Leading Without Authority

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Keith Ferrazzi. He’s an American entrepreneur and recognized global thought leader in the relational and collaborative sciences. As chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and its Research Institute, he has introduced a really exciting, transformational operating system he calls co-elevation that leads to exponential change and value in all kinds of companies, from startups to massive global companies.

Formerly, he was CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels. He is a number one New York Times bestselling author of Who's Got Your Back? and Never Eat Alone. And his latest book, which is what we're going to talk about today, is Leading Without Authority. He is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, and many others.

Keith, thank you so, so much for making time for our audience today.

Keith Ferrazzi: Anita, it's great. I'm really excited about your university, this conversation, and your alumni.

Anita Brick: Great. The audience is students all over the world, alumni and a variety of other people who have found and enjoyed CareerCast.

So to give us a place to start. What does it mean to lead without authority?

Keith Ferrazzi: There is a new operating system at its core called co-elevation, and it's a methodology on how to lead. The question is for who. Who needs to co-elevate? It's two perspectives. It's the young Keith Ferrazzi at Deloitte who became the chief marketing officer by the time he was 30 because he did not wait for a promotion. He did not wait to be anointed. He actually saw a vision for what was possible, and he co-created with a set of individuals that had nothing to do with his position of authority. Ultimately, as a result, I was rewarded with a title and a position. But the fact was, I was acting as chief marketing officer for a couple of years before that even happened, because I saw an opportunity and I generously gave of myself and co-created something special. That is available to everybody, everybody in the company.

I've been in organizations, I coached teams – that's what I do. And I've been in organizations where the head of HR ended up being the tipping point person responsible for the transformation of the product suite. It's not just because they stuck in their wheelhouse. They knew that the strategy was we were being beaten by competition with a more robust product suite at a lower price point, and our technology was out of date.

Okay. Well, who are the kind of people and what are the kinds of conversations we need to have? And the head of HR influenced the agenda for the executive team's time spent, introduced new tools like collaborative dialogue, threw questions out to the table, like what do we need to do to compete in the marketplace? And the next thing you know, they're actually reinventing their product suite across divisions and silos because of the head of HR, leading without authority.

I'm also constantly when I coached teams dealing with a division president that's trying to get functions to directly report into her, because she believes that for her to do her job, she's got to have IT reporting in to her, not to the chief information officer. Excuse my French, that's just bullshit. That that time spent wasting time accumulating resources because you're incapable of effectively collaborating and co-creating across divisions and silos is no way to spend your time. You've got to recognize that that's an old game. The reason it's an old game is because nobody will ever have enough resources, nobody will ever have enough resources to effectively meet the marketplace’s crazy demands. And what does that mean? The marketplace demands today are for reinvention on a weekly basis. And literally having, you know, recently been post peak pandemic. I never said that before. We were reinventing ourselves on a weekly basis. So we know it's possible. What we need to do is moving forward, we need to be radically adaptable. We need to focus on constantly finding unexpected growth. And we need to focus on transformation, 10x not 10%. If you want to be a leader, you can't just fight for ownership of resources to make that happen. You've got to collaborate across the matrix.

Anita Brick: Okay, so an alum asked this question: “I'm a big proponent of inner transformation to create positive change. I know how to do this in my own life. That said, I'm not in executive leadership and I'm not sure where to start. Where would you start if you were me?”

Keith Ferrazzi: You know, using the example of myself at Deloitte. The first place you want to start is where the need is. If you're going to be trying to influence people, to join your movement, to join your mission, to join your vision, to enlist in your goals, whether they've been assigned to you or whether you're creating them. Part of this is you can start with something you've already been assigned to do. You can start where you say, okay, my job is to grow this particular market by 20%. I need to co-create with the sales organization. I need to co-create with the marketing organization. I need to co-create with the product organization. Why don't I even co-create with customers? Why don't I bring some customers into this conversation. Why don't you even co-create with some organizations that are outside of my current bandwidth, meaning these are just companies selling into the same companies I'm selling into. They know my customers. They know my prospects. Maybe there's an opportunity to co-create some joint or adjacent go to market strategies.

I call that teaming out. It's one of the eight core dimensions of a high performing team teaming out. Where you start is irrelevant to me. The question is how do you apply the practices of co-elevation? That's the outline of the book. Number one awaken that. Who is my team? Who's my team means who are the people I need to enlist in order to achieve transformational outcomes? That's a big idea because that has nothing to do with the people that report to you. So you start with where you see value creation opportunity that is outside of the resources and authority you currently have.

