Never Lead Alone with Keith Ferrazzi

Well, it can be pretty lonely to try and lead and grow a team, a company, like anything like that. It can feel like you're doing it on your own. Today is really all about not leading alone. Like, how do we lead in a more connected way and make the whole process easier? Something I'm deeply passionate about myself. Hey everybody, Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. Our show comes to you every week with a story, a guru, an author, a CEO, something about growing your business, something that makes the whole process easier, more enjoyable, like all that. And you'll find more than 620 shows at scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now, just wherever you are right now. Like, subscribe, and share it with some friend if it's useful for you. All right, listen, I'm joined now by An author we've talked about many, many times. Vern's talked about it, well, at least the Never Eat Alone book, but he's written a whole bunch of other books. And I met Keith Ferrazzi in person at a program or a thing called The Yearn, an event. It was super cool. And we finally connected. I've been wanting to get him on the show ever since then. It's almost 2 years now since we were at The Yearn, but it's great to get together. And he's got a new book out now. He's written a number of books. Yeah. Never Eat Alone, Leading with Authority, Competing in the New World of Work. Um, he's been a thought leader. He was a, um, he was a big deal at Deloitte. Um, he's been covered in all kinds of, you know, super prestigious things. We don't have to go on and on about all of them, but, you know, the, the HBRs and the Wall Street Journals and things like that of the world, the Fast Companies. Uh, and he's, uh, a lovely human. So I have carried at least the spirit of Never Eat Alone Uh, very close to my heart. And, and this is an area that I'm weak at, like the relationship side of things. So glad to have you on the show. Welcome to the show, Keith.

Bill, thank you. What a beautiful introduction. I can't wait to dive in and pick apart a few of those things.

So what is the thing that you think most people get wrong in the world of relationship building, relationship cultivation, nurturing, management?

So, we're going to start OG with Never Eat Alone, and we're going to work our way through 20 years of all the way up to High-Performing Teams and Never Lead Alone. Look, I think there's a correlation between the two, and there's a core IP at the center of all of our work. And that is that relationships need to be as far away from transactional as you can.

Mm-hmm.

And it doesn't take any more time to make them authentic than it does to make them transactional. And it's how you show up. And so, you know, in the case of Never Eat Alone, from a networking perspective, you know, why not show up with an intention to create a bond? And as I've always found, the golden key that opens up that gate is actually vulnerability. It's showing up, being willing to share something about yourself. And you experience that At our at our gathering called the yearn, and you know I do it all the time. Like whether it's a dinner party that I'm going to that I hate small talk. I'm an introvert. You you probably don't believe me. I'm an introvert who has learned how to engineer a better way of showing up and being, and being authentically or being purposefully authentic is a way. So I'll go to a dinner party. And instead of small talk, I'll say, hey everybody, can we just go around? Like, what's the sweetest thing going on in your life right now? And what's sour? And everybody goes around and guess what? It shifts the mood. I go in on a sales call to a client, a prospect, a CEO of a company. And somewhere in the first 10 minutes, I'll ask a question innocuous, like, how was your weekend? And I'll be ready to say, You know, you know, mine it was great, but I do have to say I'm struggling with my youngest boy. And da da da da. Like I'll have ready an authentic, true, but purposeful opening to say, "Hey, you can talk to me about anything."

Yeah, it's interesting. So we have a mutual friend, Shelby Scarborough, who's been on the show before as well to talk about her book, and. Actually, I think she's been on twice. We also just talked about being a good human.

She's actually— She truly is.

Gracious. And I, so my wife Lori and Shelby and others are friends and they get together all the time. And I remember once thinking about her relationships and my relationships and being a little jealous of it. And we were talking with it and she's like, yeah, I don't know, you could maybe try some new practices or whatever. So I'm like, yeah, that's a great idea. So I call a buddy of mine and I say, hey, Let's get together for lunch. And, uh, and so he says, he's like, yeah, it's a great idea. So we get together and we go to this place and I'm looking forward to like, like I, I have 2 hours for this lunch and, um, and I, uh, sit down and I'm really delighted for it. And I've done a lot of this, like after I read the book and after I went to Italy for a while, I came back and I'm like, I need to spend more time connecting and I love to eat well. And so like, so I would do that, but I still, although I would, leave more time for it, I still would tend to be transactional and impatient. So now I'm, I'm older. I'm 60 now. And I go out to lunch with my friend and I sit down and he's like, okay, so how are you doing? What are we talking about? And this and that. And then we finish up a couple of things and he creates a couple of little action items for both of us. And then he's like, okay, I got to go.

