The Future of Work Starts with Connection with Keith Ferrazzi

Episode 42: The Future of Work Starts with Connection with Keith Ferrazzi

Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday challenges traditional HR thinking

Trina Sunday: After talking about soul food, I’m helping you to rethink connection. Connection in your work, leadership and communities. And I’m joined by Keith Ferrazzi to talk about a whole range of things. How you can have authority on connection, CO elevation, teamship, how we can build our connection muscle to be the true co pilots in organisational transformation. Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practise. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trani, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop.   I’m here to help and also to shake things up.

Keith Ferrazzi teaches people how to build authentic, intentional connections

So let’s get started. Last episode I was talking about soul food and what it means to be starving, starving your soul. And a lot of you came back with some comments about connection and a lack of connection. So I thought, who better to chat to than Keith Ferrazzi, who’s helping organisations to move beyond transactional relationships and teaching people and teams how to build authentic, intentional connections that drive trust and collaboration. He has concepts on CO elevation and teamship and he shows how people can work across silos, lift each other up and jointly own outcomes instead of operating in hierarchy and isolation. And isolation is at the core of this and connection is the antidote. Welcome. I’m joined by Keith Ferrazzi. He’s a renowned executive team coach, keynote speaker,  influential thought leader and the founder of Ferratsi Greenlight, where he spent more than 20 years coaching Fortune 500 companies, unicorn startups and even governments. I’ve been following Keith’s work for a while now, and whether it’s what he’s doing through Greenlight Research Institute or the copious books that he has written, this is about team transformation and he’s a business coach that really does challenge the way that teams work together to get breakthrough results. And I’m really excited because it is the 20th anniversary of his book Never Eat Alone and there’s a lot around relationships that I want to explore. And for someone that really brings together chros as well on occasion, and looking to build communities in that space and many others, it’s a great opportunity for us to Talk about humanity, people and how we come together. So welcome, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi: Wow, that’s a great introduction. Looking forward to the day. Thank you.

Trina Sunday: Thanks for joining me.

You’ve become known worldwide for your work around connection and co elevation

I think before we dive, I guess, deep, it’d be really great for people that don’t know you if we could start a little bit with your story. So you’ve become known worldwide, obviously, and for me, especially around connection and co elevation and, you know, I’m,   really keen to understand what sparked your interest in relationships and in the first place, I guess, and what in your own journeys brought you to this work.

Keith Ferrazzi: You know, I think probably it started with survival. I was born quite poor in Pittsburgh,  Pennsylvania. My family were immigrant from Italy and the steel industry had crashed everywhere around us and we. My dad was unemployed, my mom had to become a cleaning lady.  I had to go to work literally when I was 10 or 11 at the local country club. And what I realised was the ticket to my growth and opportunity was going to be through people. We didn’t have anybody in our family to ever gone to college. What I noticed at the golf club where I was caddying for wealthy people in the community was that they helped each other. You know, I used to be jealous that their kids, you know, had this nepotistic opportunity available, get them internships, they had all these cool things. But I just. Then I realised if I built relationships, these people would also have affinity and we’d have real authentic connection. And it. Ultimately it led to great generosity two ways. And there was a one particular woman named Mrs. Poland who really gave me a leg up when I was young. And,   I joked with her one year years later, I was like, why did you help me so much? And she said, keith, you took two strokes off of my golf score. And the thing that I recognised is that if I identify amazing people in my life, I serve them with authenticity and generosity. I found the doors opened to me and that was the path I followed. I became, as a result of that, the youngest Chief Marketing Officer in the Fortune 500. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte, Chief Marketing Officer at Starwood Hotels. And I’ve had a. I’ve had a really blessed career as an entrepreneur. And it’s all been through that philosophy of,  be proactive about identifying people to engage with. And then after that, you need to,  make sure that you’re deeply generous, authentic to who you are yourself, build real relationships and doors open. And that was the basis of Never Eat Alone.

