Never Lead Alone

The world’s best teams don’t win because of leadership alone. They win because of teamship. Yet when it comes to success, it is leaders who are lauded; too little attention is given to the transformation of the team itself. We’ve all but ignored how to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in teams, Keith Ferrazzi argues. Upgrading teams is one of the least curated and under-leveraged opportunities for success. It is time to focus on teamship. But first we must reinvent our understanding of what teamship is and how it functions in a work world that is significantly more volatile, networked, hybrid, diverse, and inclusive than even a decade ago. New thinking about the false and debilitative assumptions that drive teams to underperform is overdue. We need to capture the bold spirit of co-creation and human ingenuity that drives teams like Astro Teller’s Google X to strive for and sustain innovation. In Never Lead Alone, Ferrazzi shares the approach that drives his coaching practice—the playbook he has used to reboot team performance at major brands, including Mastercard, Intel, Starbucks, and General Motors, along with fast-growth unicorns like MongoDB, and Scopley and governments like Bhutan and NGOs like the World Bank. Drawing on more than two decades of deep study with colleagues from the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute, he identifies ten key shifts to unlock the potential of any team, accompanied with 20 High Return Practices that quickly turn each shift into a new team habit. Using the tools that have successfully rebooted team performance at Fortune 500 companies and unicorn brands, Never Lead Alone can help any organization experience innovation and exponential growth.