Leading Without Authority by Keith Ferrazzi
Introduction
THE NEW WORK RULES FOR A NEW WORK WORLD
Nothing gets done in a single silo or function anymore. Constant collaboration is at a new premium, because the big things are always led by cross-functional teams. We need people driven by purpose, passion, and persistence, not position or job title. We need people who will seek out the right solution and then figure out how to get a team together to build it. It’s no longer about hiring great talent. It’s about hiring talent that will make the team great. - BRIAN CORNELL, CEO, Target
We live in a momentous time in human history, one that has never offered more abundance and opportunity. But these times have also brought about a Category 5 hurricane of disruptive changes. Breathtaking advances in science and exponential technological innovation bloom all around us, making our lives better and easier. And yet there are people at all levels of organizations who feel fatigued, fretful, and even beaten down at work. It’s a Dickensian dichotomy—the best of times and the worst of times
We are long overdue for a change in the way we work. Advancing technology has made that change an urgent necessity
THE LIMITATIONS OF AUTHORITY
Through my decades of team coaching, I’ve come to see how many people are repeating the same mistakes I made at Starwood so many years ago. Too many managers rely on their title, position, and budgetary control to get their work done. They waste too much of their energy on painful bureaucratic infighting, energy that would be better spent leading others to collaborate and seek audacious new solutions. And I find that people without formal authority are often sitting on the sidelines, waiting their turn, when they could be diving in as I did at Deloitte, building relationships and leading without authority to get extraordinary things done.
Employers need us to seize opportunities, take the initiative, and build value for our companies. Sclerotic old-school command-and-control decision-making is no longer going to cut it
Leading without authority has never been more important, and the need for it grows more urgent by the day
THE NEW WAY FORWARD
Leading without authority is unavoidably becoming the twenty-first-century organizational model. The trouble is that for most managers, the secret to applying the model reliably and with excellence remains a mystery
The old rules of the game aren’t working anymore. But every day I still see people clinging to those old rules by their fingertips. Why? Because there are no rules to the new game we’re playing, and no manual for how to play the game well.
Until now.
This book is the first to codify a new set of work rules for our new work world. It gives readers a complete, holistic, and proven methodology for succeeding in a world in which the ability to lead without authority is an essential workplace competency
Simply defined, co-elevation is a mission-driven approach to collaborative problem-solving through fluid partnerships and self-organizing teams. When we co-elevate with one or more of our associates, we turn them into teammates. We enter into close co-creative relationships based on candid feedback and mutual accountability. With its guiding ethos of “going higher together,” co-elevation nurtures a generosity of spirit and a sense of commitment to our new teammates and our shared mission. The resulting outcomes almost always exceed what could have been accomplished through regular channels within the org chart
I believe co-elevation is capable of transforming even the most contentious workplace relationships into mutually beneficial partnerships. When we co-elevate, we work with more positive energy, generate more innovative ideas, expand our abilities, and execute faster. Though these ideas might sound naive to some
Co-elevation will help leaders, teams, and organizations at every level cut through bureaucratic bottlenecks of authority and achieve better, faster results. As you co-elevate with others, you can begin to take on new transformative missions with your expanded teams, collaborating to achieve goals you never would have imagined before
And co-elevation is contagious. By its design, it compels us to keep enlisting more and more people to our cause, creating a bias toward action and innovation. Co-elevation transforms organizations through personal transformation. It calls for everyone within an organization to exercise leadership in collaborative partnerships, regardless of their title or position. The relentless pressure to innovate demands co-elevation, because opportunities arise too fast to be dealt with any other way
TIME FOR A WORKPLACE REBOOT
In the coming pages, you’ll learn how to build co-elevating relationships and how to develop your own co-elevating teams. You’ll get a step-by-step guide in how to reinvent collaboration in the workplace in a way that is bold and inclusive, and generates radically improved outcomes. You’ll see the power of co-development, a peer-to-peer coaching methodology that fulfills co-elevation’s promise to “go higher together.” You’ll see the importance of gratitude, praise, and celebration with new eyes. And you’ll see how sparking a workplace movement that draws on co-elevation can lead to a worldwide movement for reimagining how we all show up with each other in the world
WORKING WITH GRAVITY
I believe passionately in co-elevation. I believe the spirit of co-creation unlocks human potential—in service to better ourselves, to better each other, to better our organizations, and to help address even the largest global problems.
I have come to apply co-elevation in every aspect of my life. It’s a standard of behavior that I try to bring to being a parent, to building friendships, and to finding my soul mate. Co-elevation has the power to inspire and motivate people in very deep and personal ways
I use the expression “working with gravity” to allude to the basic drivers behind our intrinsic human nature. We all thirst for belonging. And that need provides great opportunity for any leader, with or without authority. Since the dawn of time, the rationale for being a member of a tribe is survival, both individual and collective. Our lives improve when we contribute to the collective welfare of the tribe, when we co-elevate. Co-elevation is part of our DNA
RULE ONE
Who’s Your Team?
Position does not define power—impact defines power. Impact can be made in every role at every level, and when we prioritize bringing out the best in those around us, business growth and success follow. We’re at a critical time where deeply held notions about work are rapidly evolving. We must cultivate diverse workplaces where space is created for honest and constructive feedback and where associates further each other’s success. In short, we need to build organizations that value and encourage co-elevation. - MINDY GROSSMAN, CEO, WW International
Every workplace suffers from office politics. The remedy is to lead a team of your own creation. To lead others who do not necessarily report to you. In other words, to lead without authority.
And that’s the foundation of Rule One of the new work rules. You must awaken to the realization that for every goal you have, for every project or mission you have, you are responsible for leading a much broader group of people than the formal members of your team. The more ambitious the mission, the broader this group will be, and yet your leadership of this group must be as committed as it would be if each one of them were reporting to you.
Most of us feel a sense of loyalty and obligation to the formal teams we are assigned to, or that are assigned to us. We care about the people on our teams—at least, on good days. We support them and go to bat for them; we want them to succeed and grow. Now, as the work continues to shift toward more loosely organized cross-functional teams, we have to extend that same degree of care, concern, commitment, and camaraderie to all our new team members—even the people we don’t yet realize are on the team. It’s the only way to achieve extraordinary results.
LOST IN THE MATRIX—ON STEROIDS”
Defining characteristic of the new work world is radical interdependence. Top-down management still sets the budgets, but the work itself is getting done through these sprawling networks of radically interdependent relationships. No single manager can have sufficient authority, wherewithal, or resources to meet the deluge of today’s challenges. In the words of one of my clients, “We need to do work so great that you couldn’t possibly do it alone
Our networks have evolved into the primary medium for getting work done. And because everyone in most organizations is connected through these radically interdependent networks, our effectiveness is ultimately determined by our ability to lead, inspire, and serve our network. Think of it as a network of networks
Every moment we spend focused on gaining more control over resources to get things done is a precious moment wasted. Those are moments better spent building relationships and co-creating with people and resources outside your direct control. You’ll identify ways to help one another develop new capabilities and gain new perspectives, which will ultimately help you achieve greater things. The age of radical interdependence requires us to engage in these kinds of deeper, richer collaborations with people we often have no control over in order to fulfill our mission and move the organization forward.
In short, we all need to think of ourselves as leaders, as innovators, regardless of our job titles. We all have to demonstrate initiative and encourage deeper collaboration so we can contribute the full range of our ideas and talents to what we do.
WHO IS ON MY TEAM?
I ask every team that I work with the same question: “Who are the most critical people to help you achieve your goals right now, whether or not they are currently aligned to your org chart?” These are the people on your team. No matter who they report to formally in the chain of command, they are all members of the team you need to lead without authority in order to get things done
Well, if someone is on my team, I support them, take care of them, and direct them. I work to understand their goals and help them achieve them. I do my best to protect them from the bureaucracy and corporate BS, and from pressure from above
RULE ONE: THE PRACTICES
When we lead without authority, we consider all the people who may be critical to us achieving our goals. And we enlist them as members of our team. It’s a unique opportunity to set aside the limits imposed by the resources you control, and instead consider the impact you want to make
Here are some tips and best practices about how to get started co-elevating, how to build on early success, and how to best track and organize all your co-elevating teams
My advice, early on, is to find someone you think you’ll have a positive experience co-elevating with. Choose someone most likely to grasp the roughly outlined vision you think deserves your collective attention. Even better, I would encourage you to start building that co-elevating relationship before you need to. The more time you spend nurturing and building relationship ties with an associate you respect and think you may want to work with on something big, the easier it will be later to invite them to join you in taking on challenging and aspirational projects together
Sometimes, you have no choice. You need to start building your team in the midst of a crisis, when everyone feels they’re behind the eight ball
Is there a project you can imagine co-creating with someone else you admire, not just for the project’s impact, but for the learning experience or to deepen the relationship? Does someone have special knowledge or a unique background you could learn from? Do you see someone who is a diamond in the rough, someone you feel is being underutilized by the company, someone who might become really energized if you came to them with an idea? If you are going to initiate real breakthrough ideas, who would be an ideal partner for such a mission? Well, go get them on your team.
