Never Lead Alone with Keith Ferrazzi

Introduction and the loneliness of leadership

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:32Bill Gallagher: It could be pretty lonely to try and lead and grow a team, a company, anything like that. It can feel like you're doing it on your own. Today is really all about not leading alone. 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, 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, subscribe and share it with some friend if it's useful for you.

01:22Bill Gallagher: Alright, listen. I'm joined now by an author we've talked about many, many times. Verne'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, a thing called the Yearn, an event. It was super cool. And we've been wanting to get him on the show ever since then. It's almost two 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—Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, Competing in the New World of Work. He's been a thought leader. He was a big deal at Deloitte. He's been covered in all kinds of super prestigious things. You don't have to go on and on about all of them, but the HBRs and the Wall Street Journals and things like that of the world, the Fast Companies. And he's a lovely human. So I have carried at least the spirit of Never Eat Alone very close to my heart. 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.

Vulnerability opens the door to authentic relationships

02:28Keith Ferrazzi: Well, thank you. What a beautiful introduction. I can't wait to dive in and pick apart a few of those things.

02:38Bill Gallagher: So what is the thing that you think most people get wrong in the world of relationship building, relationship cultivation, nurturing, management?

02:48Keith Ferrazzi: So we're going to start OG with Never Eat Alone, and we're going to work our way through 20 years 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. 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. So, you know, in the case of Never Eat Alone, from a networking perspective, 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 experienced that at our gathering called the Yearn. And, you know, I do it all the time, whether it's a dinner party that I'm going to. I hate small talk. I'm an introvert. 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? 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, mine was great, but I do have to say I'm struggling with my youngest boy. And I'll have ready an authentic, true, but purposeful opening to say, hey, you can talk to me about anything.

04:53Bill Gallagher: 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.

05:07Keith Ferrazzi: And she is. She truly is.

05:10Bill Gallagher: Gracious. And so my wife, Laurie, 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. She's like, yeah, you know, you could maybe try some new practice or whatever. So I'm like, yeah, it's a great idea. So I call a buddy of mine, and I say, hey, let's get together for lunch. And so he says, yeah, it's a great idea. So we get together and we go to this place, and I'm looking forward to it. I have two hours for this lunch. And I sit down, and I'm really delighted for it. And I've done a lot of this. 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 I would do that. But although I would leave more time for it, I still would tend to be transactional and impatient. So now 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 then we finish up a couple of things. He creates a couple little action items for both of us, and then he's like, okay, I gotta go.

Most teams are mediocre and lack mutual accountability

06:25Keith Ferrazzi: 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'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 in the new book, right? What do you do for a team when you want that team to have each other's back? 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? I want people to care so much about the mission and each other that they will wrestle ideas, they will challenge performance, et cetera. 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.

07:46Keith Ferrazzi: A relationship where, by 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.

08:06Bill Gallagher: 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 gonna 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. And how do I get people to hold it? I feel like I'm always having to hold everybody to account. Like, yeah, it's not your, it's a collective thing of the team to do. Right? Broken social contract. You didn't land the agreement.

08:39Keith Ferrazzi: Right? Yeah. So most of the teams, 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 there are questions like, do we challenge each other when it's risky? Say scale of zero to five, 1.3. Right? 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 twos. 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, 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 gotta win together. Once you get that social contract, then you gotta follow it with practices. So you would do this thing that I call stress testing. I always believe, and I 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 at the end of those sprints, you do, in a sense, what a stand-up 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.

How empowered manufacturing teams shaped his thinking

10:54Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I know it well. We can talk about that, and actually, it's important.

10:57Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. 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. 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've 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 twenty-four 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.

12:00Bill Gallagher: 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 bit first. Go back.

12:22Keith Ferrazzi: A hundred percent. 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 gonna grow up someday and fix American manufacturing. I'd say most people wanna be a fireman, but no, I was gonna fix American manufacturing at the age of ten. 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 butt 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, 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 lane, sure, but we don't spend enough time crossing those swim lanes to get the best answers. And too often, we coordinate and collaborate in our silos. And that just, I'm sorry, 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.

14:57Bill Gallagher: 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 two guys in it on each end of the boat. One end was sinking, and the other guy calls out to him. He's like, well, my end of the boat's not sinking.

