How to build high-performing teams with Award-winning Coach Keith Ferrazzi

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch and take it to the top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead a life of purpose. Let's get started. Today's special guest is Keith Ferrazzi. I hope you enjoy the show, Keith. A huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast, James.

Let's have some fun. I'm looking forward to this.

Oh, I'm so excited to sit with you. So 20 years ago, a couple of decades ago, you wrote an amazing book, Never Eat Alone. Why did you write that book? And, you know, where has it landed 20 years later?

So that book was actually an accident. It's probably the best accident I ever had in my life. It was written because I had had a lot of early success in my life. I was the youngest partner at Deloitte. I became the global chief marketing officer of Deloitte, the youngest officer in a Fortune 500 company at Starwood Hotels, chief marketing officer and head of sales at Starwood. And somebody came along and said, hey, I want to write an article about you. What makes you successful? And I sat down and was thoughtful and I wrote 10 things that I thought were critical to my success at the time. And interestingly enough, they were all very relational, right? To, you know, thinking about who are the most important people that would advance my career and really busting my ass to be of service to them. That seems like such a simple and obvious thing. But, you know, when you're a kid in the bowels of Deloitte and you see the CEO of Deloitte saying, someday we're going to be at par with McKinsey. And at the time, we were the lowest of the big eight.

Wow.

And then what I did is I went away and I said, oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm going to go do some research on what would it mean to crawl up from the gutter and become one of the best consultancies in the world. And I wrote a white paper on what are the best practices in professional services marketing. I was 24 and I sent it to the CEO and he was like, wow, that's impressive. Nobody ever has done that. Why don't you come down and meet with me? Next thing you know, I'm meeting with him regularly. He becomes my mentor and he invites me in on a project to become, you know, to really engineer the future of marketing for the firm. And I became the chief Marketing officer. That's mind blowing. That was the book, right? And, but that was not what I wanted to do for a living. That's what I was doing to enable me being an executive at big companies. I just become the CEO of a computer games company because back in those days, if you were a marketer, you don't go from marketing to CEO. So I wanted to go get a P and L job and I became a CEO of a smaller computer games company. And what I started to realize is the leadership of an enterprise or any team is really tough to really try to extract value from all the different bits of the business. And I started studying this and it became one of the earmarks of what made this company successful and was able to be sold. And then I said, you know, gosh, I really have. I think I've seen stuff that the world doesn't really think about when they think about leadership. I realized that teamship is as important as leadership. And yet leaders worry about giving feedback, but do they worry about getting their teams to give each other feedback? Do they get their teams to hold each other accountable? Do they get their teams to lift up each other's energy? So I've been on a 24 year journey of researching and coaching what I believe to be some of the highest performing teams in the world?

I love it. I'm seriously excited for this and I know that the viewers and listeners are as well. So here in New Zealand, we've got the All Blacks. So that's our national rugby team. They're pretty damn awesome. You've heard of them awesome, right? So they're renowned for culture. They're world winning. One of the most dominant sports teams across all sports. Now, there's one thing I've learned with working with some of those guys, and it's this. In good teams, leaders hold the players accountable, but in great teams, players hold everyone accountable.