It’s been 20 years since your book about the human spirit came out

Trina Sunday: I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since that book, it feels like yesterday. And I think, what’s your observation? Been around generosity. So, in terms of the human spirit, I’m curious to know. Fast track, 20 years or more. Sorry, not ageing you, but, you know, fast track from those moments of the country colour. But then look at where we are now. What are your observations?

Keith Ferrazzi: You know, it’s easy to be cynical and suggest that we’re more divisive, more divided,  more fractured than we ever have before, but I don’t go there. I really don’t. I don’t see any of that. I,  just don’t. What I see is when I choose to engage with people, the connectedness is there. And that’s what I try to teach individuals, leaders, individual contributors. Inside of large companies, people are always complaining about the cultures of their companies. And I don’t have it. I just don’t have it. Because the reality is how you engage with the people around you sets your culture. I just don’t have it. I really don’t. I’ve spent a lot of time in the United States when the first. When the book came out, doing tours of employee,  resource groups, women’s groups, African American groups, lgbt,  et cetera. And what my message was is, and by the way, I have six sons and my sons are of very different nationalities and origins, all through foster care and adoption. And what I would say to them is, I’d say, listen, I know that prejudice will hold you back. And I’ll tell you, the most erosive prejudice that’s going to hold you back is your belief that other people don’t want a relationship with you or prejudgment. And, you know, for myself, I’m a gay man who hid that most of my life back in the 80s and 90s, when I was going up through the corporate ladder, because I just assumed that it would be an encumbrance to my success. And what I found over time was as I emerged who I was, none of my prejudices met me, none of my prejudgments to fruition. Again, I do acknowledge that it exists, but it exists with 10 to 15% of the population. And the rest, I would say 50%, feel like you’ve got, you know, it would be something. But the point is that if I become good at, defining and deepening the relationships around you, I create the culture that I want in life.

Trina Sunday: I think there’s so much in that. There’s so much in that for me, being the mother of a biracial child, there’s so much in as the, you know, the Anglo mum that’s navigating, you know, what it is to be black and what that looks like. So, so much learning. I’m on such a racial journey all the time.

Keith Ferrazzi: I do remember when I was in Australia, we connected around that.

Trina Sunday: Yeah, yeah. And I think, do you look back and regret. Regret’s probably the wrong word. That’s my word. You can throw your words at me. But not being able to be your authentic self. Do you feel a sense of loss in not being the man that,  you were openly.

Keith Ferrazzi: I love the man that I am today. And there was a lot of shame in my life. First because I was poor and growing up in wealthy schools, because my parents got me full scholarships in the wealthy private schools in the community. So I think that the,  shame has been ever present in my life. And then when I came out to myself, you know, usually there’s a staging of coming out. I came out to myself. I came out to my close friends, and ultimately it came out to the world. But that. That was decades. And,   no, I’ve often, you know, we. We all have these little musings of like, wouldn’t it be great to go back in time and live things over again? You know, get to know Bill Gates when he was still at Harvard and whatever. But the reality is, I wouldn’t want to jeopardise what I have today.

Trina Sunday: That resonates with me too. Cause I think it’s one of those things where I had an epiphany by moving to Cambodia and throwing away corporate first world kind of environments, and had been disillusioned and just kind of. It was a very liberating experience and has taught me a lot around humanity and taught me a lot around people and connection to people. And I spent some years there, and I still do work there. And there’s parts of me sometimes it’s like, have I missed all these years of happiness? Like the truest, happiest version of myself. But I probably wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t have done those other things right. So it’s just part of the journey. That’s life.

You’ve said that relationships beat credentials every time. Talk about connection in this book

You’ve said that relationships beat credentials every time. And I think about HR and I think about many practitioners kind of feeling compliance over cultivating true connections. And I know there’s phenomenal people doing work in this space that counters that. But connection to me is kind of like a muscle that you need to build. And. And I feel like we’re missing that. What do you think about when you.