Siloed work structures limit speed and innovation

15:12Bill Gallagher: Right. Right. Well, look, and it's unfortunately, you see it all the time. A lot of them are like, they kinda sit back there with their mouth shut while somebody is like, going down in flames. They don't realize he's gonna bring the whole company down. Well, I mean, you look at what happened to General Motors before bankruptcy.

15:27Keith Ferrazzi: 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, 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.

15:49Keith Ferrazzi: There's another one. There's a company you might know called e.l.f. Beauty. So the Estée Lauders, 150 some years old or whatever, the juggernauts, they still have two-year cycle times for new product development. This little company comes along with a commitment that for the next two years that you're here—this is your onboarding time—you will grow further and faster than anywhere else. But you've got to be willing to give each other feedback, and you've 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 trying to torpedo each other. We're going to do it because we're committed to each other's success. And we're going to do it out of love. And that business at e.l.f., it works. They're the number one market share growth in the industry. Tarang, the CEO, has created that culture all around. Obviously 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.

17:00Keith Ferrazzi: 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." Or a practice of something I call a candor break. In the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two and says, "What conversation should we be having in the room that we're not having?" They talk about it, small groups for five 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.

17:56Bill Gallagher: It's interesting. I hear you dealing with these very human interactions, but I also hear that 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.

18:12Keith Ferrazzi: Well, I think it really goes back to my early days 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 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. You know, 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.

19:26Keith Ferrazzi: 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 going to start seeing with AI tools and others, as you move further along that continuum, I think we're going to see more holacratic teams, self-managed teams, where the team doesn't need somebody kibbitzing 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.

20:11Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's an interesting thing. You mentioned candor in all that and breaking through in all realms. And a lot of people have popularized or jumped on the bandwagon of radical candor, feeling like we're all 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 going to say whatever my opinion to you about you without any filter or niceness, any consideration for your feelings. That's radical candor." And what there isn't is any humanity or compassion or any self-confession, like, "Look, I screwed this thing up, guys, and I don't know what to do next."

Candor must serve the other person's success

21:04Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. So there's a lot of unbundling of what you just said. So let's take it piece by piece. First piece is, candor needs to be in service of another person's success. 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?" And I'm really sharp on this. And I said, "Listen. I'm okay if the person feeling your candor feels that that's what they needed, a two-by-four, because 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. So people who 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.

22:31Keith Ferrazzi: 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 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, 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.

23:28Keith Ferrazzi: 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 it home. And that's why I think the book has been doing so well because of that. Practical, practical, practical, very practical practices.

A leader who feared conflict until she saw it work

23:48Bill Gallagher: Yeah. 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.

23:59Keith Ferrazzi: There's a CIO that I know well, deeply respect.

24:06Keith Ferrazzi: And she had been much more tepid in wanting conflict to arise on the team. She 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 people would be hurt, and she was distrusting that we could get to a place where candor could be fluid. And she would say things to me like, "Jeez, I don't think we should do this exercise," et cetera. And at some point, I just had to say, "You're paying me a lot of money to be mediocre for you. You've gotta take the reins off and let me run an agenda that frightens you a little bit. And if you wanna shut me down afterward, please do." And she heard that. Right? She heard that. And we did then run the play the way I wanted to run the play, and as expected—I've done this thousands of times—it bode well for her. So she now takes that on, and she uses the practice fairly abundantly. But, you know, 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—a father that was too angry, a mother that was whatever. And all of this stuff is true. And 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. He has this thing called an outlier meeting. I love Bill. It's so fucking—excuse me—it's so damn funny. Believe 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's like, "Hey, by the way, congratulations on the Tony award that we won." And he's like, "This is not a place for victory lap. Let's get back to it." Like, just focused on it. And I gotta tell you, these guys have crushed it. 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 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 that you can say, "Okay, how am I doing? Am I getting better?"

27:08Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I hear a lot of care for the collective win and an unwillingness to dress it up too much. Right? Like, let's get at the real truth.

27:24Keith Ferrazzi: Yes. And there is a chapter in the book all about celebration. George Fisher, who was over at Verizon—now he's over at T-Mobile. He was the CEO of Verizon Enterprise. Now he's over at 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 wanna get to the stage where on a weekly basis, the team is celebrating each other. There's a fun exercise of peer-to-peer celebration that I learned from George where everybody goes around picking one person on the team that they wanna call out and celebrate for something they've done that week. 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 three 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.

