Interdependent leadership | Keith Ferrazzi | TEDxLASalon

So, in the last 18 years of our research, what we have identified is that the contracts that we work with in the workplace, the relational, the informal contracts have fundamentally changed on us. And the lack of recognition or the clinging to the old contracts is causing great misery. My intention today is not just to entertain, Not just to give you insight, but instead give you something that within a week from now and 3 months from now, you'll actively be doing something different. So we lead a research institute for changing human behavior in the workplace. How many of you in this room, out of curiosity, have someone's behavior in the workplace that you would like to change? Raise your hands. Okay, good. Do they happen to be sitting next to you? No. And how many of you believe that they would say the same about you? Raise your hands. That's a critical point because what we're going to be talking about today, not only in the workplace but in society, how can we have the independent agency to make a difference in the behavior of the people around us to better achieve our missions? We call this leadership without authority. Now, if I didn't hook you enough with the original lead-in, then I'd like to suggest there's some other reason you should think about this. And that is that the person that you show up in the workplace, wherever that happens to be, is the person that you show up in life. And your capacity to shift to human and to embrace and bring people from one place to another are fundamentally the same whether it's in your personal life or your professional life. This happens to be, this young man happens to be my son. Now, I should say that he is my self-proclaimed son because very often he does not admit to being my son. He came into our house at 12, and that's actually within just a couple of weeks from him joining my home. Now, what does that face say to you? That face says to you— first of all, I couldn't even say it in front of the cameras what that face and that little mouth did say to me. You will never be my fill-in-the-blank father. And the reality is that that young man's reptilian brain, his fight-flight mechanism, drove him to look at us and say, you will never hurt me like I have been hurt over 12 times before, which is the number of homes he had been in before he came to our home. And I will make sure that I protect myself against you. Does that make sense? Do you recognize that in the workplace, there are lots of little Daniels inside of lots of people? And how we react to our own sense of psychological insecurity fundamentally defines how we relate to others. And some of us pop out of the womb and kiss the doctor and we're off and running. But others, and myself particularly, and many people don't understand this, but I'm an introvert. I don't get my energy from engaging with other people. I need to charge on my own. And more importantly, if I don't have a stage or I don't have a purpose, I'm actually very difficult to engage with another person in things like small talk, etc. So, what I want to make you understand and recognize is that you don't have to be an extrovert. You don't have to be what people might say a self-proclaimed people person. To be able to recognize that to enlist other people, there's a different set of skills that we need to embrace. Now today, and I have no idea whether or not this moment I am this young man's father or not. I'll have to find that out on Saturday when we go get sushi. Now, the world of work today, we all know and we have heard in abundance, has radically changed. First of all, if we're in any business, the external pressures for transformation are extraordinary. Even the disruptors are constantly being disrupted. And internally, the pressures are extraordinary. You know, some people roll their eyes about the millennials in the workplace. At the end of the day, these are individuals— how dare them demand purpose? How dare them demand that we are attentive to these individuals? How dare them demand that they have a job that's meaningful? We gave that up so long ago. How dare them demand all of these things in the workplace? But they do. They do. And we're only finding out that the Gen Z, this next generation is going to be demanding all that much more, and God bless them. But the pressure that that puts on managers to deliver things like coaching is extraordinary. And now imagine that you're living in a workplace that's just fundamentally virtual and matrixed such that the employees you're supposed to coach aren't even working on projects where you can see them deliver their work. And if that's the case, How is that individual attended to if their managers aren't even present for the work that they're doing? Now you add to that a gig economy where individuals will come and go in the workplace in their own volition and expect a certain level of engagement, or they will go somewhere else and take their time there. Oh, wait a second. I was talking about the millennials, weren't I? No, that's the gig workers. It's all the same thing. And the pressure is extraordinary. And the question is, how do we have productivity? But, but that makes an assumption. The assumption is that we look up for authority. Leadership comes from there. Coaching comes from there. We have the assumption that they're working and co-locating and informal learning and, and coaching actually comes organically at the water cooler. But you don't even see these people anymore. So the problem is that we cannot assume that the old contracts, The old working relationships are still in existence in a world that has changed so radically. And for anybody that still clings with their fingertips to assume that the question of what's my job or where's my job or where is my coach or where is my leader and all of those things are naturally prescribed by virtue of organization, design, and structure— no. The reality is you all have work responsibilities. For every work responsibility, there is a network of individuals that are your team. Does that make sense to you? For every set of individuals that you have goals, there are a set of individuals that you must work with as your team to achieve those goals. I fundamentally believe with technology enablement, we will find a day when org structures are not drawn in traditional ways that they are today. Org structures will be very amorphous and focus more dominantly on goals that you have aligned to individuals who are crucial to you achieving them. And that's your team. And that's what