All of us work with people who could improve their performance with the right guidance or encouragement. If you are truly committed to a mission or project and you find that someone’s performance is holding the group back, why not do what any good leader would do and coach them? Take responsibility for making a positive difference
Have you been procrastinating? Is the code too hard to crack? Are you terrified of failure? Or is it that you don’t know where to begin?
As you get more comfortable with this approach to team-building, you will want to become more systematic about how you use co-elevation to achieve greater scale. As a young executive at Deloitte, I devised a quick and easy system for relationship management that I call the RAP—relationship action plan
In the words of management guru Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed.” Once you begin co-elevating with several people on several different projects, you’ll want to start a RAP for each project or team you’re working with. Begin by making a prioritized list of your most critical relationships for the project at hand. Ask yourself, “What’s my goal for this particular RAP?” Take notes and define the specific outcome you hope to create with each member of your co-elevating team. Whose support do you need to be successful?
When collaboration becomes too challenging, we tend to fall into what I call the resist state, which manifests as tension and stress between us and a teammate or colleague. While in this state, we passively or consciously avoid authentic collaborative engagement—even when it would boost our chances of success
After you’ve identified the quality of each relationship along the continuum, assign them a simple number using the following scale:
–2 Resentment state
–1 Resist state
0 Coexist state
+1 Collaboration state
+2 Co-elevation state
The RAP gives you focus, so you know which critical relationships on priority projects need your special and urgent attention. Having multiple RAPs gives you a managerial shortcut to prioritizing the co-elevating relationships you most want to focus on and the shared objectives that need the most attention
Measuring relationships this way doesn’t make those relationships transactional. To me, it helps to single them out for how important they are. Occasionally I will share my score with a person I am co-elevating with in order to discuss what I hope we can accomplish together
TRANSFORMATIVE TEAMS, TRANSFORMATIVE RESULTS
It’s an amazing story—but not that unusual. And all of it is available to you once you ask, “Who’s my team?
OLD WORK RULE: Your team is limited to those who report to you or report to your manager.
NEW WORK RULE: Your team is made up of everyone—inside and outside the company—important to achieving your project or mission.
OLD WORK RULE: Professional relationships happen organically over time and develop without purposeful effort.
NEW WORK RULE: Professional relationships must be proactively and authentically developed with the people on our teams. This is the new competency of collaboration and productivity. It is critical to getting things done, more quickly.
RULE TWO
Accept That It’s All on You
We want to go after problems that no one else has solved, and create things no one else has ever figured out. To do that, we need people who don’t make excuses, who take the lead in innovating and lead without authority when it’s necessary to get things done. Innovation leaders naturally learn by doing. That means they try things such as quick sketch prototypes, dry tests, or A/B tests. They learn from the tests that work, and especially from the tests that don’t work. Every surprise is new learning for the innovator. SCOTT COOK, chairman, Intuit
When we think and act like co-elevating leaders, our potential as leaders will get recognized—sooner rather than later. That’s the fundamental message I want to get across in this chapter. No matter what your status is within an organization, the way to be a leader is to start leading. Right now. Do the job before you have the job. That choice is always entirely in your own hands. And the way to begin is by accepting that it’s all on you
SEIZE RESPONSIBILITY
“If you could wave a magic wand whose performance would you improve in your department? Who would make the biggest difference”
True leadership doesn’t presume to have the answers. In fact, the opposite is true. The best leaders start with an open mind and invite others to seek solutions with them. Truly great leadership is about genuinely caring about the other person’s success as you mutually learn and grow. That’s true of all successful leadership. But it’s absolutely crucial to leading others when you have no positional authority.
TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR KEY RELATIONSHIPS
Building such relationships represents a new competency in the new work world. It is absolutely critical in tackling transformational change. Relationships come in and out of our working lives so frequently today that we don’t have the luxury of letting them form haphazardly. Instead, we must proactively and authentically develop them, keeping in mind the specific tasks we want to achieve in partnership with them
Cheryl Bachelder, who as CEO of Popeyes led a tremendous turnaround at the company’s restaurants, has stressed the importance of this kind of relationship-building. “How well do you know the people who work for you?” she asks in her book, Dare to Serve. “Do you know the three or four events in their life that have shaped who they are today?”1 Leaders with those insights are able to understand their team members’ motivations and desires, leading to better conversations and fewer misunderstandings.
Despite the organizational barriers of insecurity and of hierarchy, our hearts are crying out for closer, more trusting relationships at work. People are eager to get help in talking through and solving their problems, and in helping others solve their challenges, too. But that happens only in the context of a relationship built around trust and authentic care. When people don’t feel connected, they don’t lean in to collaborate. When people don’t feel safe, they shut down
KEEP PUSHING THE ENVELOPE
Co-elevating teams like this have tremendous power. Those who have studied such relationships—from Hewlett and Packard to Lennon and McCartney—suggest that these kinds of dynamic relationships are deeply rooted in human nature. In their book Team Genius, Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone write, “Arguably, even more than language … it is this talent that singles out our species, an innate understanding that by partnering with another person, we can accomplish things we cannot do by ourselves.”2
I think that might be part of the reason Hollywood buddy movies like 48 Hrs., Thelma & Louise, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Men in Black are so popular. We are naturally attracted to the story of two people thrown together under extreme circumstances who rise to the occasion
Each of us has the ability, and the opportunity, to step up to be a leader in the new work world. I would argue that we have a responsibility to do so
RULE TWO: THE PRACTICE
If you’re like others I coach or audiences I speak to, you may be thinking: “You just don’t understand who I have to deal with,” “You don’t realize how much work I have,” “You have no idea how difficult it is to get anything done here,” or “What you’re suggesting has nothing to do with my job.”
If you’re nodding along to any of these statements, then strap in. I’d like to help you discover how that kind of thinking is a self-sabotaging excuse that will lead you into mediocrity.
I empathize with the very real pressures, difficult bosses, or underperforming reports people face at work. I’ve used many of these same excuses myself. But I am not going to coddle you, because the stakes are too high. I know you’re busy. I know about office politics; how some companies defer, delay, and dash initiative and new ways of doing things. I acknowledge that on the surface, it can feel easier and safer to just hunker down, do your job, stay in your lane, and let everyone else sink or swim on their own.
I get it. And none of it matters.
We’ve hit an inflection point where staying in our lanes is no longer an option. To have any shot at success today, with the relentless push to transform, innovate, and reinvent, we have to climb out of the bunker and reach out to the people who make up our teams. And when we find them, we have to do the work together: get to know them; work collaboratively; furnish genuine feedback; and offer guidance—and stay open to receiving all of the above from our teammates in return.
We can’t wait for our team to find us
Redefining and broadening our relationships in these and countless other ways starts with recognizing that each of us is responsible for doing this ourselves. It’s not the responsibility of our teammates, our boss, the company’s leadership, or the organization’s overall culture. Simply put, we create the reactions of those around us through our behaviors. Co-elevation doesn’t require that both individuals agree. But in the end, you need to own the decision whether you want to have succesful relationships with your co-workers, bosses, clients, or partners.
This is the mindset one needs to shift from passivity, resentment, or resignation to the energetic determination to build a supportive team that achieves greatness
I’m also not ignoring the reality of difficult situations. I’m saying, instead, that if success matters to you, you’re the only one who can overcome the obstacles in your way. Even when facing our most daunting problems, we have 100 percent of the power over how we choose to react
The truth is, you can build a relationship and work in partnership with anyone. Before I elaborate on how, I want to head off all the excuses that prevent us from co-elevating
I’ve heard them all.
I know you’re busy. I empathize. I know that some people challenge, test, and vex you. People are difficult sometimes. Heck, a lot of the time.
I’m not doubting the hurdles you’re facing.
