Welcome to Transform’s Q&A Author Spotlight Series, where we feature insightful authors who are redefining people and culture, work, leadership, and technology. Join us to gain fresh perspectives and practical knowledge from those at the forefront of today’s evolving professional landscape.
About the Author
Keith Ferrazzi is a renowned executive team coach, keynote speaker, influential thought leader and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight, where he has spent more than 20 years coaching Fortune 500 companies and unicorn startups. Keith challenges the way we work to achieve more connection and collaboration, with a revolutionary shift from leadership to teamship. His columns are regularly published in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company, and Inc. Magazine. Ferrazzi is also the New York Times Bestselling author of “Never Eat Alone” and “Who’s Got Your Back”. His latest book, “Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship”, draws on two decades of coaching experience and insights from 3,000+ diagnostic assessments with leading organizations.
To read more or purchase Keith’s book, “Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship”, visit the website here.
Background and Inspiration
Transform: What inspired you to write about Leadership, and what keeps you motivated in this field?
Keith Ferrazzi: My inspiration comes from a deeply personal place. When I was growing up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, watching my father struggle as an unemployed steelworker, I saw firsthand how poor leadership and outdated work practices could devastate families and communities. What keeps me motivated is my mission to transform business through better teams. For twenty years at Ferrazzi Greenlight, our research institute has been studying and coaching teams, developing what we call ‘high-return teamship practices.’ I’m driven by the belief that we can create extraordinary outcomes when we shift from traditional leadership to teamship – where teammates co-lead and elevate each other to achieve world-class performance.
Transform: Can you share a pivotal moment or experience that led to your interest in Leadership?
Keith Ferrazzi: It goes back to my childhood. When I was ten years old, I sat at our dinner table listening to my dad, an unemployed steelworker, lament about the practices in his workplace. His manager would actually tell him to slow down because he was making the boss look bad by outworking his peers. The American steel industry was arrogantly ignoring Total Quality Management principles that Japanese factories were using to deliver less expensive, higher-quality products. Watching my parents struggle – my dad taking any job he could find, my mom working as a cleaning lady – I committed to my dad that someday I would fix American manufacturing. That early experience shaped my understanding that transforming teams really can transform organizations.
Transform: How have your professional experiences influenced your writing and perspectives on Leadership and workplace trends?
Keith Ferrazzi: My journey through Deloitte and Starwood Hotels provided two contrasting experiences that profoundly shaped my perspective on leadership and teamship. At Deloitte, where I became the youngest partner and global CMO, we were a unified team. Every hill we faced, we climbed together; every challenge we faced, we overcame together. Though at the time we were the lowest of the Big Eight consultancies, we had a shared mission. At Starwood, despite creating innovations like the SPG loyalty program and the W Hotel concept, we struggled because we weren’t a cohesive team. We had brilliant individual teammates but never achieved the psychological safety and interdependency needed to bring it all together to win. These experiences led me to found my own research institute and coaching firm to explore what I now call teamship – the practices that make teams extraordinary.
Writing Process
Transform: How do you stay current with the rapidly changing trends in the workplace and Leadership to ensure your writing remains relevant?
Keith Ferrazzi: Through my Research Institute, we’ve conducted over three thousand diagnostic assessments with teams over twenty years of coaching. We draw together primary research from institutions like Oxford, Wharton, MIT, and Harvard Business School, and match them with our with real-world observations from coaching the world’s top teams and design high-return practices. This combination of rigorous research and practical application helps us identify and validate what actually works in today’s volatile business environment. We’re constantly testing and refining practices that address modern challenges like hybrid work, diversity and inclusion, and the integration of AI in team collaboration.
Content Development
Transform: How do you develop the case studies or examples in your books, and do they evolve as you write?
Keith Ferrazzi: Through our research and monitoring of thousands of teams over twenty years, we identify what might be considered a ‘best practice,’ then refine it and reapply it to other teams until we know it will measurably move the needle. Only then does it become what we call a high-return teamship practice. These practices have been the differentiating value of our team coaching for years – changing the culture of organizations through the practices and work of their teams. The case studies emerge from real-world observations in what I call our ‘laboratory’ experience of coaching the world’s top teams.
Themes and Messages
Transform: What core themes do you explore in your writing, and why are they significant to you and your audience?
