Finding Brave 123: Co-Elevation: How To Lead with Positive Influence Collaboration, Keith Ferrazzi

Thank you. Thank you. Got it.

So when I. When I wrote Never Loan, it was right after coming out of Starwood Hotels. I'd been the Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte. I'd been the Chief Marketing Officer at Starwood.

Yikes.

And it was a pivotal time. I was just going in to being a CEO of a tech company and I really at the time was trying to decide. I was selling that tech company, by the way. So I was trying to decide what I wanted to do next. Obviously, I had a huge amount of success because of my relationship and my relationships, which opened up huge opportunities for me. The benefit was that I knew I didn't have to go back into big companies. I knew that my relationships, my network, so to speak, were robust enough that it could support me to run my own business. And that's the direction I chose to go. But my business never had anything to do with the book of Never your loan. You know, were you.

I'm sorry, I don't know this. Were you a marketing consultant for. That's, that's the business. It was growing entrepreneurial ventures and marketing? No.

So I started a company called froze greenlight 20 years ago. It was. Started it on April 5, but just celebrated 20 years of Farozzi Green light.

Congrats.

The intention of Frozen Greenlight was I wanted to focus on what I called the human capital side of growth.

How many ahead of your time 20 years ago?

What's that?

You're ahead of your time 20 years ago. My God, we're just.

Well, I just saw it. I mean, I, I saw when we were at Deloitte that I, as a marketer, I could, I could create an amazing event at Davos, but my partners didn't know how to engage to build relationships with CEOs.

Wow.

Right? That was a human capital problem, not a strategic problem.

Wow.

I saw at Starwood Hotels, us put a W Hotel banner up, but we still had the same converted unionized employees from a prior owner that had no give a damn about our brand and didn't give a damn about our clients. So I saw again the human capital side of growth. So I wanted to create a company that focused on the human capital side of growth, and most of it was in coaching of sales organizations because I could get a quick lift in revenue by the work that we do. What occurred was I realized that as I was working out in the field with sales organizations, a lot of the problems that I saw preventing us from being successful happened back in the headquarters. You know, the sales organization head didn't get along with marketing, didn't get along with product, didn't get along with technology. And that bullshit created the problem at the essence of us being able to serve customers. So I started taking my. I started saying to my sales leaders, listen, give me a. Give me a. Give me a stab. Give me an hour on the executive team's agenda. Let me talk to them about what we're seeing in here. And I got started getting that hour and I started going in, revealing to them how their behaviors were stopping customer satisfaction. And next thing you know, that became our business. So today, we almost solely our business coaches, executive teams through transformation. That's what I do. I don't do executive coaching.

I wish this could be our podcast if you want to be on my podcast, but we'll do that another time. Can I ask you a question?

By the way? You're welcome to take this recording and release it as a podcast.

I would love that. But maybe Evelina's. That image there. We wouldn't want that for the podcast. What do you think?

Okay, I'll take that off.

I'm sorry. I'd love to have you on. I don't mean to.

No, I just.

You guys are constantly frozen on this. Oh.

So I went on audio for that reason, because it. Evelina, why don't you do this, dear? Hey, Evelina, you can go ahead and drop off. We're good.

We're good. Kathy's not an asshole. I know you gotta protect your time.

It's nice to meet you.

Now, I would love. Awesome, awesome. So, Keith, you want to do this for 20 minutes? And what I would do is just change out my microphone. Do you mind?

Sure, no, go ahead.

And you know what you can do? What I'd love you to do is, you know, I don't. Obviously we're not making this promotional, but at the end I'm going to say, where do we learn more? Where? And you're going to tell me what you want to make sure that we're talking about. Okay, let me.

Let me plug this in while you're doing that. Who is your typical audience? So I can speak to the audience.

It is mid to high level professional women. That's who it is. Is that your world at all?

Well, so many. Most of my half of my clients are executive women. Just because they should be, you know.

Oh, good. I love to hear that. All right, let's see here now. Okay. All right, let me just make sure it's. Can you hear me?

Well, it's a little less loud than it Was.

All right, hang on one sec.

Doesn't sound like it's going through the mute mic. It sounds like it's going through something.

How's that? Is that better?

That's much better. Yeah.