That's chapter one of my book. And I didn't use the All Blacks, but that is 100% true. And what's interesting is very few leaders understand that that's their job. Everybody is leading like a hub and spoke like a maypole and everybody dancing around them as individuals, looking up for direction, etc. Looking up for affirmation, looking up for celebration, looking up for feedback. But it's the great leader that knows how to orchestrate that. So what I've done was I took a book and I said, I studied what I thought most teams were mediocre in what areas and how did they need to be exceptional? So we need to shift from conflict avoidance to candor, right? So that's one of the shifts. And in that chapter, I describe a hero story of somebody who did it well. And then what we did was we identified and extracted the practices. I don't believe in concepts. I think way too many business books are devoid of simple basic practices on how to get the job done. And what I wanted to focus on are what are the practices? So for instance, if you want to move a team from only looking to you for feedback, not each other, you shift from doing report outs where people show up in the room and they report out to the room and there's only a couple of conversations and you move on to the next report out. You shift from that to what we call stress tests. Stress tests is what I saw teams do when somebody shows up and they say, look, here's what I've achieved, but here's where I'm struggling. Forcing somebody to give presentations and sharing what they're struggling is critical because it opens up the team to be willing to give feedback. Right. And it also shows that this person should always be seeking improvement, not just bragging about what they've done. And then what the team does, it goes into small breakout discussions. You could turn to the person next to you or go into a breakout room and they're forced to answer the following three questions. Okay, you just watched this presentation. What are you, what are they missing? Write down what, what, what you think you want to challenge them on. Write it down. What innovation or idea would you give them? Write it down. Do you want to Help. If so, write it down. So now you've just taken the culture you want to have. You want to have a challenge culture, tell your team to challenge. You want to have a curious culture, tell your team to give ideas. You want to have a supportive culture, tell your team where they can help, and you basically turn the culture you want to have into an assignment. That's one simple practice in the book, in chapter three, that if you start doing stress testing regularly, the average team, on a scale of 0 to 5, is at 1.9 relative to its level of candor. Wow. Once you do stress testing for a few months, it goes up into the high threes, low force.

And have you seen this across multiple industries? This is not industry specific.

100. It's really about. It's about human dynamics. Not necessarily about. In fact, I was a good buddy of mine has a very big audience, and I was on a podcast this morning with them. And his audience isn't leaders, it's everybody. And so I was. I morphed the methodology into what anybody could do. So if I'm unemployed and looking to get a new job, who's my team? My team is my board of advisors, who I may be seeking insights and advice from during this period of time. How do I get that group of folks to not just feed me horseshit or tell me what they think I want to hear? How do I get that team to tell me the truth? And so stress testing can be used even with your personal board of advisors, your friends, where you go to them and say, here's where I am in my life, but here's where I'm struggling, right? And here's where I think I'm going, would you do me a favor and tell me what you think? And instead of that, and they're like, oh, you're wonderful. Everything's great. Then you give them an assignment, say, no, I want you to be thoughtful and tell me what I'm missing. Tell me what I'm missing. Give me an idea of something that I should adopt that, you know, I'm not adopting. And if you wish, tell me where you could help. Now, that even could be used in a personal context. It could be used with your spouse. What I've been a student of and a thought leader in is what I call the relational sciences and how. How people working more effectively together can achieve breakthrough outcomes.

Why do you think we resist that? Sometimes if there's somebody listening right now going, I don't know. I'm pretty uncomfortable giving someone that right to give me that feedback, what's the resistance?

Let's, you know, David, let's call you David. David, if you're sitting there thinking, I don't know that I want to do that, then I say it is perfectly acceptable. I really, I'm fully endorsing your right to be mediocre. That is totally your call. If you want to be mediocre and ignore the feedback that is out there and available that will help you go to another level, you are perfectly welcome to be mediocre. But I'll tell you, as a marketer who invented, you know, early brands, like, you know, we were researching the W hotel chain or the St. Regis hotel chain. I was the, you know, the CEO of, I was chief marketing officer of, of, of, of Starwood, which owns W. St. Regis, created the Heavenly Bed, all these things. We went out and got market research data. Like we got people to tell us what they think. If I had ever taken that document that we had paid good money for, it was available to us in abundance and put it in a drawer and like, I don't know, I don't know if I want feedback for my idea, I would be very healthily mediocre. And you know, as an individual, we've got to be customer centric. We've got to be willing. Now here's the thing. You're wincing now. I'll stop joking about this. I, I don't want you to be mediocre, but I suspect one of the reasons you don't want to take that feedback is you actually think that you have to do something with it. You do not it. All our lives when we've gotten feedback, we were actually getting directives. Our parents gave us feedback. They gave us a directive. Sit up straight, eat bad. You know, whatever. Our bosses, our teachers, our coaches, every time somebody told us something, they were telling us what to do and we had an obligation to do it. If we go out and think that we're, we're asking for, for, for directive. What, what you'll get all this feedback. You, it'll. Some of it be conflicting. What the hell do you do with that? Right? So what you need is to like, make sure it's clear in your head and the people giving it to you. You're asking for radical input, not directive. And also it's going to free them up. You can say to them, hey, listen, I want you to tell me what you think I'm missing and it's okay. Listen, I don't have to agree with you. In fact, I'd be Happy if I don't because you'll be giving me an insight that I may not have. But I want you to tell me exactly what you're thinking and I'm going to take your insights, I'm going to take other people's insights, I'm going to put them all together, I'm going to analyze it and I'm going to figure out what I want to do with it. But I, you know, bless you for telling me what it is. But you got to give it to me with double barrels and I might, might take it, I might not. So it gives people a relief in that social contract of what to do with that feedback. Does that make sense?