Well, you know, you can always set expectations. One of the things is I coach executive teams. You know, I will try to set an expectation that this is going to be unique. This is going to be different. I will often host CEO dinner parties in the Bay Area, and I will really work on the language of the invitation. I love it. I'll say to folks, you know, this is going to be a unique experience. It will be 12 people, one table conversation, authentic and deep. And my intention of the evening is that you'll leave and be able to feel comfortable picking up and texting each other over the weekend. Saying you need help. That's my intention at the dinner. Now flip that ahead 20 years and the new book, right? What do you do for a team when you want that team to have each other's back?

Mm-hmm.

What do you do for a team so that it has the same kind of psychological safety that it can kick each other in the butt, right? It's like, I want people to care so much about the mission and each other That they will wrestle ideas, they will challenge performance, etc. And by the way, I want that in my personal life too. I mean, there's a thread here which says I want a set of relationships, and I had to give it a name. I call them co-elevating relationships. A relationship whereby being in that relationship, whether it's a work relationship, personal relationship, by being in that relationship, both individuals are pushing each other higher. That to me becomes a new earmark for high-performing relationships—team, business, personal, otherwise.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I'm struck by as I looked at the prep for the book, thought about the title, that kind of thing. I'm struck by all the time I'm having conversations with leaders who are like, "Okay, so I'm going to be away for a few weeks. Should the team still have the meeting without me?" I'm like. Yeah, it's not your meeting, it's the team's meeting. Like, and how do I get people to hold each— I feel like I'm always having to hold everybody to account. Like, like, yeah, it's not your job. It's the, it's a collective thing of the team to do. Right.

That's a broken social contract. You didn't land the agreement. Right.

Yeah.

So is it like most of the teams? So I have a diagnostic tool that I use when I first go into a team. And what I can tell you is that most teams are horribly mediocre at best. And they're questions like, do we challenge each other when it's risky? Say a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3.

Mm-hmm.

Do we have each other's back? Yeah, 2.8 at best. Do we cross the finish line together? Meaning, do we all win together or are we winning individually? And that one tends to be in the low 2s. So, once you do a diagnostic and you can easily look to and point out the mediocrity of most teams, then you can solidify the social contract. You can say, okay, okay, let's talk about this crossing the finish line together. We all have to agree that if one of us wins, it's not winning. We all have to win. We all have to cross the finish line. And if one of us is winning and you look back and someone's struggling, we have a team commitment to go back. Solve the problems, reallocate resources, whatever we need, but we got to win together. Once you get that social contract, then you got to follow it with practices. So, you know, you would do this thing that I call stress testing. You know, I always believe, and I know, you know, that the methodology that you all have is very aligned to my belief in what a high-performing team is. I believe you work in short, agile monthly sprints. Right. And in those, at the end of those sprints, you do, in a sense, what a standup is. I call them stress tests. I think at the end of every monthly sprint, the team takes each big rock and the leader of that initiative stands up and says, hey, here's what I achieved. Here's where I'm struggling and here's where I think I'm going next month. And then the team is assigned to challenge. So, there's a difference between having a culture of challenge and one where you're assigned to challenge. It's rare that people have a culture of challenge. Most people have a culture of conflict avoidance. I then create a practice where you assign a challenge.

That starts in childhood.

Yeah, I know it well. We can talk about that. And actually, it's important. But everybody goes into small breakout rooms and opens up a Google Doc and says, here's what they're missing. So we just heard the presentation. Here's what they're missing. Here's an idea that could help. Boom, boom, boom. Here's where I could help. Boom, boom, boom. And then we come back and reboot the conversation. What I've just done is I've created a practice like you all do with your system of scaling up. I created a practice that creates the culture we're looking for, right? So that's the key. What I've done is I've researched 24 years now of what does it mean to have the behaviors, the process, and the tools of a high-performing team. And if somebody is a scaling-up business already, they've got a lot of those, right? I'm adding a set of practices I think that will add to the behaviors and the tools. I do believe that there are a lot of collaboration tools that we're sitting on that we're not using, that we should be using. Instead, we throw meetings at problems all the time.

Well, let's share some of the stories and stuff that get into this. We'll come back to some of the methods, that kind of thing, so people have a picture of it. But you talk about the beginnings of this as a kid, starting up, growing up, watching your parents and going through that and thinking about that. Talk about the childhood, uh, bit first. Go back early, if you would.