Thank you. I did a whole one not knowing that. Are we good and recording? Okay. Beautiful. Awesome. So tell me, tell me that version again of what you did, if you don't mind. And what I'm going to ask you is, it almost sounds like you're a therapist at heart and someone who studied communication and studied human dynamics and power. So anyway, you're going to talk to me all about that, but tell me a little bit about. So you were head of marketing for Starwoods for Deloitte Massive. Tell me about that again, Keith, if you don't mind that progression. Thank you.

Absolutely. So if you spin back a number of years ago, I wrote a book because I found that the relationships in your life are the number one predictor of opportunity and success. And for your audience, I would say that is as true today as it ever has been. And one of the things that I've been blessed is being invited to a number of women executive groups, etc. Because of this book. We all know that our relationships and our network is so important. The first thing I think is most important for executive women to recognize is that sitting around you are a set of other executive women that are the lifeblood of your success. That should what I call. I created a word that I just announced in my new book, Leading Without Authority, and the word is called co elevation. It's when a group of people commit to a shared mission, but they also commit to each other, to going higher together. And what I love to do is when I'm invited into women executive networking groups or women executive CIOs or women executive marketers, etc. What I love to do is help that group activate and realize that sitting around us is our coaching group. Now, part of that is a commitment that we as individuals will in fact allow ourselves to be coached by each other, that we consider it a gift. Right. As opposed to considering feedback or criticism or suggestions or innovations or ideas as intrusive. We need to be more porous, more open. I created this word porosity. I think when relationships are strong, you become porous to each other, open and absorptive. Right. That's a critical element of the new book and teaching people that. So what I've done over the years, you know, having been the kid who was a poor kid in Pittsburgh, who grew up in Pittsburgh and got A great education and have been had a lot of success because of my relationships. I wasn't born into them. My dad was an unemployed steelworker. I awakened to realize that in the work that I do now, which coaching executive teams, it's the ability to get a team to co elevate with each other. Now a lot of minorities. I have two boys. I have an African American son who's African American and Mexican. He self identified as black. And I have another one who is more Armenian and Persian.

How old are they?

21 and 24. I got them at 12 and 16. And you know, and I also am a minority. Don't necessarily know it based on being an old white guy, but I happen to be a gay man. So what I have found is that so many of us are fearful that our status of being other prevent us from building relationships with others because we're fearful we won't be accepted. And I keep trying to help my boys understand that the greatest prejudice they will ever face is the prejudgment that they won't be accepted because of their. And by the way, they don't care about their color, which I love. They're more worried about the shame that they feel about having been orphaned early. And then in the foster care system, that's their shame that they carry. That's their prejudgment of themselves. And so my gift to all of your audience is that if we alienate ourselves by holding ourselves back from the constituency of others that we need to build relationships with to achieve, we're really only disserving ourselves. And even though people might not look like they'd be embracing of us because they look like other themselves, old boy, whatever it happens to be, I mean, here, you know, like I said, here's an old, you know, white guy. And. And the answer is, you know, I'm a gay man with, you know, with minority children and my former fiance is Asian. So, you know, we're like a Benetton family. Who would have known it if you just walked into a room and saw this old white guy, right? So the prejudices that we have just prevent us and hold us back from success. Now this same prejudice, and this is what I try to teach in my new book, Leading Without Authority. The same prejudice exists in functions and divisions. Oh, those salespeople, all those marketing people, all the finance people, the HR people. What stops us from being co elevating in an organization stop us from finding value in the interdependencies of teams. So as leaders and all of Your clients are leaders. What I want your clients to realize is that your job as a leader is not to lead as an individual, but instead to foster the environment of co elevation among your team. That's the key. Your team needs to become co elevators of each other. And that's the principle of the new book, which is called Leading Without Authority.

Now, I got questions for you, Keith. I got questions.

All right, good.

