. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Let’s start with a piece of this. You write that we have to elevate collaboration. What gets in the way of elevating collaboration? How do we fix it?

Keith Ferrazzi: I think we spend too much time looking upward at our leaders. We need to spend more time looking at each other and how we work together. That’s the principal idea between moving from a perspective of leadership to a perspective of teamship. You know, a good leader gives feedback, but a great team gives each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable, but a great team holds each other accountable. We’ve got to give the team a real roadmap on how to collaborate effectively and really build transformational outcomes in the world that we’re in today.

Brancaccio: Because you acknowledge this, we haven’t changed that much where you’re stuck in patterns and ruts. We need some practice in the proper ways to give people the feedback they need. 

Ferrazzi: That question is the answer. We looked at 3,000 successful teams and asked the question, what are the most effective practices of those teams? We find that conflict avoidance is one of the most erosive elements of all teams. On a scale of zero to five, the average team reports 2.4 is their level of courage and ability to speak truth. So the high performing teams that we research and that we talk about in the book, they practice something called a candor break somewhere in the middle of a meeting, the team stops and says, “OK, go into groups of two and ask the question, what’s not being said in the room that should be said?” The average room of 12 people have four people think that they’re heard. When you do something like a simple candor break 10 out of 12 people think that they’re heard.

Brancaccio: And you can see the implications here for, for instance, diversity and inclusion, right? Because if the problem is all these people don’t feel heard, they will have a perspective that may be a different perspective that the group needs to be aware of.

Ferrazzi: I ended up talking to 26 heads of DE&I and asked the question, if you were coaching a team to be a North Star, emblematic perfect team on DE&I, what would you do? And unfortunately, there were very few answers, because most of the work that’s done on DE&I is about enterprise equity or generalized programs, but when you get down to the team level, there were fewer answers than I would have hoped for. So we started to design a methodology for DE&I, and we realized that through the book inclusion and making sure that every voice is heard shows up in so many different ways. So for instance, if you start using collaborative technology that is now available to everybody, Google Docs, Teams, Rooms, what happens is you can span out and invite people to collaborate in the dozens. People aren’t put on a spot in a room where the same four voices are always heard. You have the opportunity to be much more inclusive. Introverts can be heard, and as a result of that, you’re actually living a more inclusive team.

Brancaccio: Help me with a couple things though, Keith. I think many people listening will be scarred by some of their previous experience with dysfunctional teams. I mean, everybody wants — you call for it in the book — agile teams, but how do you keep a team accountable? Right? If it’s a group effort, there’s sometimes a tendency for no one to take actual responsibility.

Ferrazzi: The beginning of our book, we realize that teams that are truly different, they have a different social contract. David, they believe that their job is different than a mediocre team. The mediocre team salutes to authority. The high performing team knows that it’s committed to each other’s success. There’s a wonderful company that we benchmarked called e.l.f. Beauty. When they recruit a person, the commitment is you will grow further and faster than any other place you could work professionally. But in return, you have to shed your defensiveness. You have to care enough about each other to give the kind of feedback that you know you have each other’s back. That’s a social contract, and it needs to be solidified. And there are different social contracts. One social contract is, I won’t speak up in a room against a peer. It’s throwing them under the bus. Another social contract is, of course, I’m going to speak up in a room because I will not let my peer fail. I’m committed to what I call co-elevation, pushing them higher, and all of us will go higher together and achieve our mission greater and more than we would have otherwise. So that social contract is so important, but then what allows you to live the social contract are the simple new practices.

Brancaccio: As I hear you, Keith, I mean, you’re not just trying to make teams better. You’re trying to change almost an entire business culture. 

Ferrazzi: You know, my designs might be even bigger than that. David, I watch our political system with a lot of regret and sadness. The practices that we’re talking about here would be my dream to bring it to the cabinet and what’s going on down in Washington. There are other countries, by the way, the country of Bhutan, for instance, that have even adopted these principles and how the ministers work together. The bottom line, David, is yes, I believe our society, more than ever before, needs to have a collaborative, a co-elevating and a committed culture and a set of practices to deal with the volatility and the innovation that’s in front of us with new technologies like AI. And it makes me sad that we’re clinging to very old ways of working born in the industrial era that are going to stop us from moving into this next era with as much ease and as much success as we deserve, and that is possible. And so yes, I’m definitely looking for a much bigger change in organizational thinking, but I’m also hoping that it cascades out and it impacts how we behave as people, as friends, as families and even as governments.

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