Keith Ferrazzi: Talk about connection in this book, Never eat alone. And subsequently you were mentioning the 20th year anniversary. We have designed and developed an eight week course. And people fly in from Singapore, Australia, all over the world. The eight week course is all virtual. It’s a  community gathering once a week over eight weeks. But it’s lessons to force you into exercising that muscle. So we teach people is take any goal of your life. And any goal of your life, we supercharge it in that eight week period. Number one, what is that goal? Number two, who would be the people that could supercharge that goal if you built relationships with them? So that’s focus and then target and then making sure that you define what you can do for them. How do you reach out to people with generosity? I always say that my intention when I meet somebody is to identify five packets of generosity that I could bring to the table. And these days it’s easier and easier to do that research. And then how do you get, how do you build connected networks of people who serve each other that are accelerants? You know, the connectors, connecting with the connectors. So focus, target, define what you can do for them, align with connectors. Outreach. What’s a regular cadence of outreach? To connect with people, to stay on the radar screen. And then how do you consistently refine and redo this? Now this could be applied to any job, any entrepreneur, anybody building a family. My father did this for me unknowingly, right when he was making sure his kid had a successful life and got to know the right kind of people. So this, the course is found at Connected success. Com. I’m so proud of it because at the end of it, people come to my home if they want and we have a graduation. And  I love, I host, you know, anywhere from 60 to 100 people at my home for dinner every eight weeks. And it’s become one of the joys of my life. Because you’re on the same mission as I am. I believe that the world and society needs to relish and embrace a more connected level of success. Right and authentic. The one thing about generosity I can say is that people feel that if you’re targeting somebody to be generous that it’s inauthentic. And I think that’s the biggest thing we have to get people over, which is just because I’ve identified a set of people with whom I want to co create, that doesn’t make it inauthentic. The world doesn’t have to live in serendipity. If you’ve got probably the greatest love of your life was somebody that you looked at and said, wow, that’s somebody I want to invest in, build a relationship with, et cetera, that wasn’t inauthentic, it was purposeful. So teaching people that purposeful does not mean fake is very important now in hr. I think that this is important because when I work with HR organisations, usually when people are bringing me in, it’s because they’ve recognised or awoken to the fact that HR tends to work with enterprise and individual. But we miss the team. And the team is actually an agent of the work, it always has been. But HR doesn’t focus enough on the team. It focuses on enterprise goals and individual support. But to have HR transform into what we need today, we need to be the RE engineers of work itself. And that’s a whole different thing with AI. We can begin to talk about that, but we’re about to add new teammates into the work with AI agents. And if we don’t break the work down and re engineer the work, and then the question is, how do we re engineer teams and teaming? It’s such a critical component of what HR should be doing, and I would say fewer than 10% are awakened to it.

Trina Sunday: There is so much in that.

I see a lot of resistance still and denial that AI is here

 tell me more about what you think in terms of agents as teammates. And there’s some really interesting. I see a lot of resistance still and denial that AI is here, which is just so frustrating because it’s here. It’s like arguing that the Internet wasn’t coming. It’s the same kind of response. But how we harness it, the ethics behind it and how we leverage it, it can actually help with connection in some respects. But how do you talk about teams now?

Keith Ferrazzi: So a team is a group of agents and you can call an individual an agent, you can call an AI an agent. It’s a group of agents working fluidly to achieve goals. Now, I think that teams have got to be severed from org charts. And right now we all about teams as org. You know, within an org chart, you know, someone’s walking down the hall. How’s your team? They mean the people that report to them. And the reality is we are on multiple teams. You take any goal we’re working on and that’s the team. So the first big breakthrough that I give in my new book, Never Lead Alone, a shift from leadership to teamship, is getting people to redefine what teams they’re on around critical goals and starting to treat that team as if they were reporting with you and I said the word with as opposed to to, because I wrote a book even before called Leading Without Authority, teaching people how to form teams across matrix organisations and anybody, particularly myself. When I was young and I didn’t have positional authority, I gained positional authority through being good at getting shit done, through being able to build relationships. Right. That’s the way the works today. And getting shit done is both people and technical agents. Now, you mentioned something, it is true. I do believe that AI is going to be very impactful because as you start to form a team around a piece of work, AI should be able to tell you who should be involved. So AI combined with ONA organisation Network analysis, should be able to tell you who are the people that are on your core team and on your engaged team so that change management can be more fluid. Does that make sense?