So. And I might push back a little, but I know you'll be on it and answer it perfectly. You know, when you talk about porosity, porousness. So I'm going to talk about women as different from men. And please, everybody knows me enough to know. I don't mean I'm not painting every woman with the same brush or every man with the same brush. But I interviewed a wonderful renowned author, therapist Terry Real, about patriarchy. That we live in a patriarchal world and it's the water we swim in and we're the fish. And, you know, there's a whole definition of that. But two things when you talk about we need to be more porous. What, what I teach a lot of women is you need to be less porous. And this is what I mean. In our world, women's boundaries are not. We're not trained to have the boundaries that men are trained to have. So if I said to you, you report to me. And I said, well, that was a stupid way you held that meeting. You might go, well, f off. It was, it was. It was fine. To me, women tend to internalize that much more than men. So I do think we have to look at how do we bring. I'm about to do a webinar on spirituality and small business success. And what I mean by that is coming from the heart, coming from the spirit. And the heart and the spirit aren't about your ego and aren't about defending yourself. But I would love to know all that, to say what you talk about is what we need to aspire to. But in working with narcissism, you know, as a therapist, I saw narcissistic personality disorder. There's a lot of narcissists in leadership. Can I ask you to get real with me and tell me, what do you see are the two biggest barriers to what you're talking about? Right.

Well, I think the first one is the fear of being hurt, the fear of taking risks, the fear of inviting people into co elevating relationships. And the biggest barrier of that, being hurt, is often not emotional, but it's about loss of turf. Then the belief that if I invite you in, I will lose something, right? I'll lose power, I'll lose authority, I'll lose resources, you'll get under the hood, you'll criticize me. All of these fears of loss. Now my problem is this, not to suggest that the world isn't made up of people who will do all of those things. They are. But the Gallup organization found that, you know, we're really only talking about 5% of the population actively disengaged in that fashion with people. But we are also talking about more than 50% of people look like they are because they're all walking around fearful that they're not resilient, they're not open, they don't look like they would be embraced of this, right? Your willingness to take the first step and know that you roll the dice, statistically speaking, you'll win even though it's only 5% will really hurt you, right? Statistically speaking, your willingness to roll the dice stops people. Now let me add one thing to that calculus. The world is now requiring you to be so much more innovative than ever before, so much more breakthrough in your solutions than ever before. If you stay isolated and if you stay in your silo, if you stay in your swim lane and you don't invite other people in to co create, you will be mediocre. So number one, I don't think the transformational pressures in the markets allow you market allow you to be isolated anymore. The new normal is you have to be inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is needed for great decision making. But if you don't open yourself up to be inclusive, you won't tap into the value of it. And then if you do do it, just know that the likelihood of it backfiring is very slim statistically. Now you do have to get better at it because a lot of people reach out for co creation and it looks like they're reaching out for buy in. Let me make that distinction. I don't believe in buy in. Buy in means I've created a solution, I'm going to sell it to you. Real co creation is an art form that I teach in the new book Leading Without Authority and it teaches you how to incrementally invite people in into co creative environments and how do you set up the ground rules for that, et cetera.

Oh my gosh, I love it. Can I riff on this for two seconds please? While it may be that 5% only are going to be who hurt you, the people I hear and what I lived through, there was a lot of Hurt, a lot of narcissism, gender, gender bias, mistreatment, sexual harassment. So what I would say to that is, while it might only be 5%, but I don't think women tend to agree with that. What we have to do is get better at when we are hurt, we need to be more resilient. We will get hurt. I mean, look at any relationship we've ever had. There's hurt. Stuff happens. I was about to say another word. We do have to strengthen ourselves so that we're not flattened for the long haul. That's power gap number seven of mine, that we still allow past trauma to define us. So I would say that for anyone who says, boy, the hurt that I've gotten in the workplace is a heck of a lot more than 5% of the people. The other thing I want to ask you is about this CO elevation. I think I even heard you talk about this. Maybe. I've got a big following on LinkedIn. It's a big thing for me. I adore it. It's the cocktail party in the sky to me. But what I hate is if someone reaches out, which happens maybe literally ten times a day. Found you. You look impressive. And I can see they help coaches, you know, high ticket items, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and accept, and then instantly they're hitting me up, can we have a call? And they're talking about themselves. You know, cripe, Isn't that what you probably see with a lot of sales teams and marketing teams that you work with? And when I have pushed back and been snarky, people have said, you're wrong. LinkedIn is a sales tool. Can you talk about the predominance of people, Keith? They don't get it. They don't understand what it is actually to build a relationship. Can you talk about that?

Well, it's chapter three. Chapter three in here. I think it's chapter two in there. And it's leading with generosity, leading the.

Service, which you did in our call with one second into it, and it's.