Yeah, 100%. So I grew up in Pittsburgh. In the steel industry crash. And I saw the destitution of an entire city, a region, Midwest, because of the crash of the steel industry. And I said as a kid, I was going to grow up someday and fix American manufacturing. That's how you think. Most people want to be a fireman, but no, I was going to fix American manufacturing at the age of 10. The studying and the thinking at the time was cheap foreign imports coming in from Japan. The reality was that the Japanese had picked up a set of practices from academic America around total quality management, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, constant iteration of making the business better, driving decisions into the fabric of the team, et cetera. And America sat lethargic and arrogant and top-down in its steel industry and got its butts kicked. Now, that was powerful. I mean, I saw my old man just broken because of that. And so very soon after exiting university, I went into manufacturing and I started to focus on highly engaged worker Empowerment teams, process improvement teams, TQM in the earliest stages. And here you were, frontline workers like my dad, arguing and working together to make the process better. It really stuck in my brain. And I saw that. And now what we're doing is we've elevated these principles at the enterprise level, not just manufacturing, but how can we get a group of folks at the coalface of the work to be inclusively Owning the outcomes. So often in businesses, we're wearing our siloed hat—the marketer, the salesman, the product guy, the technology guy—and reality is we have to have an enterprise hat focusing on each other's success as well as the enterprise success. Now we have our own swim lanes, sure, but we don't spend enough time crossing those swim lanes to get the best answers, and too often we we coordinate. and collaborate in our silos. And that just, I'm sorry, that in this disruptive world we're living in today, if you don't have an interdependent answer bred with technology and market sensitivities, et cetera, we're gonna fail.

There's a funny old cartoon that you've probably seen that I used to have in one of my old slide decks. And it had this boat with 2 guys in it on each end of the boat. One end, it was sinking, and the other guy calls out to him, he's like, Well, my end of the boat's not sinking.

Right, right. Well, look, and that's unfortunately—

I think a lot of companies, they're like, they kind of sit back there with their mouth shut while somebody is like going down in flames. They don't realize he's going to bring the whole company down.

Well, I mean, you look at what happened to General Motors before bankruptcy, and, you know, I'm sure the manufacturing department, the Cadillac department, the Chevrolet department, I'm sure they all felt they were doing the right things and they were upset with others for not. And the reality is, you know, Mary Barra brought that group together as one team, right? Crossing the finish line together. And it's a great example of using this methodology. There's another one. There's a company you might know called e.l.f. Beauty. So with the Estée Lauder's 150-some years old or whatever, the juggernauts, they still have 2-year cycle times for new product development. This little company comes along with a commitment That when, for the next 2 years that you're here, they just, your onboarding time, you will grow further and faster than anywhere else. But you got to be willing to give each other feedback and you got to be willing to take it. We're going to do it 360 everywhere, but we're not going to do it out of, out of trying to torpedo each other. We're going to do it because we're committed to each other's success.

Mm-hmm.

And we're going to do it out of love. And that business at Elf, it works. They're the number one market share growth in the industry. Uh, Tarang, the CEO, has created that culture all around, obviously emboldens and embodies it for himself, but you see it everywhere. And it's a place where feedback is rampant. Feedback on ideas, feedback on performance, peer-to-peer feedback on style, feedback on competencies. And it's because we won't let each other fail. And it's so powerful and it's so inspiring to see that. The thing that I can say, Bill, is it doesn't take long for this to be enacted in a company. I don't believe you have to radically change culture. I just believe you have to simply change practices. You change a few practices, like you adopt the stress testing, all of a sudden, people will be like, wow, I can challenge my peer. In fact, she appreciated it, right? Or a practice of something I call a candor break. In the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of 2 and says, what conversation should we be having in the room that we're not having? They talk about it, small groups for 5 minutes, come back. Game-changing. Simple practices change culture, and people are so intimidated thinking culture's immutable. And reality is it's simple to change.

It's interesting. I hear you dealing with these very human interactions, but I also hear that like background in education and Deloitte in that you're going to create an assessment tool and a workshop and some practice, like some things to get in there to cause it to happen, not just talk about it.

