Leadership Reinvented: The Power of Teamship in Building High-Performing Teams

Dear Leader, is your team thriving—or merely surviving? In a world where traditional leadership is being challenged, the future belongs to leaders who embrace the transformative power of teamship.?

During a thought-provoking webinar with Keith Ferrazzi , bestselling author and executive team coach, I was reminded of my own past efforts to develop self-managing teams. What stood out, though, was how Ferrazzi takes this concept to new heights, focusing on building High-Performing Teams capable of delivering 10X outcomes. His pragmatic strategies, covered in his new book?Never Lead Alone, offer a roadmap for leaders ready to unlock their team’s full potential.

Most webinars I join during the day are hardly worth the time. But today’s session,? hosted by Coaching.com and led by Rosette Cataldo , CRO at Coaching.com , was different. It was packed with insights, strategies, and thought-provoking questions that reinforced how leadership is evolving—and how hard this shift can be, despite its clear advantages.

Why Teamship Is the Future of Leadership

Ferrazzi’s message was clear: leadership is no longer about an individual hero driving results—it’s about building?teamship. This shift challenges traditional leadership models by placing the focus on the collective power of a team.?

At its core, teamship is about creating an environment where every team member shares accountability, contributes ideas, and actively supports one another to achieve common goals. It redefines the role of leadership as enabling and empowering rather than directing and controlling. It’s about creating a space where everyone is empowered, accountable, and deeply connected to shared goals.

As I listened, I couldn’t help but reflect on my personal journey as a leader and coach. Most lessons Ferrazzi shared resonated with me on a personal level, particularly the importance of creating a safe and open culture.

Openness Isn’t Easy, But It’s Worth It

Being Dutch, I’ve always leaned towards direct communication. When I co-founded a company in Poland in 2006, I quickly realised that my natural openness was not immediately appreciated. At the time, many employees in Poland viewed openness from a leader with scepticism or even discomfort. For them, a boss was someone who gave orders, not someone who asked for feedback or welcomed ideas from everyone, including junior employees.

Building an open culture took time, patience, and persistence. It wasn’t easy to challenge the existing situation, but over the years, we managed to create an environment where people felt safe to speak up, share their ideas, and even challenge leadership. However, I’ve noticed that even today, many organisations struggle with this.

Why? Because openness and trust require vulnerability—something many leaders shy away from. But here’s the catch: without trust, there’s no teamship. Without openness, teams cannot reach their full potential.

Key Lessons from the Webinar

Ferrazzi shared several powerful ideas that reinforced the importance of openness and collaboration. Here are a few takeaways that stood out:

1. From Leadership to Teamship: A Paradigm Shift

Traditional leadership places the burden of accountability and decision-making on one person: the leader. In contrast, teamship shifts the responsibility to the entire team. Leaders aren’t just driving results—they’re empowering their teams to hold each other accountable, provide feedback, and share the load. This improves performance and frees leaders to focus on strategic priorities.

2. The Foundations of High-Performing Teams

Psychological safety is the foundation for any high-performing team. Without it, even the best strategies fail to gain traction. This concept refers to creating an environment where individuals feel safe to voice their thoughts, admit mistakes, and offer feedback without fear of judgement or retaliation. Keith Ferrazzi highlighted that psychological safety is not just a lofty ideal but a practical necessity for fostering trust and collaboration.

Ferrazzi also shared a practical way to assess psychological safety: diagnostic tools that measure team members’ perceived safety levels. He explained that many leaders overestimate this safety, often finding that team members rate their sense of safety significantly lower than expected. This highlights a critical gap between perception and reality, underscoring the need for leaders to actively monitor and address these disparities.

3. Small Practices, Big Impact

Cultural change frequently feels challenging, but Keith Ferrazzi offered a refreshingly simple perspective during the webinar. He explained that culture doesn’t need dramatic changes to shift; instead, it can evolve through small, consistent practices embedded into daily routines. As Ferrazzi put it,?"People say that culture change is difficult. It is not. If you change the practices on your teams, you change the culture. Culture is nothing more than a social contract. It's an agreement among a group of people."

One notable practice is stress testing, where team members share their achievements, challenges, and plans in an open forum. The team responds with feedback in three areas: challenges they see, innovations they might suggest, and where they can offer help. This creates a space for candour and builds mutual accountability, fostering a culture of trust and support.

Ferrazzi also shared how a simple practice, like hosting a long, slow dinner to encourage empathetic sharing, can transform even distrustful cultures. These actions, repeated consistently, naturally reshape team dynamics and drive cultural change without feeling forced.

4. Rethinking Collaboration

Most teams rely heavily on meetings for collaboration, but this is often inefficient and excludes quieter voices. Ferrazzi’s advice? Use asynchronous tools to gather input before meetings and save meetings for decision-making. This simple shift can drastically improve inclusivity, innovation, and productivity. Ferrazzi also emphasised the importance of video being on during online meetings, stating boldly, "If you’ve got the luxury of staying in your home to collaborate, then turn your camera on." He argued that it’s negligent not to be present for your team, whether you’ve combed your hair or not, and video helps maintain focus and connection during virtual interactions.

Are You Truly Leading a Team?

Listening to Ferrazzi's insights, I wondered how often leaders ask themselves the following question:?Is my leadership team truly working as a team. Will they have each other's backs in good and bad times??What would be your answer? And to the following questions:

• Are team members comfortable giving each other feedback, or does the leader carry this burden alone?
• Do you have practices in place to ensure everyone feels heard, or do the same voices dominate every discussion?
• Most importantly, does your team trust one another enough to take risks, share bold ideas, and hold each other accountable?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” it’s worth reflecting on how your current leadership practices might be holding your team back.

A Leader’s Journey and Reflection

Building an open, high-performing team doesn’t happen overnight. It requires leaders who are willing to challenge their habits, let go of control, and embrace vulnerability. This is something I’ve experienced firsthand, and it’s a journey I now help other leaders navigate.

In my coaching practice, I’ve seen how small shifts—like encouraging honest feedback or redefining the way teams collaborate—can lead to significant transformations. As Ferrazzi put it during the Q&A,?"practices change belief systems."

By leveraging and using the simplest of practices, you can turn what you’re hoping for in your culture into an assignment. And when practices are done repeatedly, they change a team’s cultural mindset. It’s the application of one of Ferrazzi's favourite sayings,?"You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking."For example, introducing simple practices like a long, slow dinner to foster empathetic sharing can start to shift even competitive and distrustful cultures.

Final Thoughts: The Power of Shared Leadership

Ferrazzi’s webinar reconfirmed for me that leadership is no longer about leading alone. It’s about creating a culture where everyone leads together, where trust and accountability are shared, and where teams feel empowered to succeed.

If this resonates with you, I encourage you to take a step back and reflect on your team’s culture. Is it as open, trusting, and collaborative as it could be? And if not, what’s holding you back?

The answers to these questions might just be the key to unlocking your team’s full potential—and we at GrowthTailor would be delighted to partner with you in exploring them further.