And you then enlist a team of individuals to go on that journey with you. The question is, how do you enlist those people? What's in it for them? How do you keep their energy up? So how do you lead that team? That's what leading without authority teaches you.

Anita Brick: Okay. One of the things that I was thinking about, and there are questions around this, is what if the people around you, the people who could engage with you and there's a couple of questions. One from a student, one from alum that came around this and said, but what are the people around you? You don't like them? You can't leave your job because the environment doesn't really, there's not a lot of movement going on right now. But you don't like them and you have to create them and turn them into a trusted ally.

Keith Ferrazzi: You start with you. I know that that's the least appetizing of the ideas here, but you start with you because–I'll tell you a story that you might remember from the book. My foster son and he came into our house at 12. This young man had been trust abused since he was an infant. He was taken out of his parents home because of abuse and neglect, and he was put into sequential 12 houses before he got into ours. He was very trepidatious. He was very afraid of being heard again. Him looking at me saying, you will never be my father couldn't imagine a more adversarial perspective. I'm trying to help this kid. I made a commitment to my family, myself, this child, God. I made a commitment to be his father and he was spitting at me, saying, you will never be my expletive father.

Okay, so what do I do? Do I cross my arms and say, young man, when you meet me halfway, I'll be your father? Well, I guess that that's perspective. But I don't know that I would have been fulfilling my values and what I wanted to try to achieve. We sit in the workplace, and we've been paid reasonable, fair and healthy paychecks. And yet we abuse that and we cross our arms and we say, well, when people meet me halfway, I will behave as a professional. And when someone's behaving badly, it gives us an excuse to vilify them and not collaborator cooperate. No, it doesn't give you an excuse. I had to go 99.9% of the way with that child, and still sometimes do. Literally I still sometimes do, because there's a lot of damage that that young man has had to overcome, and he's struggling with it. You know, I'm just there doing my best to fulfill my role as you need to do.

In chapter two, there's the six deadly excuses of why we remain mediocre. We look at external relationships and blame others and victimize ourselves for why we can't get things done. Now, I could go in a lot more depth in the it's all on you question, but let me go into a couple of other areas which is serve, share, and care. I've been studying relational and collaborative sciences for many, many years. Our research institute is the leading research institute on anything relational and collaborative. We had to create a word for what is the role of a leader to open somebody to change. The word is porosity, being porous. And it's a metric. And I want you to be thinking about this as a leader. I want you to think, is Anita porous to my ideas? Is she poruous me? Meaning is she absorptive? You know, is she open? Visually, glass is not so porous. You put water on it, it rolls off. A sponge is very porous? Is Anita like a sponge to my words and my ideas? Or is she like glass rolling off of her? Your job is to make people porous, as a leader. Interestingly enough, I also believe that if somebody reports to you, your job is also to make them porous.

Anita Brick: Okay, so just to stop for a quick second. And I agree with you, I agree that you need to build those bridges. I love the word. I'm always creating words too. In very practical terms, how do you do this if you're starting with an adversary?

Keith Ferrazzi: It's all on you. You've got to mollify your resentment of this individual. So if you soften your resentment, they open up. There's a wonderful set of research that we did looking at AA. There is a step in the AA program called Making Amends. There's a wonderful coach named Scene McFarland, who's one of the top 12 step addictive coaches in the country. He's out in Los Angeles. Scene McFarland. He talks about always asking the question, what's my part? So if you have somebody that there's animosity toward, ask yourself, what's my part? What is my part in the fact that this relationship is strained now? It's tough for a lot of people to see their part because, well, this person's a SOB. This person's violated integrity of the relationship and this person's, you know, always shutting me out or shutting me down, etc.. There's always this pointing victim mindset. When that's happened, how have you responded? You've responded in a way that meets that, then you've now contributed to the degradation of the relationship.

There's a whole chapter in the book about how to unpack and how to soften a bad relationship. Frankly, just being more transparent about it can also work. And going up somebody and say, listen, there's really some extraordinary work that I think can be done in this organization and for our customers. But that extraordinary work is definitely going to require the insights of multiple groups. And I believe that in order to achieve that, you and I need to work fairly closely together and co-create. Now, fluffing up the brilliance of that individual, and the need for that individual to co-create with you is also a nice way to assuage their trigger happy insecurities or difficulties. One of the things you have to recognize is anybody who's a jerk is insecure, and that's at the core of who they are. So forgiving that in your own head.