Well, I think it really goes back to my early days You know, in manufacturing, down at the plant, and seeing men and women down at the plant transform the business with no education, just with a format of how to have a conversation and a different focus in these process improvement teams. And I started to realize how much more we can expect from people, but not just people, but from teams. I know the book is called, you know, Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts. From leadership to teamship. I think we've overcompensated on leadership. Not that it's not important. Of course it is. But we have radically undervalued teamship. What is the role of a team? What's the social contract of a team in meeting the leader? And so, like you said, somebody says, I'm leaving for Italy. Should the team keep meeting? Not a question. In fact, the team should have a social contract that almost moves across the spectrum. I'm starting to see this happen. One end of the spectrum, you have autocratic, top-down, command and control, hub and spoke leadership. You start moving across to normal empowered teams. You start moving across to where I'm advocating called teamship, where the team lifts itself up 30% to meet the leader. But I think you're gonna start seeing with AI tools and other, as you move further along that continuum, I think we're gonna see more holocratic teams, self-managed teams, where the team doesn't need somebody kibitzing and focusing on everything they're doing or not doing. The scaling up system will be an AI algorithm that'll be giving us that advice all the time. And I think that the team will take responsibility for working as a team more effectively.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I, you know, I, I, uh, you mentioned candor in all that and, um, and breaking through in all realms. And I, a lot of people have popularized or jumped on the bandwagon of radical candor, feeling like we're all, uh, not telling the truth, but In my observation of many of the teams that are embracing this, in many cases it devolves to, well, we're all about Radical Candor, so that means I'm gonna say whatever my opinion to you about you without any filter or niceness, like any consideration for your feelings. That's Radical Candor. And what there isn't is, Um, like any humanity or compassion or any like self-confession. Like, look, I, I, I screwed this thing up, guys, and I don't know what to do next.

Yeah. So there's a lot of unbundling of what you just said. So let's, let's take it piece by piece.

The

first piece is, you know, candor needs to be in service of another person's

Yeah.

So, if you are, and I've seen this before where somebody goes, oh, I'm just candid, and they blurt something out, it shuts the conversation down. And I look at that person, I'm like, you know what? I understand that you're saying you're just candid, but I think you're just being an indulgent jackass. And I said, what did that comment— I'll pause in the middle of a meeting. I was like, what did that comment do to progress us to a better outcome?

Yeah,

and and I'm I'm really sharp on this, and I said, listen, I'm okay if if the person feeling your candor feels that that that's what they needed a two by four because they're the they're they're they're the type of personality like me. By the way, if I don't get hit by a two by four, I'm unlikely going to hear it. Um, so people who know me know that, and I'm fine if somebody comes across that way for me. But that's where the social contract of the team happens, right? We understand each other. We know each other. We respect each other. We love each other. We care for each other. And damn it, I'm not going to let you fail. And you're not hearing me. I'm not going to let you fail. So that's possible. But we've got to be able to have that social contract. Now, again, the practices help too, because if we do stress testing regularly, everybody gets their turn. So Bill's initiative gets stress tested. Mine gets stress tested. And if somebody is doesn't have the humility or the security to open themselves for advice, they're going to get it anyway. Because we're all committed to stress testing each other's work. And it's just a social contract. So it's about the practices. And candor can be abused, no question. It's more than likely not abused. It's more than likely hidden. And I think people withhold candor, this conflict avoidance, You know, just out of fear that it's going to damage the relationship. And when you start practicing candor in a normalized format, people are like, oh, wow, that was good. It helped me. I appreciated it. The team gets to start to learn. It's like any other muscle, right? You just got to practice it. Where I find a lot of the problem is a lot of people talk about these issues conceptually. I just try to give you some simple collaborative practices. that bring, that bring it home. And that's where I think the book has been doing so well because of that.

Practical, practical practice.

Very practical practices.

Yeah. When, uh, so I wonder if you have a story or example of a leader who had a realization that they were like the lid on it, that they were, it was too much about them and that there was a shift there.

