The New Leadership Is Teamship

The son of an unemployed Pittsburgh steelworker, best-selling author Keith Ferrazzi was haunted by his father’s experiences at the mills near his home. Checked-out bosses with little care for quality or those they led. Union leaders pushing him to slow down or risk making others look bad. Arrogant ownership that failed to invest in modernization, leading to an industry explosion and, ultimately, his father losing his job.

These dysfunctional work experiences ignited a career-long quest to seek out better ways to build work, with stops at Yale, Harvard Business School and Deloitte—where he became the youngest partner in the firm’s history and later CMO—along the way. It was that last experience that led him to write his first bestseller, Never Eat Alone, a guide to building personal and professional success through active relationship management.

Since then, he’s become a prolific author and one of the hottest C-Suite coaches in the world.

But, as he told a room full of attendees at our recent Manufacturing Leadership Summit in Cleveland, those bitter foundational experiences in Western Pennsylvania never left him. The result is a new book, Never Lead Alone, and a transformative concept that could revolutionize organizations: “teamship.”

Drawing from 24 years of research and his work with companies like General Motors, Merill Lynch and many others, Ferrazzi said teamship is a fundamental shift from traditional leadership—where managers direct subordinates—to a model where team members actively step up to meet leaders in shared responsibility.

“If you are a good leader, you’re giving feedback to your team, right? If you’re a great leader, you’re getting your team to give each other feedback,” Ferrazzi said. In Never Lead Alone, Ferrazzi outlines 37 practices to help shift from leadership to teamship. Here are five:

1. Implement Stress Testing After Every Report-Out. Instead of passive meetings where participants simply listen to updates, Ferrazzi advocates for “stress testing”—a structured practice where team members actively challenge each presentation. To implement this practice, have everyone open a shared document after each presentation to note what might be missing, suggest ideas and offer help. This practice not only improves ideas but establishes a culture of constructive challenge based on support rather than criticism.
   
   
2. Run Every Strategic Initiative as an Agile Sprint. Ferrazzi recommends adopting agile methodologies beyond software development as the standard operating approach for all major initiatives. “Agile is your new operating system,” he said. Rather than annual planning cycles, break strategic priorities into monthly sprints with regular review points. At each monthly checkpoint, the team leader should share accomplishments, struggles and plans for the next sprint, followed by the stress testing process. “Everything you do is an agile sprint.”
   
   
3. Create a “Yoda Moment” Safe Word for Candid Input. To overcome conflict avoidance that prevents critical insights from emerging, Ferrazzi suggests establishing a “safe word” that signals when someone needs to share a challenging perspective—what he calls a Yoda moment (because Yoda is all knowing, and, taken together so is your team). “So that if you are in a meeting, somebody can raise their hand and say, ‘Uh, Yoda moment, I’m going to take a risk. I’m going to say something contrary to the conversation.’” This practice empowers team members to redirect discussions, point out when someone is disengaged or challenge the group’s focus. It shifts responsibility for meeting effectiveness from the leader to the entire team.
   
   
4. Use Asynchronous Collaboration Before Meetings. To maximize input and ensure all voices are heard, Ferrazzi advocates for collaborative work, especially written memos that are then shared, before meetings occur. This practice particularly helps introverts and thoughtful team members who may not speak up in meetings. As Ferrazzi noted, some of today’s workers won’t even tolerate traditional approaches: “Kids these days out of Stanford that I’m coaching literally will walk into the room and if you say that there was a meeting, you’re like, how are we having this meeting? We haven’t collaborated yet.”
   
   
5. Institute Peer Coaching Circles. In this practice, small groups meet regularly, with each person taking turns to share challenges while others ask questions and provide advice. These circles create a culture where teammates actively contribute to each other’s growth and success—the essence of teamship. “You have a development resource in your organization—among peers. And we’re not unleashing it.”

Ferrazzi’s message resonated particularly with manufacturing leaders facing today’s complex challenges. “You want an engaged employee base. This is your threshold, true co-elevation… Enable small groups of people who are committed to winning together to build this kind of commitment. And that’s what’s going to be game changing for American manufacturing.”