At the other point, is opening porosity with that person through serve, share, and care. It's a simple formula. Leading with service. Some of the most difficult people I've had to deal with I pivoted the conversation instead of trying to get from them what I wanted, I asked the question, how can I be of more service to them? Through being of service to them, and you can be of service to them around the work you're doing, finding a way that this work serves them and therefore inviting them into it in a way. Or you can just be in service of them, you know, you can find the good in them. You can seek the ways to help them in other objectives that they have. This will again open porosity. You'll make them more spongy and less resistant. Lots of tactics in the book around it.

Those are the basic principles. You mollify your own mindset toward them. You soften your mindset toward them in exercises that you do in your own head. And then you begin to serve, share, and care. Share is opening in a sense of vulnerability with somebody so that they see the humanity in the relationship. You might not think that's possible to go from animosity to vulnerability, so that's why there may be a few other things to do, both in your own head and in serving that individual that gets you to the place where you feel safe enough to be vulnerable with this person. But I do say that over time, vulnerability, openness, human connection, that those will be strong elements of any productive relationship when somebody doesn't have to work with you and it's their choice.

Anita Brick: Okay, you've referenced different tactics. Give us a few just to get us started.

Keith Ferrazzi: Of which piece? Of the serve, share, and care?

Anita Brick: Yeah. The serve, share, and care.

Keith Ferrazzi: Sure. Well, you know, positionally, one of our clients–actually this happened to be a client, but it also happened to be a friend. There was a young woman who is in Yardaw, and she has this animosity toward this nurse who's this grizzled old sort of nurse. And her mind, she's interpreted, this person is Nurse Ratchet, you know, this is who this person is. And this person's dropping the ball on getting supplies where they need to be. All she sees is the vilification of this person. In those situations, the fact that she's a doc. But she's a new doc and this grizzled old nurse has been there forever. So who has the authority there, right? Who has the control? I don't care about title in a situation like this. This woman has been walking over doctors and eating them for breakfast for years, in this girl's mind, this woman's mind.

It's interesting. I remember this conversation when I asked the young lady sitting at lunch at breakfast with me, do you really want to make a difference in the E.R.? What's your goal? What's your dream? What's your vision? Do you really want to make a difference? And do you really think that this person has no will or no interest in human service? This nurse has been there forever serving patients. How is she with patients? And all of a sudden it's like, well, she really, really is lovely with patients. Oh I see, so she's just difficult with snot-nosed young doctors who come in think they know everything, right? So it's all of a sudden you're opening this empathy with this person to see this person slightly different.

And I said, here's what I want you to do. I just want you to the next time you go down to the cafeteria for coffee, stop by Nurse Ratchet's office and ask her if she wants a cup of coffee, that you can bring it back. And she did. And interestingly enough, little things like that. And I gave her like six tactics. Stop and get her a cup of coffee for the next time you go. Ask if on the break she wants to go down for a cup of coffee with you. Ask the nurse for advice since she's been around for so long. How have she seen young doctors succeed in making a difference in patient care? Because that's really what your dream was.

Go to where the two of you know you are aligned, which is in patient care. Let her know you don't care just about your own ego, which she's probably looking at you and thinking, you're this snot-nosed, doctor. How do you find a North star of what you're both trying to achieve? Ask her about her home situation, like what's going on in her life. Oh, wow. You're going to find out empathetically that she's got stuff going on in her life that's struggling and difficult. What does she want to do that she feels she can't get done? Oh my gosh, she wants to do the same thing you do!

That whole area of opening porosity, that mindset shift. I was talking yesterday to a very senior executive at Twitter who was running a group in the past, the finance group had been a barrier to them getting done what they want to get done, and therefore they vilified the finance group.  Then all of a sudden they read the book and they just recognized all they had to do is a chiropractic adjustment in their mindset associated with who finance was. And they started having conversations differently with finance that opened up an opportunity where they all cared about the same thing. And then they were aligned and they were working together. Those are some of the simple tactics, but I think that gives you a taste.

Anita Brick: That's really good. And I think that our audience likes to get that taste of it, and it drives them to want more. I think the other thing that's really important about the story that you just shared is a little bit more context, which is that the doc's objective was to get promoted faster. She was told five years, she thought three was more appropriate, which is fine.

And that's something I hear a lot like, oh wow, there's this person who's been there forever slowing down the gears. But what you did is you, by guiding her, you completely change the dynamic. But I do think a lot of the responsibility here is on the individual. It's on me, it's on you. It was on her. And it takes courage to do these things. And I think it is possible, absolutely. But it takes courage. But I do think also that doing what you are suggesting has implications that are much broader than the immediate project that you're working on. It has much bigger, much bigger implications as well. You talk about moonshot projects. When you think about it, we've got a lot of moonshot things that we should be doing right now as a society.