But none of our excuses matter. All these “reasons” are irrelevant to your real goal
Excuse #1: Ignorance
Now that you are aware of the new work rules and that leading without authority is entirely your choice, ignorance is no longer an excuse
Excuse #2: Laziness
Sometimes we fail to follow through and faithfully co-elevate with others because it feels like it’s just too much work
If you hang back with a not-my-job attitude, you might wind up with not-a-job. If the mission is important, then you will do what you need to do to get the job done. Yes, co-elevation is hard work—but if you abdicate your role as a leader, you may find yourself forced to abdicate your business
Excuse #3: Deference
All too often I hear people resist taking the first step toward co-elevation in deference to the org chart. When a task crosses a boundary and requires the help of colleagues in other departments or involves advocating for a new initiative, I’ll hear, “That’s above my pay grade,” or “It’s not my call.
The truth is that often, people are waiting for you to dive in and become more involved
Collaborating without waiting for permission is the path to innovation, agility, and growth.
Excuse #4: Playing the Victim
One of the best things about accepting the mindset of leading without authority is that it can cure the disease of seeing yourself as a victim
Once we accept the idea that it’s all on us, the excuse that we’re the victim goes away. That understanding gives us total freedom to act, to build co-elevating relationships, and to lead without authority
Excuse #5: Cowardice
Again, if a situation scares you, there’s probably something in it calling you to grow.
Often we fail to choose co-elevation because we are too timid, too afraid of conflict, or too fearful we’ll be rebuffed or rejected. That inhibition may be all in our head, but the fear of relationships is strong and ingrained. Most of us don’t like to confront others—and I’m right there with you! Studies show that the pain of rejection is indistinguishable from physical pain.4 But by experiencing what can be gained by leaning into that discomfort, it starts to get a little easier.
Excuse #6: Indulgence
Indulgence can take many forms. Caught in painful memories, we are often reluctant to relinquish our anger, our resentment, or our frustration
Resentment can be detrimental to our mental health and productivity. When we indulge resentments in the workplace, they just fester and get worse, undermining our careers in ways we might not even be aware of. Resentments between two parties can drag on for years in a downward spiral, costing both people incalculable numbers of lost opportunities for personal growth and professional success
If we want to succeed in a world where the pressure for constant change, innovation, and agility is massive and mounting, we have to seize the initiative. We have to change how we work with the people around us. If your goal is important enough, if it’s a mission that you believe will make a difference on your team, in your department, or in your company, then you owe it to yourself and your organization to take the first step
But let me be clear. Co-elevation does not require consensus or two individuals having to agree. It only requires your taking responsibility to decide to be a co-elevator. Whether your relationship with your partners is going to succeed is up to you, and based on your actions.
In other words, you don’t have to wait for others—you just have to get started.
We often don’t realize it, but when we change how we behave and interact with someone, we change their response to us
When I encounter someone who, I think, lacks accountability or commitment, I will first question the clarity of my expectations and the effectiveness of my follow-up. Again, this wasn’t an easily learned habit
When I talk to people about the need to forgive someone, I often suggest they look at how they have reacted to and treated that person.
Usually it isn’t the result of their best behavior or best selves.
You’d be surprised how receptive people will be, even those who have seemed antagonistic in the past, if you just say, “I’m sorry.” If you reach out a hand.
One of the chief obstacles to overcoming resentment is giving up your insistence on being right. It’s a tough one. We’re conditioned to defend our views and positions. But letting someone else be right is the act of prioritizing your mission over your “rightness”
I worked with the executives and their teams for several months. Whenever one or the other seemed to dig in their heels, I saw the other behaving markedly differently, in an attempt to preserve the peace and “give up being right.”
It is uncanny how quickly and easily people can drop feeling resentful. And when the resentment is gone, you’ll never hear anyone say they miss it. Why would they? Resentment leaves us blind and powerless; it’s been compared to drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.
OLD WORK RULE: Leadership is something bestowed upon you by the company or organization. It comes with the authority associated with your job title.
NEW WORK RULE: Leadership is everyone’s responsibility. You must help lead your team, regardless of your job title or level of authority.
OLD WORK RULE: To advance in your career, you must do what’s expected of you according to your job description.
NEW WORK RULE: To advance in your career, you should do whatever it takes to create value for your team and your organization, even if it’s not expected and even if it goes beyond your job description
RULE THREE
Earn Permission to Lead
Earning permission to lead speaks to what I believe to be a truth about leadership: the model of the strong, driven, smart, charismatic leader who provides direction, sets goals, and ensures everyone complies is a thing of the past. People do not want to be told. They want to be part of something. A new type of leadership is needed that is human, authentic, purposeful, and is about creating the right environment for others to flourish. This type of leadership will create trust, unlock self-motivation, and is needed to unleash extraordinary performance.- HUBERT JOLY, executive chairman, Best Buy
When you reach out to others with this kind of bold generosity, some people are taken aback. They may feel suspicious, fearing that they will somehow be in your debt. Or they may feel too scared and vulnerable to admit to wanting help. But I did the only thing you can do in such circumstances: I put my motivations clearly on the table. And I meant it—making a commitment to co-elevation means you make a commitment to being boldly of service.
When we invite people into our lives to play important roles in whatever mission we have, we have to be willing to give of ourselves. We have to give a lot—even more than we ever expect to receive in return. Leading without authority requires us to engage and enlist others in this way to earn the trust and faith necessary to lead.
POROSITY: OPENING UP TO CO-ELEVATION
To co-elevate with our teammates, we need to be adept at opening up ourselves to them, as well as working to open them to us and our mission. If we want someone to join our team, again, we need to do the work up front. And if and when it becomes a struggle, we must be the first to suspend any prejudgment or sense of ego and defensiveness. We need to keep offering until our teammates see the value in joining and reciprocating—in sharing our time, energy, resources, knowledge, and emotional commitment.
Opening up a teammate to this journey must be a deliberate effort. We need our teammates to see the value in sharing their time, energy, resources, and knowledge with us. We need them to say yes to joining us on a shared journey.
This ability to enlist team members and sustain their commitment is perhaps the most widely undervalued competency among leaders attempting to achieve transformational change. Why? Because while the rate of change is growing exponentially, our openness to change and to each other is rare and not growing at all
The formula for porosity and preparing others to co-elevate starts with what I call serve and share. These two complementary concepts are so important that they are dominant themes running through almost everything I write. Think of serve and share as two strands in a DNA double helix, with each strand supporting and reinforcing the other. To serve is to lead with generosity. To share is to open yourself up and build the bonds of true connection and commitment with others
FIRST, BE OF SERVICE …
My success in building effective networks has always relied on generosity. It’s my prime directive. In any situation, I’m always asking myself, “How can I be of service?” No matter who I build a connection with, I’m wondering, “What do I have to offer that would make their life better, easier, more joyful, productive, engaging, satisfying, or rewarding?” If the potential relationship is of particular importance to me, I prepare for a meeting by researching and assembling at least five “packets of generosity”—five ideas or approaches that I’ve thought about in advance that I believe might be useful to the person with whom I’m meeting
If generosity is important to building your professional network, it is even more critical to cultivating a co-elevating team to drive real change. Co-elevation demands real effort, and likely compromise, sacrifice, and casting off comfortable old habits.
It’s not enough to ask, “How does the shared mission benefit the other person?” Instead, we ask, “How will the other person’s life be improved by joining us in this mission?” Think hard; what do we have to give above and beyond the call to enlist and engage this person we hope to make our teammate?
… THEN SHARE YOURSELF
After serving has given you some modest permission to build a deeper relationship with the other person, you can begin the shift to opening up authentic sharing that will deepen the connection.
When you speak with someone in a way that is humble and vulnerable, you tap into each other’s humanity and encourage the other person to open up and take more risks with you
Genuine conversation isn’t rocket science, but it’s an art that is too often overlooked. No matter how busy you are, taking time to talk to and genuinely connect with others on your team, or those you hope to make part of your team, is, I find, one of the most rewarding and productive activities you can undertake
Opening porosity is the path to the mutual connection and trust I believe each of us longs for, at the office, where we spend so much of our time, as well as in our personal lives. It’s through these real, human connections that we earn permission to lead our teams, achieve our goals, and elevate our teammates—and ourselves—in the process
CHOOSE TO CARE
There’s an old adage: Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. The bottom line is that to lead effectively, your teammates must feel that you care about them
You have to make the choice to care, and you have to let your teammates know it. You need to tell them. Better still, you need to tell them and show them. In whatever way you can, make sure they not only hear it, but experience it.