So important, you lose nothing by leading with generosity. And I made it a way of life. And I teach executives that in a world where you don't have authority and control to do extraordinary things, you don't have enough resources to do everything you want to do. You don't have enough control and authority to do everything you want to do. If you want to be a real mover and a shaker, you lead with influence and leading with influence and leading with co creation Leading with co elevation requires that people want to be in your presence. You need to lead with generosity. And how do I be of service? So listen, when the next time that person reaches out to you, instead of just letting them know that that was an ill informed strategy for you, you could maybe give them a little coaching, say, listen, I have to admit I'm sure your services are extraordinary but I get hit up by a lot of people and a lot of people start talking about themselves. What would be refreshing would be if you would find a way to be of service before you start acting to sell. Just letting them know that little but.

That how beautifully said. It's not a slap down coaching tip, it's a coaching. I will do that. I swear to you, I'll use that language. Tell us a little more. You know, if you, if people only had, you know, 20 minutes to scoot through your look through your leading without authority book, what are the two messages that you think so many people don't understand and are really doing it incorrectly? See leaders that should know better and they don't. What do we need?

I do want to respect your time. I know that we've got for like four more minutes but look, I think probably the other thing to define, we've talked about it a bit, is the first chapter in the book says who's your team? And I don't mean go to the people that have your back. I get that. That was my second book, who's got your back? What I mean is be much broader in your definition of team because you need to engage with a broader group of people to get things done today. And I don't care about your org charts. Leading without authority is the principle that there's a lot of people out there waiting to co create with you. If you had the artistry to reach out to them with generosity and invite them in to a mutual beneficial co creation, both of you could go higher. Both of you could co elevate and it is a co elevation, it's a peerage. Both of you have to be going higher in the process.

Do you ever work with people, men or women, that don't think they need to go any higher, that they think they're at the highest level they need to be?

That's a whole, there's a whole chapter about peer to peer development and coaching. But everybody wants to go higher. Everybody wants more money, more success, more, all of those things. Right. And you can have that with a level of humility. What I find is that people who want to go higher from an outcomes perspective are not going to do it if they don't embrace the other, the team, the collectivism. And that is a. I wrote the book about networking. We wake up 20 years later and now we're working in networks. So that's the segue between one book and the other. And why I find myself as an executive coach at companies. Like, I mean, I'm not an executive coach. I don't coach individual executives. My philosophy is, you know, like you've been a therapist. I don't coach individual executives. I only do team coaching. So, like there's a difference between coaching a person and doing couples counseling.

Yeah, that's true.

I coach the team. That's what I do. And all of our intellectual property. We have a team diagnostic. We have team coaching. Anybody would like to learn more about what we do, you can go to ferrazilearning.com and we. But I'm really committed. I'm committed to cracking the code not of individual advancement, but in collective advancement. How do you get the team to be highest performing possible?

And that's what I love it. And I want to leave everyone with this. I watched a video you had about how to build remote meetings powerfully. And I'll link to it below. But one thing you said that I'm going to use at 7pm tonight when I run a meeting of 40 people, not just hop on there and just talk about the work and the schedules and the deadlines. For goodness sake. We're human and we may see a little baby running by or a dog. But what you said is why not ask the sweet and the sour? You know, just be human people. Don't be afraid of.

You know what that does is it quiets the reptilian brain. It creates psychological safety. It bonds the team. It increases risk taking, it increases innovation. Yeah. So we've got to. You've got to learn how to be leaders of the whole human picture.

I love it. And where do we learn more? Where do we get your book, Keith? Where? Point us.

Well, Amazon. You get the book on Amazon. It's selling right now, which I'm really excited about.

Congrats.

And if you want to learn a little bit more, you can go to FraziLearning.com great. But you've also mentioned I did a lot of studies on remote work and remote leadership and road teams. I have an entire resource center called virtualteamswin.com tons of webinars, articles. I did 12 articles in Harvard Business Review all about remote work. Virtualteamswin.com.

Beautiful. Thank you for taking your precious time. So great to have you.

To meet you all.

Best.

Thank you so much.

Everybody. If this didn't inspire you, I give up. Let us hear what you think. Let us hear what your challenges are about. Remote working. About leading without authority. We're here to help. Let us know. And have a wonderfully brave week. See you next time.