28:44Bill Gallagher: So most of our teams at the beginning of meetings, after some temperature check, some kind of thing to let them arrive and transition to the meeting to—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 acknowledgment—so 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?

Peer celebration as a practice, not just a nice-to-have

29:24Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. I like that. Well, those are two great practices, by the way. Yeah. So first practice you had was something that we call an energy check, and I formalized 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 I wanna know that somebody who's always a five comes in as a four, then you pause, and you're like, "Are you okay?" Like, give the score and then—I always like to ask—what's draining your energy? Personal or professional. That's a beautiful—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. 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 an intentional 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, 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, because I care about your success, in the next quarters, I might suggest—" Right? So, you know, some people call that a 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.

31:32Bill Gallagher: There's a guy you may have heard before, Fernando Flores—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?" You know? And that approach is so powerful.

31:57Bill Gallagher: And like done, not so much with forms and surveys, but just live. Let me hear it, you know? And it takes 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 like 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 gonna work on that. I'm never gonna be that kind of CEO. And the last CEO was, he's totally right. But if you want that from a CEO, I'm always gonna disappoint you. Yeah. So a yes, 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 got it. It's valid, and you're never gonna get that from me. The agree, disagree and commit is important in all of this.

33:02Keith Ferrazzi: So I wanna hear you out. But just because you have a voice doesn't mean you have a vote. 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.

33:21Keith Ferrazzi: You know, I've got six 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 advice. Right? That was a directive. Yet we wake up today and we're now giving peer to peer feedback, and everybody thinks 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 gonna do that. No, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna 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. Teamship is not an excuse for consensus at all. It's an opportunity to use even bolder inputs to make faster, bolder decisions.

34:26Bill Gallagher: What role do you see for AI in all of this today? Where does that play?

Workflows need redesign with AI, not just new tools on old roles

34:30Keith Ferrazzi: So I've got an entire research thread of work on this. 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 reengineering of workflow view. Workflows need to be reengineered 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'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 a number of job boards, and interviews will be calendared without a recruiting manager for me. During 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, 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 gonna 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.

36:43Bill Gallagher: You're saying go bigger picture. Go broader, bigger picture with it.

36:50Keith Ferrazzi: You have to. You know, look, the 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 nineties, there was a guy named Chainsaw Al Dunlap 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 gotta start focusing them on that.

37:49Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's interesting. I was talking to a CEO this week about, he was like, I feel like a lot of my processes need doing. My people are struggling, 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. 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 or 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.

38:32Keith Ferrazzi: With teamship as a model, you become much more co-creative. And we used to innovate in our silos and then go get buy-in. 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 wanna hear them. I want to know what a technology person's perspective is here. I wanna 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, you know, I talk a lot in the book, chapter six, about reinventing meetings. If we show up in a meeting of 12 people, four 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 three people, 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 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.

40:12Keith Ferrazzi: 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.

40:25Bill Gallagher: Yeah, it's a really interesting thing because you think about, especially if you are the founder or the CEO, the leader of the company, the company is a very close mirror, like two 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 at the present level. And then try to 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's off. 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, as much as you work in the organization, you have to work on the way that you work.

41:15Keith Ferrazzi: 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 road map, simple process, simple practices. I think ours is beautifully complementary. I don't get into those cadence of accountability and all the things you all do, and I feel like the systems work so well together. I'm now excited. I'm excited about the responsiveness we've had.

41:43Bill Gallagher: 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 things you think somebody should do to get started doing this?

41:56Keith Ferrazzi: The stress test is a real superfood practice. It happens to be in chapter three. 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. 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.

42:37Bill Gallagher: 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 two R's, two Z's, keithferrazzi.com. Keith, it's a pleasure once again to talk to you. It's a good meeting conversation. I think it 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.

43:03Bill Gallagher: Our workshops, our coaching, all that crap and more at scalingcoach.com. That's where you figure out and find. Also, whole back catalog, 620 plus 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 StoryOn, behind the scenes there, Crystal 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.

43:40Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken. Do Less. Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.