you need to be comfortable with. The problem is we can't solve the problems with the old mindsets. I bumped into a young lady named Sandy, head of HR for a large bank. And I said, Sandy, how you doing? And she said, oh my God. I am trying to get this new system in place and the business unit leaders won't even come to get working with my team in order to define what the user requirements are. Oh, and then the sales organization has decided to run their own compensation program even though we're launching our own program and I can't get invited to the meetings. And I said, wow, that's tough. So how's your team? Well, I just told you, it's, you know, we're all doing— No, I said, but how's your team? And now she was getting pissed at me because she knew I was trying to make a point. And the point was really simple. Jane, who is the head of sales ops, who has decided that she was going to lead an initiative to transform the compensation system in order to serve her people, is a member of Sandy's team if Sandy's mission is is to effectively come up with compensation systems that serve employees. But the whole mindset that that individual is not her team, but instead somebody who is a blocker or a barrier or somebody gone rogue, or worse, is somebody that I'm trying to get buy-in from. All of a sudden, so if I say to you, how's your team? You have this sense in this old contractual mindset of what that even means. It means it's somebody that reports to me that I care about. Somebody that reports to me that I'm going to serve, somebody that reports to me that I'm going to coach and mentor. And then all of a sudden when I say, how's your team? But what I really mean is, how is this person over here who's doing something that's pissing you off in your genre? You don't think of that as your team member. Do you get it? Yes. So who's your team? Who's your team? So my question that I want each of us to think about is, who's our team? Think of something that you're trying to achieve right now, personally or professionally. When Daniel came into my home, I had a very different team that I had to conceive of, including his teacher, his football coach, some of his old friends who had been in the group home that he didn't move. These were my team members. Who's your team in something you're trying to achieve? And guess what? You're the leader. Now they don't know it. But that's not a problem. That just means your job's a little bit different than the walking-in presumption that because I'm your leader, I have this authority to lead you and you will do what I want you to do with full productivity. Which, by the way, if that's still what you're clinging to in a world with young employees, you're not a very good leader because they've already checked out with that old leadership model. So whether you have authority or don't have authority is irrelevant. The question is, can you earn authority? Can you earn authority by the word that we've created is one that we call co-elevation. Co-elevation is a combination of co-creation and co-development, but the principle is that you're going to work with a group of people and you're going to be the kind of leader that enlists, that engages, that invites individuals to co-create great things. That means that you've got to have a mission and a purpose and a design that is exciting to those individuals, and you've got to have an empathy and a humility That reaches out to individuals and says, please join me to co-create. And if you have the mindset of co-elevation and you've got a mission, the commitment is to the mission and the commitment is to each other. We will go higher together. And that's fundamentally what leadership is today. But the issue is that it's fundamentally relational because there is no pre-designed contract because you worked for me. So it's really on you. There's a set of rules, and I want to click through for you around co-elevation. The first one is that it is all on you. Now, you could sit there and say, Keith, you don't understand who I have to deal with. And I say, I don't care who you have to deal with, because who you have to— do you think I was able to sit there with my arms crossed and said, Daniel, when you meet me halfway, I will parent you? No. No, you go 99.9% of the way for as long as you have to. Now, if you believe in your mission, you believe in your goal, you're gonna go 99.9% of the way as long as you have to. So who in your life is critical for you to achieve what you're trying to achieve with love and joy and happiness, that it's time to forgive, it's time to be empathetic, it's time to embrace, it's time to invite, and And the fact that you're right doesn't matter because being right doesn't help it get done. Does this make sense to anybody? And it also means that you can't just assume that leaders will lead, that the people with authority will lead. If you're working for somebody and they're not getting the job done as a leader, then whose job is it if you care about the job? How do you coach your leader? Your leader becomes a member of your team. How do you empathetically Care enough to let that person know that there might be another way to work with this group of individuals that is critical. We— if you care about the mission, you can't abdicate responsibility to lead and to co-create. Now, that also brings to this whole idea of collaboration, which is kind of bullshit from the past. Collaboration was, I'm going to figure out the answer, going to figure out who I need to go get buy-in from, and I'm going to go try to sell it on them. How'd you like to be one of those individuals? Let's start focusing on co-creation, not collaboration. Let's earlier on bring folks into the design process. And by the way, we've— all the data now shows that greater degrees of inclusion are critical to getting better answers. And I promise you, when I was at Starwood Hotels as chief marketing officer, if we had co-created some solutions for extending the demand of our rooms, maybe, just maybe, there was some young person like Gebbia sitting inside of our organization that might have created Airbnb. But we didn't have an inclusive mindset that broad to embrace that kind of idea. So co-creation is crucial, particularly with a diverse community. Now, the other thing is we all, in order to co-develop— remember that manager that's stressed and can't really coach you as much as they want to coach you because they don't even see you? No, this is a combined shared development journey. And by the way, this is what our next generation wants. They want to come in the