Sometimes you just have to come out and say it, just like that: “How can I help you?” They need to know you’re sincere, that your generosity is real, and that you truly want to be of help
Why is caring so important? Because when your teammates and potential teammates know you care about them, it grants you incredible permission to start the real work of co-elevation: fostering deeper collaboration and mutual development. Co-elevating relationships require two-way candid feedback—frank discussions and debates over your goals, the team’s mission, and each other’s performance.
I can’t emphasize enough the power we each have to grow personally and professionally when we grant another person permission to critique our work. Creativity and innovation are ignited by exchanging ideas and giving each other our honest views as to which of those ideas are sound and might actually work. To do this effectively with your team and in a co-elevating relationship necessitates caring and trust
You can be purposeful and focused about how you express your sense of caring without being manipulative about it. If you truly understand and accept that it’s all on you to build your team in the new work world, then that’s a challenge you can pursue with sincerity and authenticity.
You may not actually like some of the people you need to co-elevate with. But that’s okay, as long as you pay them respect and genuinely want to help them to grow in service of the mission. When you’re in the process of identifying who’s on your team, you’re not going to like everyone you need to work with to get your job done or complete a project—that’s to be expected. You may need to put aside or shed your preconceptions and judgments of those with whom you’ve had a rocky past
RULE THREE: THE PRACTICES
Authentic place, you can’t get it wrong. As Adam Grant says, “It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success.”4
Serve, share, and care is a journey of curiosity, candor, vulnerability, and action marbled together, a journey that only you can lead. It’s not a step-by-step process. You’re constantly searching to find what really moves and inspires those you co-elevate with, to make them part of your team. You are constantly thinking about the things they truly want and need in their lives and careers that you can help them attain
The best way to help you navigate this is for me to offer specific suggestions, and leave you to pick and choose among them in your quest to expand porosity in other people. Here are some of the most powerful ways I’ve found that you can be of service to your teammates and incorporate deeper sharing into your interactions with them. You won’t have to use all these suggestions at once, and you will need to pick and choose the right ones for each situation, but I think you’ll find them helpful
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s the Golden Rule I was taught at Methodist Sunday school. As an ethical code, it’s pretty reliable. Before you do something, consider how you’d feel if it were done to you. For most of us, that helps keep us on the straight and narrow.
As a tool for change, though, the Golden Rule has some obvious limitations. What motivates you and makes you excited to dive in headfirst is not necessarily the same thing that motivates those you co-elevate with, your teammates.
Earning permission relies instead on what I call the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they wish to be treated.” It requires sincere curiosity, patient listening, and learning about the other person. It’s much harder to do, and it’s fitting that platinum is much rarer than gold. All the platinum ever mined could fit inside a two-car garage.
Because it’s easier, the Golden Rule can be something of a trap. It can make you think well of yourself when you’re actually being a tone-deaf, presumptuous jerk. I’ve fallen into this trap plenty of times.
When you’re looking for ways to be of service to your team, be careful not to impose your own flavor of generosity on them without understanding their underlying desires and goals. Hear them for the powerful insights they are. You don’t have to embrace their choices, preferences, goals, or aspirations as your own. But you do need to understand them.
It’s a lesson that’s worth its weight in platinum.
You can earn permission to co-elevate with someone fairly quickly once you identify their emotional purpose, or what I call their “blue flame.” We all have one. The blue flame is what gives our lives meaning; it’s what we value most—our purpose, our passion, our calling. It’s the aspiration that lives deep inside us. And when this blue flame is ignited within someone, it’s what makes them bounce out of bed in the morning, eager to make a difference in the world
Each person’s blue flame is as distinctive as their fingerprints: Find a way to be of service to someone by helping them turn it up and burn more brightly. It is one of the greatest investments you can make in someone—I promise
To put it bluntly, many people feel that a lot of what they do at work is downright drudgery. They feel regularly disengaged, disconnected, and discouraged by their jobs. Maybe
That’s why the promise of joy in your working partnership with your colleagues is an incredible way to be of service. Never underestimate how much it might mean to someone if you can offer them a renewed sense of purpose, possibility, vitality, excitement, or fun in their work.
For some people, just being invited to work with you as you lead without authority on a special project will brighten their day and make them feel engaged and connected
Finding meaning in our work is an important human need, more important than happiness, in many respects. There is a difference between a happy life and a meaningful life. Many people can be happy just by satisfying their own needs and desires
So while some CEOs may certainly appreciate the personal and emotional growth they would expect to experience with co-elevation, it is ultimately the promise of measurable benefits that attracts their attention early on. We all need to be approached with clear and reinforced logic first, the language most of us in business are comfortable speaking, not just the promise of deeper relationships
Empathy is the bridge to get you from where you are today to a stronger relationship, one ready for co-elevation. And the key to accessing that bridge? Vulnerability.
Most people don’t believe me when I tell them that I’m naturally an introvert who has learned to be an extrovert. I do a lot of things with determination and purpose that true extroverts do naturally and with ease.
When I want to connect with people, whether it’s on a stage or in a one-on-one conversation, I have learned to share my struggles, challenges, and failings with them
I do all this purposefully, with forethought and intent. That is not to say that I’m inauthentic or manipulative. I merely recognize that vulnerability serves as an important access point in our personal and business relationships. There’s nothing fake or contrived about being purposeful in establishing and strengthening relationships this way. It’s an acknowledgment that deeper relationship-building is too important to be left to chance
The point is not to be vulnerable for the sake of vulnerability, but for the sake of establishing authentic connection and trust with another person. Just as you have to be the first to do the work toward co-elevating, you also have to be the one to go first in establishing a connection with another person if you are interested in creating a relationship with them. You often need to be the first one to open up, to share your struggles
To find a shared passion, try asking about one of these four categories: family, occupation, recreation, or dreams. (The initials spell out “FORD,” which makes them easier to remember.) Ask anyone some curious questions in these four areas, and you will see their blue flame burn brightly in one or another. Many people are not even fully or consciously aware of their blue flames, and that may be part of the value you bring to the relationship—someone who is curious and patient enough to help them identify their passion and align their life in that direction
Finding some shared passion is not necessary in order to connect with others. We just have to share our own passions, what is most meaningful to us. In such moments, we get to truly reveal ourselves and show up in a way that invites our teammates to also show up
We first introduced this concept while coaching high-level executive teams to accelerate their empathy and commitment, and today people frequently tell me they use it religiously with everyone in their workplace. I do it myself in small ways in almost every interaction. In doing so, I try to open myself up, share what is on my mind, and invite others to do the same
To make this kind of Personal/Professional Check-In, all it takes is your willingness to go first, and to share what’s happening in your life—personally and professionally. Then ask what’s going on in theirs, and listen to what they have to say
Remember, the mantra of every great co-elevating team is “Committed to the mission and to each other.” It is a powerful formula, because it responds to two fundamental human needs—to belong, and to be part of something bigger than oneself
Asking these kinds of questions—without judgment or criticism—can be extraordinarily powerful with people who are resistant to opening themselves up, who stand outside the team, looking in. What is their endgame; what is their goal? I like to inquire how they feel about their current projects and team members. I like to ask what they like, or don’t like, about the dynamics of some of the projects they’re working on. Is there a team they enjoyed working on in the past? Once I know what’s missing for them from their current work situation, I can look for ways to include that missing factor in the future
Earning permission is not a one-and-done kind of exercise. If one of your co-elevating relationships fades or starts to slip down the Co-Elevation Continuum toward the coexist or resist state, you have to assume it’s on you to get it back.
If you want to be a leader on your team and in the world, there is no other way. The farther you travel together down the road to co-elevating, the more closely you have to watch to see if your relationship gas tank is low on fuel.
I’ve seen countless successful co-elevating relationships fall into the coexist state (or worse) when teammates fail to keep the tank full. Years of co-elevating and its accompanying personal growth between two people can vanish in no time when new stresses arise or new priorities disrupt their shared goals
SERVE: This involves leading with a generosity of spirit and action in service of the other person, and your shared mission or goals, which you plan for, evolve, and execute together.
SHARE: Vulnerably building connection and commitment between you and your team.
OLD WORK RULE: To convince your teammates to tackle a project or mission, you must make a passionate and persuasive case for it.
NEW WORK RULE: To invite your teammates to join your project or mission, you must first earn permission to lead through serving, sharing, and caring.