Oh, it makes total sense. And imagine if every team and every company did this. It would be groundbreaking, powerful, powerful.

Well, and we've gotten many teams to do this and we've gotten many companies to transform and you know, in a sense in your neck of the woods. I'm working with the country of Bhutan right now.

Interesting.

A short ride from, from Dubai. In Bhutan we're getting the government ministers and the political ministers and the for profit leaders to co create in ways that will double their gdp.

Amazing.

Instead of staying in their silos. I mean this can be applied to anything.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

That's amazing that you can do it at that level as well and that they can actually see that these simple as you say that these are not frameworks or ideas. These are actual practices that they can provide. Yeah, I love it. And high performers generally simplify their way to success, right?

Indeed. Simplify and practice. It's all about practice. Just try it. Just try it. And that's what we did with the book. The book has 10 shifts. I just talked about one. Conflict avoidance to candor. There's other shifts in the book. But how do you build a team that's committed to have each other's back. Right? Yeah. How do you build a team that doesn't use old stale meetings? Is the primary form of collaboration. But we're using what I call 21st century collaboration. Use the Google Docs, use AI and we walk you through all of that so that you get the best out of your team.

Incredible. And it's interesting, a lot of leaders that I've met, they'll start with, you know, James, it's lonely at the top and I've just, I find it so baffling, like it doesn't need to be lonely at the top. So when you talk about never leading alone, what does that truly mean?

It means that you're going to expect your team to step up 30% and meet you in leadership. Most teams are lulled into a lower sense of performance and a position that makes you lonely at the top because they don't feel that they co own leadership with you. And that's where you really want agency, you want ambition, you want drive, you and creativity, you want breakthrough thinking. You've got to start setting the table that that you expect a lot more from your teams and give them the space. Like if you're running around answering everyone's questions in one off meetings, then the whole team never even gets a sense of what each other is doing so that they can answer each other's questions before you.

So what's the solution to that?

Well, part of it is I advise teams to host a weekly. I'm sorry, weekly. A monthly transformation meeting. There's nothing going on in our businesses today that isn't transformative. Everything is transformative. And so what I want teams to do is I want teams to host these monthly transformation meetings. They can be as short as a couple of hours, they could be a half a day, they could be a full day. But the intention of that is putting things on the agenda that like asking critical questions. Like chapter six has a whole list of these questions. One of them is what are the conversations we should be having in the room that we're not having today? You're going to get a whole lineup of items that should be on the team agenda. That's not there. Another question is what are the things that are going to bite us in the ass in the next 18 months? They're going to hold us back from being successful that are under our control. Right. Where can we get greater value from the interdependencies of working better as a team? These are all great questions and I've got a whole delineation of them that you need to start asking your team. And I wouldn't ask them in the room, I would ask them asynchronously, ask them in a Google Doc, a shared doc, where they can all see each other's answers. And then you take all of those and you reprioritize them as a leader of which ones you're going to address. And then in these transformation meetings, one after another, just tee them up and land them. Tee them up and land them.

That's beautiful. I like the transparency of just the Google Docs there. We can go back, we can look at it, we can see what other people are thinking, which can inspire some of our thinking.

It's what it should. That's what we've just done, is we've taken a whole round of collaboration and shifted it to the cloud.