workplace. They want to grow. They want to, they want to bold forward and climb the ladder, but they want to do that with you because they believe that you don't have all your stuff together either. And by the way, we don't. So in a co-developmental fashion, let's go higher together. Let's be humble and let's recognize that this learning journey opens people up to candid criticism and caring feedback and the kind of things we all need, but only good leaders like yourself are going to invite that and create that among the environment that you're in if you can manifest that psychological safety for yourself. Because the care of candor is what matters. Your best friends, they say something you don't believe in and your first reaction is, that was ridiculous, tell me more. Well, I want that from your teams. I want them to be able to say that back to you. And I want you to hold that space for inclusion to be able to co-create with that kind of candor. Now, what I see consistently is individuals say, oh my God, getting stuff done here is ridiculous. And I even see vilification of corporate headquarters. They give nicknames for the, for the big headquarters people. You know, just because it's tough does not abdicate your responsibility to getting the job done. If you're a leader in a co-elevating environment, in a co-elevating fashion, and you cannot be a victim, you cannot blame the broad organization for you not being able to get the job done. Do you think there's any great startup in the Bay Area that walks into their VCs and says, it's getting tough to get the job done, I don't think I'm going to try to do that. But I consistently see organizations throwing their hands up and saying, and being victims to how difficult it is to get the job done in their own companies. Does this make sense to you? Yes. The victim mindset steals shareholder value as much as conflict avoidance. And right now we're doing studies to try to figure out which one steals more shareholder value. Conflict avoidance or victimization and the victim mindset of blaming your own organization for why you are not getting your job done. Is this burden of leadership beginning to set in on you? That every one of us, if we actually had a little bit of this, imagine, forget about breaking down silos, we're going to be able to create the appropriate network and web that we all need to get our jobs done and to have that kind of joy and to have those kind of teams. around us, but it takes individual agency to be able to do that. And then when we get the smallest amount of success, the only reason people are going to go through this hard work is to high-five for the success. Celebration becomes the key. The 1960s and the '70s and all the work around positive psychology showed this, and we've ignored it, and we've created cultures of shame all around us where we point for people and look for the things that are going wrong. But what we need to do is we need to embrace and celebrate and high-five, because that gives us the energy to put up with the bullshit. I think you leverage your tribe. As a leader, you ask 2 people to help each other. As a leader, when somebody's struggling, you're allowed to talk behind their back, but only if it's to go get another team member and say, we've got to help this person. Can you help me help her? Leverage the tribe on the tribe, and that's how we're actually going to break through. And don't try to do this everywhere. Just start today to do it somewhere. Is there— I'm going to do it. Are there 3 relationships in your life where possibly, just possibly, you could rethink a co-elevation mindset? Don't choose the negative 1, difficult, most difficult relationship. Don't choose the ones that are already your best friends. Choose something that's right there in the middle and reach out and begin to explain to them how you'd like to co-create a different environment and that as a collective, if we could be committed to this mission and committed to each other's growth, imagine what we would achieve. Don't let the naysayers drag you down. Focus on the role models. When you find those co-elevators, focus on them because they're going to give you the energy, and those are the path that you need to build your team. And with a few of them, then collectively you can start dealing with the resistors. But focus not on the resistors first— that'll drain your energy and take you down— but also focus on the ones that are the best. Coaching is ultimately it, and the idea of you becoming a network of coaches for each other. Small drops of being of concern to each other's success for the service of the mission and for each other. That's the co-elevation movement. Start today. Start today. Who will you reach out to today? Who will you reach out to today? Maybe there's one individual that it's time to forgive and move on. Maybe there's one individual where you've been lazy and haven't been engaging. It's time to reach out to— just pick one individual. I'd like to land this with a little homage to my mother, who taught me a lot about this. My mom has a group of ladies that she plays cards with, and she's played cards with those individuals for 45 years, every month. And she calls them the card club girls. And I said, Mom, tell me about the card club girls. She says, well, these card club girls, they, they, they, When your dad was unemployed for many months, they were the ones that cooked extra and brought it home when your dad was out looking for a job so we didn't have to eat welfare cheese. And those card club girls, when your aunt was passing away, we sat on her bed and said goodbye 2 days before she passed. And when your dad died, they were the reason that I got out of bed and went out of the house every day because they made me until it was time for me to get out of the house. And I sat there and I listened to that story and she says, one of these days, because every time one of them dies, they have to change the card game. One of these days, there's gonna be one of them playing cards, playing solitaire by themselves, thinking about the others. And I think about that and I thought, I don't have that in my life. And I didn't have it as a leader in the workplace. That's our pinnacle. And we can each be leaders little by little, moving in that direction. That's true co-elevation. That's the promise for all of us, and it's sitting richly around us. If we let our guards down, if we take authority for the relationships and invite people in appropriately into this kind of a New work order. Truly new work order. We have no choice. Thank you.