RULE FOUR
Create Deeper, Richer, More Collaborative Partnerships
The job of leadership in the twenty-first century is to create an environment that’s agile and collaborative, and this means cutting across teams and hierarchies. At Box, one of our core values is “Be an Owner.” Any Boxer, regardless of their level or team, should feel enabled to lead without authority. It’s all about creating teams that are execution-oriented, with a bias toward action. And most important, teams and individuals need to feel safe when they occasionally fail. We learn from these moments through candid yet supportive postmortems, and we embed these lessons into how we operate in the future. - AARON LEVIE, CEO and co-founder, Box
Disruption and the demands of transformation create impossible situations that demand impossible solutions. The teams at Target found their solution in a new form of deeper collaboration, what I call co-elevating collaboration. Driven by the company’s audacious goals, Target’s teamwork yielded transformative outcomes through fast and faithful execution of this simple formula:
Transformative Outcomes = Radical Inclusion + Bold Input + Agility
Let’s break down each part of the equation.
Refers to a commitment to true diversity of voices and inputs in the collaboration process. It’s all about unlocking and extracting uniquely powerful ideas and perspectives by embracing and engaging a much broader, wider team”
Radical inclusion drives breakthrough ideas and innovations throughout the organization by attracting employee viewpoints from the widest possible range of departments and areas of expertise. As Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “We believe you can only create a great product with a diverse team, and I’m talking about the large definition of diversity. One of the reasons Apple products work really great is that the people working on them are not only engineers and computer scientists, but artists and musicians.”
领英推荐
Is the gift you receive when you solicit candid and courageous feedback from a radically inclusive team. When team members can engage openly in back-and-forth conversations, they debate what’s working, what isn’t, and what they should do more or less of. All ideas are brought together to be sifted, sorted, debated, and decided upon.
Is the method for putting radical inclusion and bold input into motion as a continuous iterative step function until we get it right. By breaking project cycles into shorter sprints and checking in more frequently, teams sharpen their focus on achieving short-term outcomes that drive the pace of change forward
WANTED: CO-ELEVATING CO-CREATION
Disruptive change demands this kind of authentic co-elevating co-creation. We all need to go higher together to find breakthrough solutions, whether on small individual projects or huge bet-the-shop initiatives like Target’s. At all levels we need to land more innovative solutions in the market than ever before. We need to pivot faster in response to market changes and co-elevate throughout, so that every member of every team emerges stronger and better prepared for the next wave of threats lurking around the corner.
RULE FOUR: THE PRACTICES
In the new work world, nimble, ambitious, and audacious are the essential elements of co-elevating co-creation. Whatever your title, whatever the size of the collaborative project, your job as a leader without authority is to bring more people in, help generate larger, more impactful ideas, and find ways to execute faster. It all starts with a process that fundamentally changes how you and your teammates think about, organize, and execute on collaboration.
Having coached hundreds of executive teams all over the world, I’ve seen how true co-elevating co-creation can’t take hold until all the old habits of second-rate collaboration are laid on the table with their shortcomings exposed. This is vitally important, whether it’s a two-person collaboration or a big cross-functional team effort. In one of the first meetings, if not in the first, take stock of all the historical routines and work-culture norms that had previously prevented you from generating outstanding results. Then collectively cast them out, like an exorcism.
That’s one of the first steps in a process I call “recontracting”
Having officially exposed the undesirable collaboration behaviors, the group can then recontract for a new set of agreed-upon desirable behaviors. These behaviors vary with every group, so the rest of this chapter is devoted to discussing a number of the basics—such as a commitment to candor, methods for keeping emotions in check, and a preapproved process for breaking deadlocks
To begin the talk on past collaboration failures, you might want to give your team the bold-strokes outline of the Unholy Trinity of Bad Collaboration: Consensus, the BS of Buy-In, and what I call Bake-and-Ship.
Is usually cited by grizzled business veterans as their primary fear, whenever I discuss collaboration. Many of them have been tortured by collaborative efforts that tried to placate every voice in the room and ended up producing useless, consensus-driven mush
Is that frequently insincere invitation to collaborate, aimed at gaining a group’s acquiescence on decisions that have already been made. The proposition is something like everyone voicing their lunch preferences, only to find out later that the pizza order was already on its way
Is my shorthand term for any process in which a small group goes as far as to interview and seek input from others first, but then crafts and presents a solution pretty much in finished form like Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. This is often the work of consultants or training programs rolled out from headquarters
Before we start collaborating on a project, we must first be ruthlessly candid with ourselves: “Do we trust each other? Do we feel safe sharing our boldest, most critical ideas openly? Have we done the necessary, important work, to serve, share, and care with the broader team to make this collaboration possible?” These are foundational questions we must confront if we expect to maintain candor moving forward
A culture of candor within your team unleashes everyone’s contribution to the fullest and ensures bold inputs. This is why wildly successful entrepreneurs like Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, champion a workplace with a radically transparent culture.
“The key to our success has been to have a real idea meritocracy,” Dalio writes in his book Principles. “To have a successful idea meritocracy, you have to do three things: 1. Put your honest thoughts out on the table. 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn. 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding if disagreements remain so that you can move beyond them without resentments. And to do this well, you need to be radically truthful and radically transparent, by which I mean you need to allow people to see and say almost anything”
By the way, Dalio’s firm is the exception that proves the rule. Bridgewater Associates is a relatively small company that is inundated with job applicants who are attracted to its extreme culture
Most organizations don’t have that kind of ready-made culture of candor, so it’s important to recontract for candor at the very start of every collaboration. However, we also need to set the collective expectation for the team to grow psychological safety through deepening relationships and serving, sharing, and caring, then, on the back of this relationship, keep that candor conversation alive
Once everyone’s agreed to commit to being candid in their input and feedback, it’s time to prepare for conversations, thoughts, and ideas that may hit some sensitive nerves. Passion is understandable—even encouraged—in collaboration, but it’s smart for the team to discuss in advance how to work through any exchanges that grow overly heated
The team might recontract from the start that each team member will take responsibility for stewarding the emotional climate in the room so that it nurtures innovation, creativity, and ingenuity. Another approach is to agree that anyone can interrupt an emotionally charged exchange that risks intimidating people or shutting down candor by calling out, “Red flag,” at which point the team agrees to step back and observe their behavior
Co-elevating co-creation relies on a continuous stream of check-ins with critical constituents, proactively seeking additional thoughts and perspectives. A great way to solicit bolder and more frequent input of this kind is to develop the habit of firing off lots of quick emails with humble requests for feedback. I do it all the time with my team
As leaders, our goals are to always stay positive and keep the conversation focused on ideas and processes for improvement. Avoid getting into debates or coming across as defensive. We want to keep the input flowing, and a negative response risks shutting off the tap.
When recontracting with your group, remind them what the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium said, “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we speak.” Leaning in and showing sincere curiosity in what others have to say is an important collaborative skill. If we only swim in our lane, earplugs affixed, we miss out on what could prove to be indispensable insights from others.
To achieve real transformation, we need collaboration that keeps expanding our vantage point, so we need to be vigilant and encourage more input. One useful tool for doing this during meetings is a process I call 5x5x5. One team member takes five minutes to explain a problem or an issue for which they are seeking input. For example, “I’m struggling with getting an associate engaged with our work here,” or “I’m considering a fairly costly investment as a part of our solution.” The issue should involve some degree of doubt, and the team member with the question should be truly curious to hear other points of view.
Over the next five minutes, other team members should ask questions so they can gain a deeper understanding of the problem, without suggesting solutions. Then, over the final five minutes, everyone takes turns offering very direct and candid feedback. The individual who receives the input thanks everyone for the gift of their insights and candor. As with any gift, it will be used as the recipient sees fit
The challenge facing all companies today is that real change does not come about through incremental improvements. It comes through what’s commonly called 10x thinking. If the typical goal in your company is to achieve a 10 percent improvement in cycle time for new product development, ask yourself what it would take to achieve ten times that result instead. The magic of 10x thinking is that it forces us to think in such radically new ways that even if we end up achieving only a 2x or 3x improvement, that’s still exponentially greater than what would have been gained incrementally.
Co-elevation is the perfect tool to begin tapping into those dreams and finding teammates and partners receptive to trying them out. You’ll learn a lot. And, just maybe, you’ll help your company go big before industry disruption threatens to send everyone home.
To elicit the collective wisdom of any group, effective collaboration depends on receiving candid and bold input from everyone. That can be a challenge in larger groups, where only a few voices tend to dominate on particular issues, while other voices go unheard.
As described earlier, CPS, the collaborative problem-solving process, is a tool that should be used continually throughout collaboration. Here are more details on how it works.
First, put a question on the table. The question can be from one team member who needs advice in one specific area, or it could be a broader question meant to provoke bigger thinking and maybe some contrarian perspectives.