Trina Sunday: Yeah, it does. Makes complete sense.

You talk about leading without authority in your new book Never Lead Alone

I think there’s so many different elevations of how we talk about team. I,  didn’t mean to use the word elevation because it’s one of the things that was in my head when you were talking about leading without authority. And that was when I’d first heard the term CO elevation. How do you think that’s evolved? Tell us what that means for people that might not have read your book yet and what’s changed in that space for you over time.

Keith Ferrazzi: So leading without authority. Well, actually never lead alone teaches, as does leading without authority teaches the basic principle that when you are successful at work, you’ve identified the people you’re working with independent of org charts and you have made a commitment to create a shared mission among you. So you’re committed to the mission, but you’re also committed to each other. Too often teams are hierarchical, teams are hub and spoke to a leader. And the reality is we need to expect more from our teams. We need to elevate the team to meet the leader in leadership. So I talk about how an individual who’s a leader should give good feedback. We all know that. But a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback to gets the team to hold each other accountable, that gets the team to raise each other’s energy. So there are a series of shifts in the book called Never Lead Alone that shifts from traditional leadership, which has Hubbin spoke to you, to interdependency of the team, lifting each other up to achieve a goal. And you know, there are great examples of this in the book, but one is as a company called Elf Beauty.  I don’t know if it’s in Australia or not. But it’s a beauty company that is crushing it in the industry, competing, taking market share from the really big, you know, beauty companies. And they’re doing it because they can have cycle times of new development that are months where everybody else is years. They cut right to the chase. They. There’s not a single meeting that they have where everything isn’t left on the table. No sidebar conversations, no walk down a hallway, no meeting after a meeting. And if everything’s on the table in the room, you can get stuff fixed like that. That’s what HR needs to be doing. Yeah, HR needs to be making sure our cycle times of work are faster. And there’s a question in the. We do a diagnostic which you can get online that says, do we challenge each other in the room when it’s risky to do so? And the answer of most teams on a scale of 0 to fives are the high ones. And so we’ve got to. And I understand there’s lots of work in the past about crucial conversations and,  courageous dialogue, et cetera, but it’s a classroom thing that you read or talk about and then you go back with the same habitual behaviour. We need to change the practises of work. I introduced things called candour breaks. I introduced things called stress tests. Simple ways that,  when we studied 3,000 teams, we saw practises. Practise changes work, practise changes habit. My favourite phrase is you don’t think your way to new way of acting, you act your way to a new way of thinking.

Trina Sunday: Tell me a little bit about those practises.

Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. So a stress test is probably the best. We do report outs in the workplace where it’s like somebody stands in front of the room and it’s like, here’s what I’ve been working on. And they go through a 20 page deck. People that don’t really care checked out, they’re doing their texting and I mean, these kind of conversations have a,  1.9 level of courageous dialogue. But instead we tell everybody we’re about to do a stress test. Lean in. When we’re done hearing this, you’re going to critique this. You have to. You are assigning the culture we want to have. So a stress test, somebody reports out, here’s what I’ve achieved. One page. Here’s what I’ve achieved, here’s where I’m struggling, here’s where I’m going. It’s almost like an agile standup, which is another critical component of high performing. Teams Agile is the new operating system. It’s a full chapter of the book. And then people know that because they’re listening and they know that the next thing they’re going to do is go into small breakout conversations and they’re going to start writing. Here’s what I disagree with, here’s what you might be missing, right? Here’s an idea for you, an innovation. Here’s where I’d be willing to help. That is a stress test. We have now squeezed the juice out of the room in terms of the critique and feedback and it’s done through a simple practise. Now, the average team of 12 people, four people think they’re heard when you do these kind of stress testing exercises. Ten people think they’re hurt. So we want inclusion. Let’s start including people in the work and you can do them asynchronously. You don’t even need to do them in a meeting. You could send out a short, five minute video and people, even a broader group of people can be included so you can have broader diversity of input. It’s so easy to change culture. It is not difficult. You just have to start changing your practises. Total Quality management, Six Sigma changed manufacturing culture. Agile changed software engineering culture. This changes culture.