That's amazing. I love it. And you talk about these shifts. So if you were to say, james, there's two or three of the most vital shifts, what would they be and why?

Yeah, so I. I think about all of the 10 shifts in a layer kick. The middle one is what I call a challenge culture, where the team becomes its other, each other's coaches. And the chapter of shifting from conflict avoidance to candor, that's one. Another one is shifting from getting your coaching from the boss to getting to giving each other coaching, to feeling that growth is a driver of success and not something you should be ashamed of. It's like, it's amazing when senior executives, they think that they no longer need coaching, they think they no longer need feedback, et cetera, and to start to unleash that in the team. So that's two of the shifts. Then you go down. What gives you the psychological safety to kick each other's butts in that challenge culture? What gives you. That's the relationship, it's the commitment. So one of the chapters is moving from the relationships that we have in our teams. They can either be serendipitous or they can be purposeful. How do you make sure that your relationships are purposeful? And that's one of the shifts within that one.

Can we talk about that? So a friend who was the captain of the All Blacks and he said, look, we weren't all friends, we weren't all best mates. And you know what? That was a good thing. And yes, there were some people in the group that were closer than others, but we're there to do a job and there was respect and there was trust, but we weren't all best mates and hanging out. So what's your thoughts on that? Do we all need to be buddies, or can we get really high performance without that?

So, without a question, the number one projected contributor to success is the challenge culture. For people to be responsible to push each other higher, I call it CO elevation. People have to be responsible to push each other higher. People have to feel that they're responsible for calling each other out and holding together, accountable for greatness. Right now, you can either recruit for that. So maybe in the All Blacks, when they're searching for teammates, one of the things they're looking for is this person humble enough to want to get better, is this person courageous enough to give each other feedback so you can recruit for that challenge culture. And then if that's true, you don't have to be each other's mates. You have to be committed to winning. And in the All Blacks, winning is pretty clear what that means. But committed to a shared mission in a company and committed to winning together and committed to pushing each other higher to get there, that's all you need for winning. However, there are some companies that haven't recruited for that. And you've got delicate people, you've got insecure people, you've got egos, you've got all of that stuff. And if you. If you dove into the room and started telling people to give each other feedback, you would have frustration and you would have a level of challenge among that group that would be debilitating, not. Not enlivening, because you don't have the agreement that that's what we do. So as a boss, you can either set it up as a part of the culture like Amazon has and. And Ray Dalio from writing his book Principles has, or you got to build some degree of. Listen, I care enough about you that I'm going to tell you the truth. Let me. Let me share my background. You know, I came. My old man was a immigrant Italian family, unemployed most of my young life because they came to Pittsburgh, which was the steel industry crash of the 70s, and I had a really tough life. And, you know, we never made more than 10, 15,000 bucks a year when we were lucky back then. And that gave me a scarcity mindset. Like, I was always fearful, I was always hustling. And it take me a long time to build from a scarcity mindset to belief in myself and others and have an abundant mindset, and I still fall back. Adult scarcity behaviors, right? So the ability to build that empathy between us. Like James, if you knew that I sometimes show up with a scarcity mindset. And I might have. I might be quick cutting somebody off, or I might be a little more abrasive because I am treating you exactly how I treat myself. And sometimes that's not always as nice as I treat myself. And if I'm doing that, then you might have a little bit of empathy, and you might even have permission to say, keith, you're falling back into that old scrappy kid from Pittsburgh. Come on, get out of that. Right. So by telling back stories, by building relationships, etc. Now.

If you're the all blacks, what makes the assumption that you respect each other? Performance. Right. So can you have somebody who's a little loudmouth and. And maybe pisses people off, but their performance is clear, and they're clear that they have to work as a team? Yeah, you might be able to get away with that, but if you're over at a company where, you know, performance against the mission we've got to have, we got to figure out what that shared mission is. We got to figure out the shared KPIs are, etc. You know, I do think that empathy and a little compassion for each other is valuable.

100 agree. Yeah, it does. And this idea of your mindset going from scarcity to abundance, I mean, there's going to be lots of listeners feeling the same way.