There's a, there's a CIO that, uh, that I know well, deeply respect. And, and she, she had been much more tepid in wanting conflict to arise on the team. It felt that things were out of control. She was out of control. She couldn't manage the conversation. She was fearful for people. She was a very sensitive individual, very caring individual. She was afraid that, you know, people would be hurt. And, and she was distrusting that we could get to a place Where candor could be fluid. And, and she would say things, you know, to me, you know, like, geez, I don't know, I don't, I don't think we should do this exercise, etc. And at some point, I just had to say, you know, you know, you're paying me a lot of money to be mediocre for you. You've got to take the reins off and let me run an agenda that frightens you a little bit. And if you want to shut me down afterward, please do. And she, she heard that, right? She heard that. And we did then run the play the way I wanted to run the play. And it, as expected, I've done this thousands of times, uh, it, it bode well for her. So she now takes that on and she uses the practice fairly abundantly. But, you know, it's, it's tough. It's your entire history of human experience and interaction of relationships and collaboration. are bundled by very early childhood trauma and issues. You know, a father that was too angry and, you know, a mother that was whatever. And all of this stuff is true. So taking that first baby step, which is why the book tries to give you a hero story that'll inspire you, somebody who does it well, like Bill Connors at Xfinity. You know, he has this thing called an outlier meeting. I love Bill. It's so fucking— excuse me. It's so damn funny. Bleep me out there. Bill has this outlier meeting and he's sitting around with his team and it's the only thing you do in this meeting every week is point out what's not working anywhere you see it across in whatever it is. And it's an exciting time to get us to log everything we need to fix. And no defensiveness allowed. And there's no staying in your swim lanes. And also, this is not the time to celebrate. So somebody who's like, hey, by the way, congratulations on the Tony Award that we won. He's like, this is not a place for victory laps. Let's get back to the, like, just focused on it. And I gotta tell you, these guys have crushed it. Eddie, he's now the CEO over there at Xfinity. But he went from region to region and everywhere he went, just crushed it because the whole team celebrated teeing up like T-ball, you know, these issues and just hitting singles, doubles, and triples all the time. So exciting. Just simple hero stories, simple practices like an outlier meeting, and then a diagnostic, you know, that you can say, okay, how am I doing? Am I getting better?

Yeah, I hear, I hear a lot of care for the collective win and an unwillingness to, uh, dress it up too much, right? Like, uh, like, let's get at the real truth.

Yes. And, um, there is a chapter in the book all about celebration. George Fisher, who was over at Verizon, now he's over at T-Mobile. Um, he was the CEO of Verizon Enterprise, now he's over T-Mobile. George really taught me a lot about celebration. I think we need to shift from celebration being the responsibility of the leader and paltry at best. Like most teams don't celebrate as much as they need. Now, what Bill would say is there's a place for it, right? But there's also a place for really focusing on what's going wrong and let's not sugarcoat it. But then I would also say George is right. I want to get to the stage where on a weekly basis, the team is celebrating each other. There's a fun exercise, a peer-to-peer celebration that I learned from George, where everybody goes around picking one person on the team that they want to call out and celebrate for something they've done that week.

Oh, uh-huh.

Everybody does that. What's really interesting, there's a little byproduct of that. In addition to the elevating of a human and pointing out what that person did so other people could replicate it, There's something about what happens if you're not celebrated 3 months in a row. What's that say about you? Right? It starts to become very powerful. People start to want to be in that spotlight. So, they start to be more generous to their teammates.

So, most of our teams at the beginning of meetings, after some temperature check, some kind of thing to like let them arrive and transition to the meeting to re— you know, maybe they came in from a stressful family thing or bad traffic or whatever, like just allowing people to be wherever they're at to start. We usually will have them start with a round of good news. And in our case, most of the time the good news, this is not yet the acknowledgments or that kind of thing. This is generally the self-reported good news. Like, I'm really proud of this this week and I made progress here. And then if you're having a really bad week, it's like, I'm still here. That's your good news, right?

Yeah, that's so—

Yeah.

Those are 2 great practices, by the way. So, first practice you had was something that we call an energy check. And I formalize that a little bit. I like when people start these meetings, I'd like people to give a score to their energy so that we can start to be cognizant of what it is relative to other times. Because sometimes, you know, I want to know that somebody who's always a 5 comes in at a 4, then you pause and you're like, are you okay? Give the score and then say, I always like to ask what's draining your energy.

Yeah.

And personal or professional. And that's a beautiful instead of— and I might just take that and formalize it a little bit more. But then the thing that I do with the team is to say, listen, not just to empathize. Listen to the fact that we kind of own each other's energy. So, if somebody's sharing that their mom's going in for a treatment, Then I want more than just me as the leader to put it down on our calendar to call them on Tuesday and see how mom is. You know, I want the team to have a shared resilience contract. We have each other's back. We own each other's energy. And that's a tensional piece, not just to share as an icebreaker, but to share as a real intention. And then you go on to the piece that you're talking about. I do think that it's like when I do, there's an exercise I do of feedback called an open 360 where everybody goes around and gives one thing. So, you know, we start with Bill. We all go around and say, Bill, what we most appreciate about you is X and admire about you. And Bill, what, because I care about your success in the next quarters, I might suggest, right? So, You know, some people call that, you know, a blank sandwich. But the idea is I do believe that it's a good idea to psychologically ease somebody into the critique with reminding them of how you respect and care for them. And similarly, at the beginning of a meeting, giving people a chance to have a victory lap is good. It's fine.