Here are some examples of what I think good questions sound like:
Each question needs to be focused enough to fill the limited time available—between thirty and sixty minutes. Try to be simple and direct in forming the questions. Multipronged questions don’t work as well, because there are too many elements to address in a relatively short period of time.
With the question on the table, send everyone into small groups of two or three to really grapple with the topic, and allow them whatever time is appropriate to the complexity of the question.
Psychological safety is at its greatest in a group of three, so in each of these small groups, the participants can work intensely and creatively with the greatest courage, risk-taking, and candor
CPS has yielded some of the most exciting moments I’ve seen in collaborative meetings. Clever, out-of-the-box solutions emerge when small, safe groups take fresh looks at the issue”
One great topic of conversation in recontracting is our common human frailty when it comes to changing our minds. We resist doing it—which is exactly why we must commit in advance to remaining open to this possibility all throughout the collaboration.
My favorite Ralph Waldo Emerson quote is, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In a collaborative environment, try embracing the idea that you may be wrong. If it turns out to be true, you’ve learned something, and that’s a cause for celebration
If you hear an idea or opinion you dislike, try to see it from the other person’s point of view. Recognize that you are unlikely to be sure you are right until you are challenged by the robust input of others. When everyone recontracts to accept that even a great idea can be improved or perfected by bold input from others, it’s much easier to keep an open mind.
It’s vital during recontracting to have discussions about how the team will break impasses and deadlocks if and when they occur.
Temporary impasses of one kind or another are common in collaboration. Most can be dealt with by holding a CPS on the challenge or question at hand. When you have an impasse, everyone gets to shift their perspective back to the agreed-upon mission, and to each other.
In my experience, most impasses can be dealt with collaboratively. Everyone needs to acknowledge what’s best for the mission. Those who are not on the “winning” side of the argument must let go of any resentment or attachment to being right and get back to working together.
Collaboration gets put to the test when a group becomes deadlocked on a complex project and no one has the authority to make the final decision. But a deadlock isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When group members are holding on to mutually exclusive solutions to the problem, it’s often a healthy sign that everyone is thinking big, aiming high, and unwilling to buckle in the name of consensus.
The ideal approach to a deadlock is for the team to come together with the aim of finding an even more breakthrough solution
Again, the way to avoid this risk at the start is to recontract for something I call the Transformational Tribunal. Everyone agrees in advance that there may be times we need to seek tiebreakers, and we agree who will arbitrate the final decision in the event of a deadlock. Binding arbitration of this kind is common in professional contracts, and it belongs in every collaborative effort, even in the smallest groups of just two or three people.
In your recontracting conversations, the final points you want to cover are the rules for ensuring that measurable progress is made during each meeting. I always coach teams to “land the plane” so at the end of a meeting, everyone knows who in the group is walking away committed to acting and executing the next steps toward the final outcome
Set expectations at the opening meeting. If it’s not yet time for a decision or if you’re just getting broad and early input, it’s important to acknowledge this much at the beginning of a meeting
Do a “yes, no, maybe” exercise at the close of the meeting. Let everyone know where you’re at before you go your separate ways. Five minutes before the meeting wraps up, run down the key ideas that were discussed and offer your take on each one, in terms of yes, no, or maybe:
“Yes, we’ll do it.”
“No, it’s not time for that.”
“Maybe we should look into that more.”
If you are the decision-maker in the room, you owe it to everyone to be transparent about the direction of team decisions. And if you’re not the leader or decision-maker, you owe it to the group (in the spirit of mandatory candor) to ask the leader to run a “yes, no, maybe” exercise on the meeting’s key points before the group disperses
SPREADING A REAL COLLABORATION CULTURE
All the skills of co-elevating co-creation represent new and important employee competencies. In the new work world, our ability to master our area of expertise isn’t worth much if we can’t use it to collaborate at this kind of rapid pace
OLD WORK RULE: Collaboration is a fallback you resort to when you can’t get the job done yourself and really need other people’s cooperation and resources.
NEW WORK RULE: Collaboration and partnership with your team members is the new normal, and is essential in co-creating transformative ideas and solutions that will lead to more regular and consistent breakthroughs and outcomes.
RULE FIVE
Co-Development
What I learned early on in my career at Merrill was that our fifteen thousand financial advisors could be a real catalyst for change. The power of deep and systemic peer-to-peer coaching can unleash an awesome force of development. - ANDY SIEG, president, Merrill Lynch Wealth Management”
It’s easy to use the word “feedback” without recognizing there are three distinct kinds of feedback, and some forms of feedback are easier to give than others. The easiest kind of feedback is idea feedback—helpful co-creational feedback on how to do something better (“Hey, Joe, why not try it this way?”). The feedback that’s a little harder to give is performance feedback, because that’s about accountability (“Hey, Joe, I think your team can hit higher numbers than last month.”). Finally, there’s competency feedback, the personalized feedback you give about an individual teammate’s abilities. It’s not the kind of feedback you can toss around casually with a “Hey, Joe” remark.
All truly impactful coaching happens in this third area of personal competency feedback. Whether we need a specific upgrade in certain hard skills or ongoing coaching in our soft skills, we all need to be told where our competencies need to grow and develop
DEVELOPMENT IS EVERYONE’S JOB
The original idea for this book was based on a simple premise: Within every relationship, there is an element of mutual coaching, which, if it was purposefully activated could draw out both parties’ highest potential. And yet of all the ideas you see in this book, it is this concept, of peer-to-peer coaching, of co-development, that draws the most skepticism and pushback
The most common objection I hear is, “It’s just not my role. It’s not my job.” That’s certainly true under the traditional rules of work, where coaching was something bosses offered to subordinates, and subordinates were expected to comply with it
Most people can’t bring themselves to tell a colleague he has spinach in his teeth, let alone offer personal feedback on how that colleague could improve his skills in listening, communication, prioritizing, or time management. Either we don’t feel we have the permission to give such intimate feedback, or, more likely, we’d rather play it safe.
In her groundbreaking bestseller Radical Candor, my friend Kim Scott gives a pretty brutal name to this brand of nice. She calls it manipulative insincerity—when you don’t challenge your colleague, because, ultimately, you don’t care about him or the mission. It’s the absolute opposite of radical candor, which is all about challenging because you care.
Everyone has experience providing candid feedback in a spirit of generosity and goodwill. You might just not have done it in the workplace. Whatever resistance you may be feeling, be candid with yourself about the source of your fear
IT’S ALL IN HOW YOU SAY IT
Guided her through the seven stages of beginning a co-developing relationship.
Before we offer feedback, even if we have opened porosity and the existing relationship is strong, we should always request our teammate’s permission and wait for their verbal assent. It’s a request for recontracting in your relationship. If they decline our request, okay, well, you’ve given them that choice. Try again another time.
Critiquing past performance often results in the other person feeling the need to defend their actions and choices. When coaching a peer who does not have to take your advice, I find the most productive approach is to keep coaching feedback focused on the future, and on what someone can do going forward to be more successful. If you find you must look in the rearview mirror to identify counterproductive past behaviors, then also be sure to praise and celebrate positive past behaviors that you’ll want to encourage in the future.
I urge you never to deliver personal feedback without requesting it in return. The term is co-development. It’s a two-way street
Remember, even if we are leading the team, we are never above anyone on the team. We’re right there on the ground beside our teammates, continuing to grow and develop with them
Again, since our feedback is a gift, we must be prepared for the possibility that our teammate may not accept it. As with an ugly tie from Aunt Ginny at Christmas, they have the right to thank us and put it in a drawer without ever trying it on. Your job is to humbly offer to help someone with the issues and concerns they are facing, not force them into a response. If they don’t want or accept your gift, then you have to let go. Accept them for who they are and where they are on their personal and career development journey. Work with them up to the limits of their ability, and keep trying to reach out to them at the level of permission you have earned.