Well, any entrepreneur would, for sure. Of course, you know, we're always entrepreneurs. There's a reason we didn't go for the easy job.

Yeah.

And, you know, and that's tough. And we've got that scarcity mindset, and we're frustrated with others who don't seem to have the same drive, tenacity, etc. Yeah.

How do you make that shift? How do you shift from scarcity to abundance?

Psychedelics.

I love it.

A little bit.

If you want a short path, it would be psilocybin and ayahuasca.

So have you done both?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Okay, great. So this is great. I wasn't expecting to go on this tangent, but I like this tangent. So I've had a lot of the world's leading experts on psilocybin and ayahuasca and buffle on the show. I'm fascinated by it. First of all, what led you to your first plant medicine experience?

Just sadness. Where my life was, I was succeeding in many parts of my life, but I wasn't the father or the husband I wanted to be.

How do you recognize that?

I got caught cheating and. And I was. And I realized this is not the human I wanted to be. And I wasn't a man who was congruent with how I show up in terms of what I want to do for other people's lives in the workplace. Like, I'm not Dr. Phil, right? So I'm not trying to make everybody, I'm not making better marriages, etc. Although ironically, you practice this work in the workplace. It's amazing how much you can change your home life by learning how to show up with transparency and with empathy and with co elevation. This idea of co elevation came to me in an ayahuasca journey, actually. The idea that a group of people could come together, whether it's spouses or a team or a sports team, could come together with a shared mission and a belief that we have to push each other higher at the same time. And so the word came co elevation to be collaborating and elevating together.

And so, yes, I mean, for me, it was a very personal journey. And what. But what I found was as I, as I did the work with a guided shaman, I found that my perception and understanding of my leadership also changed. Interesting. So I did it because I wanted on a very personal basis to be a better man and a better spouse, but I also wanted to. What I found was that it made me question so much of myself in many other ways.

It's like almost the plant itself, the medicine. It's a coach. It's a coach of sorts that kind of comes in and counsels and challenges and questions.

I mean, I'm not a. I tend to be woo woo ish, I mean, but not totally woo woo. But I do believe that those journeys unlock the wisdom of the universe and what you need. But here's the point. I think God created us as amazing creatures. And I think we have the wisdom in ourselves. Yeah, all we have everything we need in ourselves. And that all of the contortions of how we've grown up and our assumptions and our scarcity, all of that stuff blocks it, right? You just took a look at a little child and see how much all that beauty and light is in that child. All the happiness you'd ever want in your life is in that child until we start fucking with it, right? And, and what, what, what the plant medicine does is it just unlocks all of that and it unlocks all of those blockages and it allows you to reincarnate to yourself without some of those old contortions that created some of the things that we might do today out of fear, out of scarcity, out of wanting to be loved, et cetera.

I Love it. It's interesting because I'm meeting more and more very successful corporate people who are going in and trying psilocybin and then ayahuasca and they're having the most profound experiences. It's something I haven't done yet, but, but I'm gaining a lot of knowledge on and thinking about. And when the time is right, I'm sure that I'll, I'll step into that. But I just love that you've done it and that you've had that kind of transformation.

Yeah, yeah. And look, you know, it's a controversial topic. Less and less controversial. More science is behind it now and more senior people are behind it now. More leaders and thought leaders. So I feel less alone. But I've been talking about this for a decade and over, over that. And I've been putting myself out there, willing to share this in audiences that might be prejudicial against it. Oh, that's drugs. No, it's medicine. It really is. You know, you don't mind if somebody takes a pill of an SSRI to modulate their emotions. That seems acceptable. But now we're just talking about a plant based medicine that was grown and used for thousands of years by indigenous people to bring healing to entire tribes. And we call that drugs. I mean, that's crazy.

It is. I agree. I love that you challenge it. It's brilliant. So when we think. I want to go back to teams for a sec. When we think about a low performing team versus a high performing team, you've studied literally thousands of businesses and teams. What do you think separates low performance from high performance?

What I said earlier, a challenge culture 100.

So we need to put it all on the table.

