Ep 665 | Teamship — Leading Together Over Leading Alone

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Do you ever feel like, as a leader, every single decision, every problem, every escalation somehow lands on your desk or in your inbox? You are probably trying to lead, but you are likely also drowning in being kind of the, the hub or the central node of it all. I think that's how what we call hero leadership fails. Today I want to dive into this newer concept, at least newer to me, uh, something I just recently learned. and it's called Teamship. Teamship. It's a framework that an author known as Keith Ferrazzi introduced in his newest book, Never Lead Alone. And what it does is flip the traditional leadership model upside down so that your team actually carries more weight. So, let's talk a little bit more about Keith. You know, what teamship really means and how maybe you want— might want to consider it for your team and implement it starting tomorrow. So first off, who is Keith Ferrazzi? Keith is a best-selling author and he's an executive coach. Very, very, very well-educated guy who also ran some major, major organizations. And he authored a book called Never Eat Alone. You probably have heard of the book Never Eat Alone. Which was his classic book about networking. Over the years of working with, uh, all these Fortune 500 companies and these tech startups and these leadership teams, he started to notice a pattern. He started to notice a pattern, and that pattern was that traditional leadership models where all of the decisions and the power and the accountability, they all would flow through one person he noticed that they begin to collapse under complexity. So, his shift, what he began to talk around or teach was that leadership shouldn't be about the brilliance of one. It should be about the collective brilliance of many. And he coined this term teamship to describe this new paradigm. This new paradigm where each team member is a co-owner in thinking and in accountability and in problem solving. The leadership or the leader is not diminished per se. He or she and, and the concept of leadership is just reframed. So instead of the hero, the leader becomes the system designer. And when I read this, when I learned more about it, I started to fall in love with it more and more. Teamship is leadership that's practiced through the team, not over the team as a lot of traditional leadership models happen to do. So, what it means and what it anchors to is number 1, what Keith calls co-elevation. Co-elevation is simple. You push your peers upward. It also, number 2, is built around peer accountability. So, not reliance on the leader to call out issues, but peers calling out issues. Number 3, it's around structured candor, which means safe, regular mechanisms for sharing, or I should say speaking the truth. And then number 4, it's about visible commitments and shared norms. So what makes this teamship concept rather novel is that we often default to this kind of command and control model, if you will, or to, you know, start to behave like my job is to lead and your job is to follow. And teamship says things differently. Teamship says we're all leading and we're all holding each other up. I think this matters. This idea around teamship as a form of leadership matters now more than ever. Because complexity and scale and velocity, I don't think there's— I mean, just in the world in which we operate today, there's not a lot of leaders, if any leader at all, that can keep pace. The burdens of decision-making and oversight and innovation, they always bottleneck at the leader. Teamship actually distributes that weight. It accelerates decisions. It surfaces issues earlier. It binds people a bit differently than in models past. And ultimately, I think it saves the leader from burnout. So in these volatile markets or these fast-scaling teams, I think this sort of model where the team is more deeply involved is essential. If you think about maybe some examples, let's take like a real estate team. Like a real estate team. Instead of the traditional command and control model, I think in a teamship sort of world, agents start holding each other accountable to make their lead follow-up, or to track their leads in the CRM, or to, you know, role-play, or instead of you as a leader having to monitor them, they're monitoring one another. In a, call it, high-growth startup, instead of traditional status updates, the team runs stress test reviews where everyone presents, you know, what's stuck and where they need help. And then peers begin to jump in to unblock in those places where help is needed. In Farazi's playbook, this is exactly what's discussed. These are not theories. They're already practiced in a lot of high-performing organizations. And I think you can implement some of this too. So, how do you go about implementing this concept of teamship in your world? You know, I'm just going to give you— we can't possibly cover the entire conversation he has in the book in one episode here today, but let me give you the first, call it, 4 moves that you can make this week. I think number 1, we can start by declaring your intent. So, in your next team meeting, maybe say something like, "Hey, we're going to experiment with this new concept." that I just became familiar with known as Teamship. You're going to see some new practices out of me. We're going to shift our accountability a little sideways. We're going to test this out together. So number 1, I'm going to declare the intent. Number 2, I'm going to build out a one-page social contract or team norms. So in a 30-minute session, let's codify the 5 or 6 behaviors that everyone on the team agrees to. For example, we speak what's true even when it's uncomfortable, or we own problems, not just tasks, or we help each other proactively. So come up with this new social contract around what teamship and teamwork and like co-leadership and co-elevation might look like. Make it visible and then revisit this at each meeting or every month. So, number 1, declare the intent. Number 2, build this social contract. Number 3, start to use candor prompt in your next meeting. Candor prompt. So, what does that mean? Toward the end, ask, hey, at the end of the meeting, ask, hey, what's something we're avoiding discussing that we must surface? That is a candor prompt. What's something we're avoiding discussing as a team that we have to surface? And then maybe break into— break the team into pairs for a couple minutes and then share one point each. And do this sort of thing consistently. And what it does is not just surface, you know, some things you've been avoiding discussing, but it also trains this degree of emotional safety. And then number 4, what I would say is take one of your meetings and shift it from whatever it is you were running to what I would call, or what Farazi would call, a stress test plus ask format. Stress test and ask format. So instead of providing status updates, go around the room and ask each person to answer the following. What's working? What's stuck? And then state specifically what I need from you. And then let peers offer direct help. Instead of making it the traditional leader-led rescue mission, let everybody else chime in. So share what's working, share what's, you know, where you're stuck, and then share what you need to get unstuck and let everybody work together to offer direct help. Beyond those 4 steps, your job is today as a leader is to observe and maybe nudge or prompt and reflect. And after you run 2 or 3 cycles of what I just described, you can start to ask, okay, well, which of these behaviors gained traction and which of these behaviors might still need a little reinforcement? And then what you do is tweak that contract a little bit. Maybe iterate the format and figure out ways to embrace more of this teamship concept. I don't think you need perfection around this. You just need forward motion. And there's an opportunity here to co-lead instead of that traditional format. So, pick a practice from that list I just gave you and run it this week. Maybe use the candor prompt or make your social contract or try that stress test format. And then, just take notes on how the team responds. I don't think you need to flip your culture overnight. I think you just need to get the foot in the door and start to try some things that are a little different. And over time, you know, those cracks start to become shifts. I think that that's what teamship is all about. Start small, lead well, and then elevate. Elevate together. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.