Keith Ferrazzi: As a society, right.

Anita Brick: But then taking it back as a company level, if you have a lot of big things going on, which a lot of companies do right now because of all of the rippling impact of Covid, among other things, how do you choose which moonshot to go after so that you have the Northstar and you can mobilize others?

Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah, that's always been my challenge because I think I see five, I see five moonshots and I want to do them all. I feel that you trust the team on that. I was just having this conversation in my own organization. When Covid hit, my traditional business took a hit to revenue, which is coaching Fortune 100 executive teams. Those teams, even though I do believe, needed our coaching at that time to make sure that they fluidly worked together and found growth opportunities. What I saw was everybody clenching down, just across the board. I opened up and said, wait, what markets do we want to start opening and serving, you know, and pivoting? To me, it gave me my moonshot opportunity.

My moonshot opportunity is that I want 100 million leaders to be practicing co elevation. How do you think about something so audacious? And I learned this practice from my friend Peter Diamandis, who's one of my personal friends and coaches. I coach his team. He coaches me. The idea of putting a crazy audacious goal out there that you can't achieve through traditional means, then you have to enlist people differently. Because I don't know how to get 100 million followers of the principles of co elevation in the world, but my team and I collectively could co-create a better solution, and we did. We've now opened an entire consumer division. I used to only sell half $1 million engagements. Now we have a $500-course teaching a leader how to co elevate. We have an $8,000 bootcamp where the whole team learns how to co elevate. I've just never had that product before. My team created these solutions with an audacious goal.

And then what's more important, everyone's been talking about going back to work and I started a media company called Go Forward to Work. And we're we have now hundreds and hundreds of executives who want to commit to learning from what we've just learned in this four-month period and sharing with each other the best practices so that we can all level up as a result of this crisis, instead of slip back into old ways of working, go forward to work.dot com is a new website I created. So now all of a sudden they started getting research. And then that opened up an invitation from one of the big podcasting companies asking me if I wanted to do a podcast. Now I'm starting to see the path to 100 million, right? You start with the audacious metric, and then you work with your team to co-create. This is exactly following leading without authority. I just practiced it myself.

My team, Peter Diamandis, my team was buddy of mine who had founded one of the big podcasting companies. And thinking about this, my team was the former managing editor of Forbes, Bruce, who I reached out to and said, how do I get legs on my ideas broader and deeper? All of a sudden I've teamed down and I've co-created. I've not done on myself, I've co-created. That's what leadership is today. And all of a sudden you can build a movement. I want to build a movement of transformation, of leadership. And I'm doing it because I practice these principles.

Anita Brick: And I love it. I love the fact that you are doing what you tell others to do, because not everybody who writes books does that. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Keith Ferrazzi: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Great. So one of the things you talk in the book, I like to think of it less about the word gratitude and more about the word appreciation, because appreciation has both the element of gratitude and the element of growth. That said, you know, an alum asked the question: “You know, you speak about gratitude.” Because that is part of co elevation, too. And he said: “You know, You speak of this in each of your books. How do you see taking gratitude from a feel good activity to a solid business practice?””

Keith Ferrazzi: It's interesting. I have spent a lot of time on generosity. One of my core principles, from every loan to who's got your back to leading with authority is getting the generosity. When I heard that question just now, I questioned the question. I was like, do I have, I really spent a lot of time and gratitude because to be honest with you, I struggle with credit.

I struggle with it personally because I grew up a very poor kid, scarcity minded, afraid of not being able to pay the rent. I'm always seeing what's not there so that I can fix it, and it doesn't bite me in the butt. And I'm not as grateful as I should be. And I'm now learning in my old age of 54 next week to be more grateful. And so that's something that I'm really working on. So I say that but I do recognize it. And it is in this book in a big way. There's an entire chapter on celebration. Why? Because as I coach executive teams, what I find is that a team that celebrates each other gets more from each other. What you focus on, you get. You focus on the criticism, right, then you get everybody focusing on the mistakes and you get a sinking malaise. You get a bit of an overlay of depression in the team, but you focus on celebration, you focus on gratitude, and all of a sudden people are lifted.