What observations have you had around hybrid and fractured workplaces

Trina Sunday: What observations have you had around hybrid and fractured workplaces? We’re seeing a lot of mandates back to the office here in Australia, a lot of pushback on that. What are you seeing in terms of people, what you’re talking about? Those practises lend really well to people being in different places and having virtual elements of including people in without having to be in the room necessarily in advance.

Keith Ferrazzi: If you’re going to be hybrid or fully remote, then you just have to be much more purposeful and planned about everything. You can’t be lax. There’s a chapter in the book, how do you build strong relationships? Before the pandemic, the average relationship score of a team scale of 0 to 5 was 2.8.

Trina Sunday: Wow.

Keith Ferrazzi: And during the pandemic went down to 2.3. So no wonder that CEOs said, I don’t feel the same bond of my culture, let’s get everybody back to the office. But there were people like the CEO of Dropbox and others that said, well, now that we’re virtual, let’s be really intentional about it. And they started doing things like energy checks, where everybody went around and said, here’s where my energy is and here’s what’s bringing it down. So it was a purposeful, engaging of relationship. Those teams raised their relationship score into the high threes. So more than,  the average score before, when you were practising what I call serendipity bonding. Serendipity bonding, everything to me is a methodology. So when CEOs are saying, I want people back to the office to connect, they’re saying, well, the only way I know how to connect is using serendipity by walking down hallways. So serendipity bonding is the cultural norm that most CEOs use. If you started using purposeful norms, you started collaborating better. Like they say, well, but you don’t collaborate effectively. All of these things can be fixed, but it has to be really purposeful. The problem is most CEOs have grown up not knowing these innovative, cutting edge ways of working. And these kids out of Stanford that are building these new companies, they don’t collaborate the same way as big companies. They collaborate in this very fluid, using Google Docs, et cetera. So we’re constantly seeing a need to shift that back.

Trina Sunday: Mhm.

A lot of people will lose their jobs with AI, no question

And there’s a common thread through your work there about being purposeful. Right. It’s being purposeful around the people that you’re wanting to connect with, where that networking’s happening, purposeful around the conversations, what the connections are going to kind of lead to and what they’re,  driven by. Do you find that authenticity is lacking generally in terms of leadership more so than capability? Or is capability lacking more than authenticity?

Keith Ferrazzi: Well, no, I mean, most organisations have built very capable bench strength. But I would say that authenticity, it certainly reared up during the pandemic. Think about how intimate, connected, vulnerable people became. We would start every meeting with, how is everybody really? There was a beautiful shining moment in crisis that emerges. And yeah, I mean, I would say that that has been eroding back to old norms, but I think that, look, clearly the economy shapes a lot of this and we moved from a great resignation where we were all independently owning our own jobs and choosing what we wanted to do, et cetera, and companies were trying to do everything to keep people to the great preservation where everyone’s just hopeful that they keep their job through AI, which by the way, won’t happen. A lot of people will lose their jobs with AI, no question. Yeah, no question. And I’m writing about this and feel that we owe the future employees much more than we’re giving them today. And we know that we’re. Our call centres are going to be 20% the size of what they are, 80% reduction. So many jobs are going to be exited and I do not Believe based on the technology. I do not believe that, oh, there’ll be new jobs created, yes, but not of the same work type. You’re not going to take a call centre worker and make them an AI specialist in know, in technology. That’s not going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of displacement and I think, you know, perhaps your government is better than ours. Ours is particularly poor at managing these kind of social safety nets. So what’s the role of enterprises like, you know, as we think about what are we owing people as we displace them with AI? These are very important questions that are, that are being ignored and I think not accidentally, to be honest, I think it’s easy to just say, well, jobs will be created. The reality is I don’t believe that that’s true.