No meeting after a meeting, no private DMing, everything on the table, in the room, and ideally a round of collab. So that's the first piece. The second piece is not using meetings as the fallback of all of our collaborations. So like, you know, there's a guy, Gil west, who was the chief operating officer of United Airlines and he went to work before one of these young, hard driving unicorn companies and he walks in and he's like, I see a problem over here, let's have a meeting on it. And the, the Stanford kids looked at him and said, gil, how do we have a meeting on that? We haven't collaborated yet.

So Gil's idea was, let's throw you in a meeting and let's start talking. Let's collaborate. Which I know for a fact, the average meeting of 12 people, four people think they're hurt?

Yeah.

So if we have a meeting, we're then going to have a meeting after meeting, we're going to have private DMing. If on the other hand, you had a meeting, you had an issue. What if we sent a spreadsheet out to everybody? This is chapter six, which is adoption of 21st century collaboration. So moving the shift from meetings to 21st century collaboration. And if we were to say to a group of folks, you know, we're falling behind in the quarter, what do you think the real problem is? And have everybody write the answer to that question and next to it, you ask them, what bold solution do you think we could use to break through? All 12 people would write it up in advance. Read each other's. Now we can act. Frankly, a lot of the answers will be obvious now. But let's show up in the meeting, we can land the plane. One meeting half the time, probably. It's amazing. One meeting.

It takes me back.

You mentioned Ray Dalio earlier. I remember him talking about the idea meritocracy where like everyone does have a voice, they've all got ideas. But then there will be some kind of meritocracy where we actually vote on it, talk about it, and things will become abundantly obvious what the right solutions are. It sounds in some ways that it's informed by the group as opposed to by the leader.

Yeah, well, and not just the leader or the group. It could be the network of people needed to get the job done. So most problems can't be solved effectively within the team that has control of the problem. If you have a sales deficit, it's not just the sales reps that have the ability to solve the problem be sales support, it'd be product development, marketing, et cetera. So the ability to use asynchronous collaboration to make sure all of those voices are heard, I guarantee you the marketing people have a sense of why were falling behind in sales because they believe they're creating assets that aren't being used effectively by the sales organization. Sales support or even customer experience are looking at it from a different angle and they have a different vantage point of why we're falling behind. We need to get all that on the table. And if you only try to solve a problem within the confines of who you can control your team that reports to you, you're going to be very suboptimal. And so there's new forms of collaboration are the best way to go around that.

Let's chat about something very specific. I was doing a keynote on Monday for an American based company who've got locations all over the world. So the New Zealand location, I was chatting with their staff and I discovered very quickly that they're a work from home company. And I mean fully work from home. There's no executives in any office in any part of the world. So 10,000 staff, all. All working from home. What are your thoughts on that and how we create CO elevation? Is it still possible without having the shoulder to shoulder stuff?

Yeah. So I was coaching the Cisco team back in the mid 2000s and.

They had created WebEx back in the day. They had created telepresence. They were leading before for Zoom. Actually the guy from Zoom came from WebEx, from Cisco, before teams, Microsoft Teams, it was Cisco. And I got really inspired by the idea that someday we won't need offices the way we need them today. So I did a research project for five years funded by them, Accenture and a bunch of others. And it was what are the new people roles in a virtual world? And I published must have been 18 pieces in Harvard Business Review. So if you're leading a virtual company, go into hbr.org, write my name in, and you'll find tons of advice like how do you manage an employee that you don't see, how do you get candor in a team that isn't, you know, that is remote, etc. All those questions. The answer is that when you're virtual, when you're remote, when you're not walking down a hallway, you need to be much more purposeful about everything. And that's why a lot of people during the pandemic felt that virtual didn't work because they were practicing their same serendipitous workflows. They did the same stuff they used to do in a boardroom, they would do it in a Zoom room. And they weren't showing up deliberately with new ways of working that are, that are geared toward virtual. Virtual like asynchronous collaboration where you collaborate before you show up, where you use the breakout rooms like Zoom. The folks at Zoom tell me that nobody ever really uses the breakout rooms. I use them every single meeting because I want to hear everyone's voice. You send people to a breakout room of three, have them talk about something, have them come back like, I, I'll do this thing called a candor break. In the middle of a meeting that's really important, I'll say to the team, let's do a candor break. Push a button. Everybody goes into groups of rooms of two and what they're doing is they're saying what what what is what should be said in that room that's not being said. And they're discussing it. And then when we come back, everybody reports and guess what we hear all the candor we should have heard. Amazing, right? So virtual means purposeful. You can't be lazy and just do the way we used to work.