Candid feedback doesn’t always have to be so direct. Follow-up can be more subtle and nuanced, especially when you have been engaged in the coaching conversation for a while. Ask questions that help your teammate reflect on their performance and behavior. Help them find the answers by being authentically curious and interested in exploring questions and answers together
So much in the opening stages of a co-developing relationship depends upon tone, approach, language, and, above all, genuine caring. You really have to care about the other person to create a co-elevating relationship
Look, you may need to move forward more deliberately. When your teammate gives you their feedback, ask them to hold you accountable in real time, and/or request a monthly or biweekly check-in
CO-DEVELOPMENT: THE ULTIMATE FORM OF SERVICE
Drawing on caring candor will help you to help your teammates grow, learn, and develop. I’ve found it is the most effective way to invite someone to be receptive to feedback. We tend to tune out criticism when it is dished out by someone who only seems to want to point out what we did wrong. But when we give feedback out of a spirit of truly wanting to help the other person become the best they can possibly be, it is the ultimate form of generosity. You are genuinely serving them
To cultivate the level of trust required to be a great coach, it’s crucial to listen with complete focus and care. “There is always an energetic connection when people come together,” writes Marcia Reynolds in her book The Discomfort Zone. “Something happens in the space ‘between brains’ when people interact
Coaching often fails when it’s more about the person giving it than the person receiving it. Make sure the feedback you provide is for your teammate and not for you. Check yourself before you say something that might be taken as criticism
Ideally, co-development is like a tennis match. Sometimes we serve and sometimes we receive service. We offer candid feedback to our teammates when needed, they offer feedback to us, and back and forth we go. But when we’re just starting out, sharing our candid feedback about a teammate’s performance is often too daunting. If you sense that you haven’t earned enough permission to do so, then don’t. Try first asking your teammate to help you develop. Then later, if the exchange has gone well, weave in an offer to do so in return
Just because you’ve earned the permission to offer candid feedback doesn’t mean you can assume it’s always welcome. Even when we have established a solid foundation of trust, and candor rules the day in our relationships, it’s still easy to overstep
Hearing our weaknesses articulated or our poor performance called out tends to trigger defensiveness in most of us. To help combat this very common challenge, here are some of the best practices I’ve found to help better hear and embrace feedback.
Try to remember that feedback is nothing more than data in service of everyone going higher. Remind yourself that you control what you do with that data. Consider it a gift, even if it hurts, and do your best to receive with humility and grace whatever feedback your teammate offers you.
With defensiveness taken off the table, curiosity can emerge front and center. Be excited to explore what you are told. If you don’t understand the feedback or it’s unclear, ask for clarification. Be careful not to sound defensive
Whether or not you agree with the feedback, always thank your teammate as you would thank anyone for a gift. Be clear that you will put the gift of their feedback in the mix as you collect additional feedback
The stronger the relationship, the more fluid and frequent the feedback can, and should, be. So, after advocating for more feedback, be mindful how often you ask for it in return
Once the back and forth of feedback is a habit and a natural way of working, it’s a good idea to refine your exchanges by seeking feedback on how you give feedback. This is the time to inquire how the feedback you are sharing with the other person is landing. You or your teammates may wish to dial up or down aspects of your feedback based on their perception of its impact on people. This kind of open dialogue is healthy and can deepen your partnership as you go higher together.
I’m often asked whether we should try to offer candid personal feedback to our bosses, and my answer is always “Absolutely!” The higher people move up the corporate ladder, the more they need feedback from those under them—and the less likely they are to get it.
The natural concern, though, is that your actual feedback won’t be well received. What if your boss gets upset? If that happens, apologize, and suggest that you were offering your humble thoughts because you care enough to do so
Together Rich and Steve brought a plan to Andy that, at its core, entailed inviting consistently top-growing Merrill Lynch’s advisors to start up the Advisor Growth Network (AGN), a community for all advisors to coach each other and share the high-growth techniques that had put them at the very top.
A CO-DEVELOPING PARTNERSHIP
Coaching Carter proved to be a growth opportunity for Daphne as well
With their division in trouble, Daphne and Carter wasted no time putting their trusting co-developing relationship to work. They began inviting other key members from their executive team to their lunches in the cafeteria. Discussions and co-creations and many CPS questions with sales leaders generated new ideas that resulted in more focused and reasonable near-term sales targets
OLD WORK RULE: When it came to growing professionally and developing both hard and soft skills, you looked to your manager, and to performance reviews and training programs. As a manager yourself, you generally only offered developmental feedback to someone who was formally assigned to you as a direct report.
NEW WORK RULE: We seek out our team for development and growth. We offer teammates the candid feedback they need to develop and improve their skills, performance, and behavior because we are committed to their success and to the success of the greater mission.
WHAT IS TRUST?
The model of trust we use distinguishes three kinds of trust, the three areas where each type of trust is likely to break down, and how to build it up.
RULE SIX
Praise and Celebrate
Recognition is essential to FedEx culture—it’s the bedrock on which the company’s global brand and reputation is built. No matter where you are in the world, if you respect your people and you reward and recognize the right behaviors, they will deliver exceptional performance. That may sound like fluff, but it’s a hard-nosed business approach. The difference between our team members doing their best and doing the minimum is the difference between success and failure. It directly affects our bottom line.- RAJ SUBRAMANIAM, president and COO, FedEx
LIKE RAYS OF SUNLIGHT
Whenever we celebrate and praise our teammates, it’s as though we’re shining sunlight straight into their souls. That’s been my experience, and it’s backed by psychologists who have studied motivation and organizational behavior. Psychologist Dan Ariely, bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, found that praise is more highly valued than money. His research shows that even occasional compliments can be more impactful than cash bonuses when it comes to raising worker productivity and motivation.
Researchers in another study found that when practicing physicians were offered and experienced positive affect—a pleasant feeling or a good mood—they improved their performance in problem-solving, decision-making, and cognitive organization.
In any relationship—professional or personal—you never know how your seemingly small words of praise and celebration might inspire a pivotal moment in someone’s life. Michael Lewis, author of nonfiction bestsellers such as The Blind Side and Moneyball, told an interviewer in 2005 how Coach Fitz, his high school baseball coach, had changed how Lewis felt about himself just by expressing his confidence in him.
RULE SIX: THE PRACTICES
If you want to strengthen your relationships and really open more porosity with teammates all around you, try being the biggest cheerleader for the people you know and care about. Take some time each day to set aside your critical thinking, even for a few minutes, and acknowledge their friendship, their spirit, their hard work, and their significance in your life. People are thirsting for this kind of acknowledgment
Watch how praising and celebrating others can strengthen your bonds with your teammates. Pretty soon, it becomes habit-forming. Here are some suggestions I’ve found useful in getting started
As soon as you see someone on your team do something well—big or small—acknowledge it. Any praise is better than no praise. Whenever possible, tie the praise to a specific action or behavior.
If you catch a colleague doing something right, acknowledge the action, and be sure to tell them how they made you feel, as well
Let me repeat the Platinum Rule: Do unto others only as they would like to be done unto. Public praise is great, but not everyone is comfortable with it. So know your teammates, and praise and celebrate them the way you know they would appreciate it the most.
So much of the power and effectiveness of praise comes from people feeling seen and acknowledged. But there are introverts in every workplace who would feel painfully embarrassed if you were to ballyhoo their accomplishments at an open meeting
Our teams won’t improve if we don’t let them see a sliver of light they can walk toward during dark times. When your teams are on missions that are particularly tough or when they’re having difficult moments, that’s exactly when we need to praise them, even if the performance is not perfect and the results are not optimal. There’s a saying that if you’re going through hell, you have to keep going. Celebration and praise provide the fuel that restores and sustains us, helping us to keep moving forward through stretches of extreme difficulty.
By recognizing even small victories, we show the way to larger, more sustainable achievements
I didn’t used to believe in small wins. I reserved praise and celebration for “big wins,” like winning a mega account, having a CEO give us a shout-out for their share price increase, publishing a significant research study in Harvard Business Review, or having one of our books on the New York Times bestseller list. But these big wins don’t happen every day. If that’s all you ever celebrate, you’re going to have a hard time keeping team spirit high.
Today I recognize that big wins are a by-product of stringing together lots of smaller wins along the way, and each of those wins deserves celebration
Criticism is only half the job of coaching. The other half is celebration. When you celebrate your teammates publicly, it builds your brand as a co-elevator and serves your mission by attracting others to join with you.
Try sending a text to five team members who have come through for your shared mission recently, whether it’s a short-term project or a longer-term goal. Tell them you were just thinking of them, and that you wanted them to know how grateful you are for their partnership. There’s no need to lay it on too thick. Be authentic. Stay real. Tell them how you truly feel. Then watch how they respond
Some people need us to believe in their capabilities more than they’re willing or able to believe in themselves. We need to champion these people, who, for whatever reason, aren’t great at championing themselves. A friend of mine calls this “taking an unreasonable stand” for the other person.