Trina Sunday: I think it’s general beyond the workplace is an issue generally. Right. In terms of when I think about social capital and when you talked about the silver lining of COVID in terms of us really connecting and leaning in and looking after each other, then we saw that. But now we’re seeing loneliness and polarisation and disconnection kind of everywhere. We’re seeing what you’re just talking about with AI,  displacement and not recreating jobs at the same level. What responsibility do leaders and I guess by extension HR have to foster connection and change not only in our organisations but across the community.

Keith Ferrazzi: Let’s go with this. My belief is that where economic value is being created with abundance right now, I think they deserve to be putting funds away for figuring out the social safety net. And that’s not something the average company can participate in, but I think the average company is going to get value by the exiting of employees with AI and I think there’s some amount of money that should be put back into the exiting workforce. But the largest companies in the world, you know, the OpenAI’s, et cetera, I think there’s billions that should be put set aside to figure out what the social safety net looks like anyway. But that’s sort of a hope of mine that we’ll try to get that right because I don’t trust our government to care, at least not right now. So we’ll see what happens. Just in terms of individual leaders, the reality is if I was fluid in knowing how to use, never eat alone and I was exited, I would find another way to support myself. And that’s what people don’t know. And so I do believe that the value, that’s why we created this course connected success. I do Believe that we need to put into individuals hands the power of navigating relationships that create opportunity, finding that blue flame that feeds your goals, then finding the individuals that you can manifest to achieve those goals. I do think it’s going to be an important skill set in the next decade.

Trina Sunday: Absolutely fundamental skills and tools. And thank you so much in closing out  our chat.

Keith says organisations need more heart at work

I’m really keen to hear what comes into your head when I say that we need more heart at work. What does that look like for you?

Keith Ferrazzi: What I do for a living is coach teams. I go into organisations. I just picked one I was in last week and this is an organisation, it’s over a hundred years old and a very well known brand and it has become fractured, it has become the way in which they critique each other is through passive aggressive spurts. And it’s no wonder that the speed of change that is required for this company to transform in the modern AI era that they’re significantly behind. They’re venture backed startups that are out there trying to compete against them. And so it was easy for me to go in and give them a you all are horribly mediocre. We did the team scores and I said to this executive team, I said this is horribly mediocre and I just want you to awaken to it and get your shit together because the way you’re behaving today is you stretching out the cycle time of what it should take to get transformation to occur. And this is your fault in the room. And then the next thing I do after I beat them over the head with a two by four is I say and you’ve got to have each other’s back to do it. This kind of comments I’m hearing around the table are erosive and divisive and we need you to have a principle of what I call co elevation. Commitment to the shared mission and commitment to each other. And then we do a  dinner where everybody goes around and shares a real intimate story and they’ve never done this before. You know, there’s a whole chapter in shifting from serendipitous bonding to purposeful connection and simple practises like a long slow dinner with a cue of like what experiences of your past make up who you are today. That creates empathy. The energy check creates a sense of shared responsibility to lift up each other’s energy. And we put these practises in place and they start to shift. It’s so easy. Culture change is not difficult, but that’s how we bring heart. I think that heart has to be followed with process and practise. M I call culture change recontracting. Our old contract was we built relationships serendipitously, bumping into each other and working together. Well, there was one woman in this team who’s the CFO and she says, I don’t like these contrived exercises that we’re doing at dinner. And I said, I understand it’s uncomfortable but I ask you, if you’re put into a room with a group of individuals of which you don’t know 50% of them and ah, you’re supposed to build trust, are you abdicating your responsibility as a leader to purposefully build some empathy among that team? She worked at that company for 20 years and she thought that the only way to build relationship is being around for 20 years. What about the new chief Marketing Officer that just joined? You don’t know anything about him. So heart has to be followed with intentional practise.

Trina Sunday: Love it. Intention, purpose. Bring it back. Thanks so much for your time.

Keith Ferrazzi: What a pleasure. Thank you very much. Good to see you again.

Trina Sunday: You too. Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website at reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore. It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all, all of it.

 Until next time, take care, team.