There's a guy you may have heard before, Fernando Flores, who— Oh, yeah.

Very impressed.

About assessments and the need to pull them to you. So, hey guys, I'm working on my leadership around here. I could really use your honest, I don't want you to sugarcoat things. Tell me how it really is. What's good about me? Now, what do I need to work on? What's the gap? Leading from the heart. That approach is so powerful and done not so much with forms and surveys, but just live. Let me hear it. A lot to encourage people that you really are open and interested in the raw thing. And sometimes people give you stuff to deal with. I remember coming in as a new CEO in a company once, and I did it, and I got feedback from a couple of the SLT that I was a disappointment as a CEO, and they wanted certain things from me. And I heard them out, and I'm like, oh yeah, I could really get that. I could get how that occurs for you. And let me address that now. So I want you to know I'm not going to work on that. I'm never going to be that kind of CEO. And the last CEO was, it's totally right, but if you want that from a CEO, I'm always going to disappoint you. Yeah,

so

I

like— no, maybe.

Yeah, being responsible. I'm like, listen, that's not my definition. I know you want it. I know you're disappointed. I, I got it. It's valid. And you're never going to get that from me.

The agree, the disagree and commit is important in all of this.

Yeah.

So, I want to hear you out.

Yeah.

Just because you have a voice doesn't mean you have a vote. Just because— and what I'm trying to get people to understand is most of the time when we would give feedback to a person, it was a directive. When I, you know, I've got 6 boys. And like when I was telling one of my boys, you don't eat that way. That was not a piece of input or an advice, right? That was a directive, right? And yet we wake up today and we're now on Keith Rossi's telling you peer-to-peer feedback and everybody thinks you're just, everybody's telling everybody what to do. No, we're not doing that. We are giving each other input. That people get to assess and then come back and say, yes, I'm going to do that. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go study that. So, we're trying to elevate the amount of advice you get, the amount of input you get, the amount of ideas you get. But then, we still need to leave people at it to make bold, fast decisions. I don't believe in consensus. This is— Teamship is not an excuse for consensus at all. It's, it's an opportunity to use even, um, have bolder inputs to make facts, bolder decisions.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, what role do you see for AI in all of this today? Where does that play? Seems to be—

So I've got, I've got an entire research thread of work on this. I, I'm bringing in a couple of weeks, I'm bringing at the TED conference. I'm bringing 25 CIOs and CHROs of large enterprises to talk about what is the role of human capital, IT in an AI-enabled world. And one of the things that's missing is that the IT view and the human capital view needs to be met with a re-engineering of workflow view. Workflows need to be re-engineered with AI. A lot of people are throwing generative AI tools and saying, well, how does this role get different in generative AI? That's wrong. They should be saying, you know, how do we reengineer the workflow? And that role may no longer exist. I mean, I'll give you an example when it comes to hiring. Right now, I was— I'm doing this research for an article I'm writing right now. I can have an AI interface that talks to me about a job description that I wanna hire for, and it will populate the job description without ever having a recruiting manager. That job description will then get posted to, to a number of job boards, and interviews will be calendared without a recruiting manager. For me, when I show up at the interview, the AI can give me some ideas of questions I might ask because there may be some weaknesses in the resumes and can even give me some suggestions by monitoring the interviews, which one was a better candidate. Now, that is that now you no longer need HR or the beginning of a recruiting and interviewing process. You've done it with an AI. My question is, why are we telling people, you know, to take a generative AI and say, you know, what am I going to do if I'm a recruiting manager? No, we don't need you as a recruiting manager. We need to be rethinking the entire workflow.