That's amazing. I'm going to make sure that we put links into those HBR articles that you mentioned. Our team will get those and pop them in.

Oh, there's tons, tons. I mean, I would actually look at some of my more recent stuff. There's a great piece I did in Fortune magazine about how culture changes and difficult. We just have to change our practices. So it's all focused on this thing called stress testing that I just mentioned.

Pop it all in there. And before we go on and We've got about 10 minutes or so before we've got to wrap up. But I want everyone who's listening to go to the Show Notes right now and get a copy of your book. Never Lead Alone. It's in the Show Notes. Please do that and get, get a couple of copies for others around you that are also leading and part of teams. But I want to talk about AI. So I'm meeting with some great.

By the way, this is something that.

We.

We did during the pandemic when the book was launched right after it. Anybody who bought the book for their whole team, I created a whole set of videos around how to use the book. And then if you bought it, I forget it was like 900 bucks or something. But if you bought it for the whole. The, the book for your team, we gave it for free. I think they're. If you go to buy the book, go to our website@keithfrozzi.com and I think those videos are still available. You could just ask for them. I'm happy to give them to your audience, James.

Amazing. Thank you, Keith. That's huge value add. I deeply appreciate it. And for those that want to go deep, some people like co courses as opposed to books or audio. Have you got anything on that front that's available?

Yeah. So, you know, I'm an old man.

And I've been around this business of research and writing since my first book, Never Get Alone. So let me just take you a look through and I'm going to tell you this because I just created a course and the course is called Beyond Connections. And the intention of this course is to really give you a sampling of putting all of my books into action in an eight week course. Incredible. Do it with a community of people. We've got people from Australia and New Zealand in it. And what's interesting is at, at the end of that eight weeks, everybody who was in the course is invited to my home in LA for graduation.

Amazing.

And it's getting quite impressive. I mean the groups are flying from all over the world and they're coming over and it's a beautiful community. I love it so much personally. But anyway. But what? So Never eat alone teaches you that relationships are core to your success. How do I reach out to people? How do I build people connection? How do I lead with generosity? Keith, you say that it's important to lead with generosity. Well, what if I don't think I have anything to offer? You do. And we teach us all of those things and how to be purposeful. Then I wrote a book called who's got your back? Where it really talks about how do you create a group of people around you that won't let you fail? That's different than a network. Like. And I studied things like AA groups, etc, like how do you take a group of people who become committed to not let each other fail and bring candor and accountability to each other? Right. And then I wrote a book called leading without authority. How do you work in the world and become a leader of people that don't. You don't have to pay. It's like how do you create movements? How do you create community? How do you enlist followership? All of that. Leading without authority was another book. And then I wrote a book about how technology is changing your life, competing in the new world of work and then now this one. So I bundled all of that history of 25 years of work and research and practices and coaching and I put it into this eight week course called Beyond Connections. So if anybody wants to join, maybe I'll see you someday at graduation, my house.

I would love it. Keith, I think I'm going to join and hopefully many of my listeners will join. We'll come and see you.

That'd be fun. I'd love to have you.

Oh, it sounds incredible. It's just. That's amazing. Thank you for putting it together.

Yeah, thank you, AI.

I'm fanatic about learning about it. I'm on the journey, I'm curious, I'm meeting with people that are at the forefront of it. You are doing exactly the same thing. What's your thoughts around how we embrace it and use it to help us become better? Teams.

This is a piece I just wrote in Forbes.