I think of and I might have written this in the book. I know I talk about it in our coaching, but I think that everybody on the team has a little dial on their forehead, and you have to look at that dial and say, where are they in their energy. Is it up or is it down today? And what is your role to dial that energy up? The power of co elevation is that co elevation starts with you. You co elevate your team. Then it moves to you creating a team that cultivates each other. That's the you know it's one of the end chapters leveraging the tribe on the tribe. Ultimately what you want is the team to dial up each other's energy without you. We need to lift people up so that they have emotional energy to share with their peers. That's a big deal.

Anita Brick: I totally agree. I got this email from a student giving me some updates and asking for some coaching around something and he said: “By the way, thank you for the note that you sent. It reminded me of who I want to be and who I aspire to be. So I'm going to leave that note on my desk so that I remember.” And I think that that's really a big part of what we all do. We need to remind people of the value that they are, that society on a bad day strips away and reduces the energy because, as you say, if we all co elevate, if we elevate each other, we all benefit too.

Keith Ferrazzi: It's exactly right. That's exciting. And that's why 100 million people doing. And maybe that'll spill into our government and we'll start to be less divisive and try to find solutions. I remember years ago we were teaching co elevation to a pharmaceutical company, and it was particularly the R&D function, and it was really about how the R&D function gets out of their silos and starts to co-create breakthrough solutions inside of the company, because apparently I didn't know this. But R&D, like so many other things, can be very siloed. It's a scientist work in a hole on their thing, you know. And it was a head of an R&D that said to me, she said, you know, Keith, because of your work here, it has shifted my perspective on how we work with competition and other pharmaceutical companies. And I've written a paper on co elevation across corporations in service of real scientific advancement. So this was, you know, the head of R&D. You know, it was one of the largest R&D companies in the world. It was Roche Genentech pharmaceutical company head of all of R&D. By applying it and seeing its value inside of the company, which is what we were doing, she awoke and was like, Holy cow, what if we did this across companies? What if we all share data? We could actually address cancer faster? And so she started to become an advocate for elevation in the world of science.

Now, I think what happened with the Covid crisis, I don't think people were worried about competition in the Covid crisis. We were just trying to fix this problem. And you started to see co elevation occur in the scientific community. That doesn't mean that the machine didn't work perfectly all the time. And of course as soon as people who are in a fearful situation, they start pointing fingers, etc. But there was more of it done in the last four months than ever before. This is what we're trying to capture examples of Go Forward To Work. This principle of what's going on in the world of work that's changed in the last four months that we want to hold on to and carry forward in the workplace.

Anita Brick: I agree, I agree, and hopefully you’ll get some more examples from us.

Just to wrap things up. And I would like you to be concrete and tactical here. If you were advising a client to lead without authority, what are three things that that person should start doing beginning right now?

Keith Ferrazzi: The first question is, and we talked about it a bit on this call. What's your fuzzy vision of what can be better? And ideally I tried to write the book and I try to coach you not just to make things 10%. Same amount of time that it takes to get something 10% better you could spend getting something 10x better. You just have to think differently to do it, and you have to do it with a lot more inclusion of a broader set of individuals. The idea then, is you have a fuzzy vision of something you think could be really better, and you reach out to a few people that you think would add to the creation of what that is, because it's a fuzzy vision and because it's so big, you can't do it yourself. So who are those three individuals you start the conversation with earlier?

And what's exciting about that first conversation with those individuals is you're inviting them, not into your project. You're inviting them into their project. Because it can't be yours, it's too big, it's too audacious. It can't be yours. It's got to be the collectives. You're inviting them into co-creating their project. Now all of a sudden, you've got three people noodling on this interesting big issue.

The next step is, how are you supporting that team? How are you opening the porosity? How are you coaching them so they don't fall back into the old malaise of pointing fingers, being victims? Oh, the company will never let us do this, etc. You know, how do you use, serve, share and care? How do you create a sense of porosity with this team that gives them the energy that they need to bust down old belief systems in silos? And then you're going to run a collaborative process. There's a whole chapter in here about co-creation. How do you run a collaborative process that helps you get out of the old way of momentum and thinking.

I'm really hopeful for the book. I really am. I'm hopeful for what it does to 100 million leaders that will be joining the movement of a different way of inventing transformational outcomes together.

Anita Brick: I agree, and thank you so very much. And I know you have lots of different sites. I think that you're the Go Forward to Work.com. Let's get you ideas. Let's get people to submit ideas. And maybe they'll add to that 100 million of leaders that you want to influence.

Thank you so much. You are very, very clear. And you come from a place that is so important today that it's not about you. It is much more about elevating everyone.

Keith Ferrazzi: Thank you. Thank you. What a pleasure.

Anita Brick: Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.