You're saying go bigger picture. Go broader and bigger picture with your use of

it. You have to. You know, look, I There's a big question right now, I think, that is beginning to mount in maybe not the most productive of ways, but how much do we have to take our organizations back to the studs as we rebuild them with AI? And if you look at what's going on in the government right now, there's a particular human going through the government with a chainsaw that a lot of people are applauding and a lot of people are horrified. Back in my day in the '90s, there was a guy named Chainsaw Al Dunlop that did the same thing with turnaround situations. I do think that there is a spectrum of how much we have to take and rethink things back to the studs. I think we need to do it in conjunction with our people. And I think our people are probably the best source of reengineering workflows than some outsider would be. But we've got to start Focusing them on that.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to a CEO, uh, this week about, um, he was like, I feel like a lot of my processes need doing, my people are struggling and, and, and they can't do it for themselves. And yet I said, yeah, the doers often can't be the ones to invent. So the sort of people that execute on the regular aren't particularly innovative and inventive in their approach. They like, and yet they also don't really like having new approaches forced on them. They don't see the value, but if you could bring in An innovator, you are an outsider, that kind of thing. And then innovate in partnership with them. You could create something that they would embrace, that they had a voice in, right?

The only thing I'm asking, which is with teamship as a model, you become much more co-creative.

Yes.

And we used to innovate in our silos and then go get buy-in.

Yeah.

Well, now you're just trying to sell people on your ideas and you've never even incorporated theirs. And it's not just like make them feel heard. No, I want to hear them. I want to know what a technology person's perspective is here. I want to know what a marketing person's perspective is here. And I want us to be able to create a bolder, more informed decision that, by the way, will be faster to get into execution. And if you— now, I talk a lot in the book, chapter 6, about Reinventing meetings. If we show up in a meeting of 12 people, 4 people will think they're heard versus if you send a Google Doc out to a bunch of people and say, write in this column what you think this problem is we're trying to solve, write a bold solution to that. 12 people write it up. We might not even need all 12 people to come to the room for a meeting. We may be able to look at the tapestry of people's insights. And land the plane with one meeting with 3 people and we're done. So I want us to start getting much more curious. I find, and, you know, I think you'll appreciate this, you all have created a nice system for running a team. And I find that so few leaders are curious about changing the way they work. And, and I want us to become— I want us to— In my book, if you look at 10 chapters, each one has one of these heroes. Most of them are engineers who turned their engineering mindset to how they worked. We need to get much more engaged and curious about how we work.

Yeah, it's a really interesting thing because you think about, like, especially if you are the founder, the CEO, the leader of the company, The, um, the company is a very close mirror, like 2 sides of the coin, for your strengths and weaknesses, right? You operate a particular way, you have this company, it's perfectly matched to you, right, at the present level. And then try to like change your team or get your team to do different things or implement some new thing, but you keep doing what you did before, and then it, it's off. That either the team rejects the innovation or rejects you. But one way or another, you end up pulling it back down to the level you have to— like, as much as you work on the organization, you have to look— work on the way that you work.

Yeah, totally agree. Working on the way you work, and that's just not done enough. And look, folks like yourself, folks like me, this book, we're trying to give a simple roadmap, simple process, simple practices I think ours is beautifully complementary. You know, I don't get into those cadences of accountability and all the things you all do. And I feel like the systems work so well together. And I'm excited. I'm excited about the responsiveness we've had.

So, I'll throw up the website in just a second. The book is Never Lead Alone. What are some getting started things, the top couple of things you think somebody should do to get started doing this?

The stress test is a real superfood practice.

It

happens to be in chapter 3. And I do think that focusing on breeding a greater degree of challenge culture on your team in a safe way is the answer. And the stress test is a great practice for it. Yeah, I would say start there. But I also think that you just get your team together. And just eat the book like popcorn, chapter by chapter. And it's intended not to be this difficult system you have to plow through, but it's simple practices we can start trying on and seeing how they feel.

Well, the book, Never Lead Alone, Keith Ferrazzi, keithferrazzi.com. We'll put up there on the screen and we'll put it in the show notes, but you could probably remember it. Just remember 2 Rs, 2 Zs, keithferrazzi.com. Keith, it's a pleasure once again to talk to you. It's good meaty conversation. I think should be of real value to everyone on our team.

Thank you. Appreciate your time. And I really feel this has been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Our workshops, our coaching, all that crap and more at scalingcoach.com. That's where you figure out and find also the whole back catalog, 620+ episodes with everybody else we've ever talked to about that. scalingcoach.com. And special thanks to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework. That's the core of our work. And to the folks at Storion behind the scenes there, Christelle working on our show today, Seth and Cameron, the team. Thank you guys for getting our show ready, in and out every week. We'll talk to you again next week. In the meantime, keep scaling. Thank you.