And, and, and first of all, I think we have to recognize that I was on the phone yesterday to a name that, you know, everybody knows and they're one of the leaders in AI in the world. And we both absolutely would agree that 50% of white collar jobs are going to disappear. Yep. In the next five years plus. Makes sense. And so how do you deal with that? How do you be not a part of the 50% that's losing their jobs? There's another whole conversation we could have about what governments need to do when that happens and how do we create safety nets, which America is not good at. Certainly the European cultures and Asian cultures are better. But the, the answer in the short term is you need to do exactly what James and I are doing. In your role, ask yourself, how can I crack the code of what's unknown right now? And if what's unknown? If you're some call center worker and you're like, how in the world is AI Instead of saying, is AI going to take my job? Say it differently. How is AI going to transform the customer experience through call centers? First question was, how can I as a call center rep use AI to maximize my effectiveness? The next question is, how will AI take my job? But more importantly, how could I help the company engineer? How AI could replace my job by leveling up and saying, how do we re engineer workflows with AI right now? If you do that, where do you think the company is going to put you next? You think they're just going to boot you or they're going to say, holy shit. This is somebody who understands how to be curious, how to create communities of learning how to crack the code of critical issues. Why don't you go over here in supply chain and think about that? Why don't you go over here? And so the future of survival in this AI world is your ability to be richly curious and the ability to build communities of information and knowledge and learning and people who can crack the code of those questions. And so that's, that's what I would do. That's my advice. And that was this book, this, this article I wrote in, in Forbes. And it's, it actually tells an old joke. You know the joke about a bear comes out of the woods and two campers are sitting there and one camper's like, holy shit, it's a bear and starts running and the other guy takes his boots off and puts on his tennis shoes and the guy's screaming at him. It's like, dude, run. What are you doing? You can't. You can't outrun a bear. And the guy looks over and goes, I apologize. I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.

That's outstanding. Perfect example.

That's where we are with AI right now.

Yeah.

You can sit there and be a victim and wait for AI to take your job, or you could be out ahead of everybody and co creating the future of the role that you serve with AI and you'll preserve your job.

That's incredible. You heard it here first, folks. That's just amazing. And Keith, I want to ask you just one last question before we do wrap up. I like to ask this of everyone, and I must say, I could have you on another 10 times and talk about every single one of your books. You're a fascinating human, and I hope we do get a chance to sit down in person over in the west coast or. Or down here if you come down.

Yeah. So if I come down for a speaking engagement, we should pull a group together.

Let's do it. My mastermind group would be all over it. They would love it. So we could make that happen. Now, if you and I were to just pretend for a moment that we're going to fast forward many years into the future and you're highly aware that it's your last day here on earth, someone who's very young, who you love dearly, comes into the room and they say, keith, how do I lead my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

So just to understand the question.

I've. We've gone into the future I'm about to pass out of the world.

Yep.

And.

Somebody at that time who's young or somebody from my past who's young.

Yes. Someone at that time who's young could be a great, great grandchild or whatever it might be.

I don't think I'd have a different piece of advice than I would now.

And, you know, I think I am discovering it's really a couple of things. Number one, I would say stay richly curious and realize you don't have the answers and you never will. Your ability to create small groups of people who care about answering important questions together and to build a commitment among that group. Your superpower will be to build a small group of folks equally committed to the question you're trying to solve and doing it together with intimacy, with generosity, with candor, with accountability. What I'm really saying is that's the way you be a great father. Right you need to co create with your spouse, you need to co create with your kids, with your kids, coaches, et cetera. It's the way you run a great team. That's the way you build a movement of social movement or social change. The reality of being deeply curious, proactive and being able to build that, that, that posse that can be truly transformative. That's the answer.

That's powerful. Thank you for sharing that. I know that there's many people that heard that right now going us exactly what I needed to hear. So, Keith, I just want to say a heartfelt thank you. I'm going to put in the show notes, all of your socials, your website, everything we've chatted about the course, the book. So I just want to say a huge thanks.

What a pleasure, James. I look forward to breaking bed with you sometime.

I look forward to all the very best. Thanks for tuning in to lead on Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about levelling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.