Coaching teams to change their behaviors is often an uphill slog. Most people really don’t believe it’s possible for individuals to change, let alone undergo transformative change. They concede that maybe they can influence a handful of people, but at scale, for hundreds or thousands? No way! They can’t see how it’s possible to transform the values, principles, and attitudes that have created their workplace culture
There is always something to celebrate if you look for it. On a tough day, or whenever you might find yourself feeling little cause for celebration, try tapping into your sense of gratitude. Make it a habit to ask yourself, “What am I grateful for today? What do I appreciate about my teammates, my clients, or my job?”
Paying attention to what you feel grateful for has the benefit of putting you in a positive frame of mind
Risk-taking and innovation are key to transformation. But some experts estimate that as much as 90 percent of innovative projects end in failure. “One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2014. “[But] it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets … [If] you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments. And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time whether they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”
RULE SEVEN
Co-Elevate the Tribe
To lead your team, you must remind each and every teammate that they are responsible for maximizing each other’s capabilities. That means supporting each other’s strengths and coaching each other on your weaknesses. The old model—the heroic leader taking command—was never very realistic, and now it’s obsolete. The team must serve the team, and the leader’s role is to facilitate that co-elevation. - BOB CARRIGAN, CEO, Audible”
You’re the leader,” I reminded her. She had to assume that she was responsible for the energy and engagement levels of everyone on the set. I asked her to imagine that everyone’s positive or negative energy was controlled by a dial on their forehead, and that she solely had the ability to dial up or dial down each person’s energy level. That was the power of her moods, her body language, and her comments. In her every interaction with people on the set, she had the choice to dial them up or dial them down. Her job would be to keep everyone dialed up.
Leveraging the tribe for the tribe. When we first start leading without authority, it’s all on us to ask, “Who’s my team?” and then to recruit and support that team. Next, we engage them in co-creation, first individually and then in groups. Over time, we earn the permission to co-develop with them, also individually at first, but soon we need to leverage more teammates toward our various shared missions.
As we move forward, leading without authority calls on us to instill in everyone else on our team this same commitment to co-elevation. We want them to initiate their own co-elevating relationships and ultimately share the responsibility for promoting a co-elevating culture. We also want to inspire them to look outside the immediate team and create their own co-elevating teams to draw in others outside our reach, people we may not even know.”
This isn’t about the others. Not yet. This is about us. This is about our commitment to the show and our integrity as leaders. How we show up on set and how we behave on the set will determine what the others make of this. Our behavior and our efforts to invite them to join us will determine whether they get on board or not. So let’s keep the subject on ourselves.”
Formalize a recontracting agreement with the guiding principles they promised to live by and share with others. Here’s what they came up with:
Transformation on this level is a team sport, and we all have to play an active role in it. Ultimately, by helping to promote and instill a proactive, co-elevating mindset in each team member, our own burden gets lighter, as each individual initiates change with their peers, in pursuit of our collective goals, and in fulfillment of our shared mission.
RULE SEVEN: THE PRACTICES
Leading without authority is a lot like hosting a big party. You’re also devoted to being of service and making everyone feel welcome and at ease. And the best and easiest way to ensure that everyone is taken care of, without exception, is to explicitly enlist your teammates in taking care of each other.
Negativity, whining, complaining, making yourself a victim—all are poison to co-elevation and any initiative for change. But expressions of pessimism can also provide great opportunities to be of service to our teammates through coaching: Whenever someone speaks disparagingly about a co-worker, flip the conversation so that the venting turns into positive action.
The whole exchange filled me with excitement. Instead of indulging my habit of trying to fix it myself, I’d encouraged teammate to adopt a co-elevating mindset and help solve his problem
Don’t indulge in venting. And don’t allow yourself to become a passive participant by ignoring it, either. Remember your responsibility as a leader to promote co-elevation among the team
“Whenever you have a problem with a teammate, I encourage you to sit down with that teammate in private and approach them about the problem in a supportive manner. However, before we make an approach, it sometimes makes sense to gather some insights by conferring with another teammate or two, but only with the intent to help out the person needing support: “I think Joshua is falling behind. How can we help him? And what’s the best way to discuss this with him?”
In such cases, you don’t want to get trapped in the snare of complaining behind someone’s back. Be open and transparent about your sincere intentions
Complaining about underperforming team members usually takes place in the shadows, in the form of griping to a colleague or the boss. Even worse, two colleagues will basically gossip about how a third one is not holding his own, without ever attempting to remedy the situation themselves. If we are honest, most of us have fallen into such behavior. But by so doing, we tend to absolve ourselves of any responsibility to support that team member and help them to elevate their performance. That is poor leadership
I believe strongly that going forward, HR leaders will be important contributors to building a co-elevation movement in the workplace. The need for leading without authority is so great that we will need to work with HR to co-create ways of integrating co-elevation into traditional organizational design
In developing your team, be creative in how you draw in the additional coaching resources you need to keep expanding the team’s capabilities
Maybe you already know who your first partners in co-elevation will be, or maybe you already have strong co-elevating relationships. I can’t stress enough how important it is to open porosity with them and to serve, share, and care. You can build 10x results on the foundations of these first few strong co-elevating partnerships.
If you need a goal for building a workplace movement, those are pretty good numbers to use as guidelines. As you build your relationship action plans for each of your projects, take note of when you have co-elevating relationships with 5 percent of the names on your list. Enlist those team members in the effort to get around 30 percent into co-elevating relationships
SPARKING A WORKPLACE MOVEMENT
It’s all on you to create a co-elevating team that achieves its mission and transforms your culture. Again, at the beginning, you have to do the heavy lifting. But when you are truly co-elevating and co-developing with your teammates, you’ll inspire that behavior in others. Then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to reach out, to co-create, to co-develop, and to ensure a level of co-elevation that says, “I won’t let you fail.
The burden of responsibility becomes lighter when the mission is shared. That’s how all of us go higher together. That’s when we can each achieve 10x of our own capabilities and 10x on our goals. It’s the tipping point where a team can spark a movement, and a movement can change a culture.
OLD WORK RULE: Co-workers who are uncooperative, difficult to work with, or not contributing are avoided and written off.
NEW WORK RULE: If one team member is holding back the mission in any way, the team gets to enlist the help of other teammates to elevate that team member and their contribution.
A CO-ELEVATING CONTRACT
Research has found that if we sign a contract obliging us to achieve our goals, we are much more likely to succeed at them Here is a model recontracting agreement for any kind of co-elevating relationship.
RULE EIGHT
Join the Movement
At Patagonia, we don’t just have a culture, we have a movement. It’s one of the most powerful differentiators a company can have when its people believe so deeply in shared values; and doing that, they not only practice this way inside the company but actively evangelize it in the world. And in our case our customers join us, co-activate with us, and lead as much as we do. We are a stoked co-elevating community; and that not only shows up in the conviction our employees and customers have to do more for our mission to save our home planet—but in our continued strong performance as well.- DEAN CARTER, chief human resources officer, Patagonia
My highest purpose in writing Leading Without Authority is to help you incite a movement that will measurably enhance your life and the lives of those around you, while transforming the institutions that can alleviate suffering globally. The simple practices of this book have the power to bring about real cultural transformation, not only on your teams but throughout entire organizations you touch, and into the world at large
As our co-elevating habits transform our work relationships, they will naturally spill over into the rest of our lives. The co-elevation principles of broadly embracing diverse opinions with greater inclusivity, richer collaboration, elevated candor, and transparency in service of each other, mutual growth, and development can give us all new pathways to living our truth, in every dimension of our lives.
So far, this book has focused on one person, you, changing your behaviors and elevating the people around you to greater success, mostly in the workplace. I hope you don’t stop there. I hope you now go and teach co-elevation to others who then become part of this movement. Who’s the next person leading their work who you’re going to help ignite to be a member of our movement? Imagine if instead of hunkering down in our individual bunkers, pointing fingers and blaming other people, we paused and said, “Who do I need to start co-elevating with to achieve this mission or to solve this challenge?”
This is just the beginning of a journey in which we are working to create a better world, one that can be more joyful and offer transformational outcomes beyond our wildest dreams. Through co-elevation, we will build our co-elevation movement
FIRST TO WALK THE COURSE
Now is your time to develop your own special feel for how to co-elevate and lead without authority. You’ll develop your own unique insights about what works best with your teammates as you coach them, co-develop with them, and celebrate with them. In doing so, you’ll contribute to the emerging movement.
And when that day finally arrives, when leading without authority and co-elevation are recognized as essential workplace skills, you’ll be like the teenage golf caddy I once was. You’ll have walked the course many times before, fully prepared for the challenges ahead.
Gerente de Finanzas y Administración | Planeamiento financiero | Control de Gestión de Negocios | Tesorería | Docente Pregrado
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