Keith Ferrazzi: The central theme of my work is teamship – the ultimate competitive advantage driven by shifting from traditional hierarchies to teammates co-leading teams and elevating each other to achieve world-class performance. Traditionally, we have all expected everything of the leader and given too little focus on teammates and their responsibility to each other. This matters because we’ve all but ignored how to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in and among teams. The shift to teamship has two driving forces: co-elevating behaviors and twenty-first-century collaborative processes and tools. These themes are significant because they address today’s volatile business environment and speak to modern challenges like hybrid work, diversity and inclusion, and the emergence of AI in team collaboration.
Challenges and Rewards
Transform: What’s the most rewarding aspect of writing about leadership?
Keith Ferrazzi: The most rewarding aspect is seeing these practices transform not just businesses but people’s lives. When I wrote my first book, “Never Eat Alone”, I had people from around the world tell me that it changed their life. When I think about the ideas in “Never Lead Alone”, they don’t just apply to business: the idea of winning together as a team. There is every chance that you and your colleagues are members of a Parent-Teacher Association, church groups, non-profits, and as contributors to those organizations, you can begin to transform their efficacy. What if, at a micro-level, everyone decided that Co-Elevation was the essence of how they want to parent? What if the battling of a teenager turned into an understanding of two individuals? This happened to me. This work really started to define how I interacted with my children. It started to define how I interacted with friends, and suddenly, the hurdle of what a successful relationship was to me changed. It became a set of values that I wanted to live my life by. That’s why I decided to publish these practices and give everyone the same access as my coaches and clients have had to these shifts and practices – to have a greater impact on the world of business and society—to join a movement.
Advice and Future Plans
Transform: What’s next for you? Are you working on any new projects or books about the future of work, leadership, etc.?
Keith Ferrazzi: I’m focused on scaling the impact of teamship. For the last twenty years, I’ve been coaching teams through ten fundamental shifts over six-month periods with transformational results. My vision is to see these practices spread beyond my direct coaching work. I want to see a world where teamship becomes a core human competency for living in an ever more diverse, fast-changing, and interdependent world.
Deep Dive into Specific Works
Transform: What’s the story behind the title of your latest book, “Never Lead Alone”?
Keith Ferrazzi: “Never Lead Alone” emerged from my life’s core purpose – something I’ve felt since I was a scrappy poor kid growing up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, watching my dad, an unemployed steelworker, taking any job he could find and my mom scrubbing floors for twenty bucks a day. You can trace this purpose through all my books – the desire to figure out how to help people by transforming business, to get under the hood of how to make organizations better, not just for folks like my dad and families like ours who had suffered, but for the elevation of entire communities.
The book represents my life’s work to crack the code of how we build extraordinary teams. I’m a behavioral engineer focused on high-return practices, and this book provides a practical (not theoretical) roadmap for what it means to be an extraordinary teammate and what practices we can all integrate into our work and coach into others around us. The title reflects my fundamental belief that we can all achieve disproportionately extraordinary things with a strong team of committed souls around us.
About the reader
Transform: Describe what a leader/organization looks like one year after reading your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and committing to its teachings.
Keith Ferrazzi: A year after adopting teamship practices, you’ll see a dramatic shift from hub-and-spoke leadership to true co-elevation, where teammates are deeply committed not just to the mission but to lifting each other up. You’ll find no back-channel conversations – instead, there’s candor and psychological safety. Teams will have shifted from serendipitous relationships to purposeful bond-building, especially in hybrid environments. They’ll own each other’s energy and resilience, practice broader co-creation, and operate with agile processes at all levels. You’ll see peer celebration replacing leader-led praise, true inclusion and belonging, and teammates actively coaching each other. Most importantly, you’ll see alignment even through the twists and turns of our volatile business environment – because these aren’t just mindset shifts, they’ve become ingrained team habits.
Transform: Considering a reader who just finished your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and is processing all the great insights, what is the first step they should take to operationalize their learning?
Keith Ferrazzi: The best first step is to nominate a teamship ambassador on your team who is passionate for the change and will ensure everyone gives all the shifts and practices a healthy shot at adoption. While eventually we all become teamship ambassadors, having one designated person working with the leader and team initially will help coach these new behaviors into play when others might fall back on old habits. Use the diagnostic questions throughout the book to help your team understand the gap between their current behaviors and what’s possible for a world-class team on a teamship journey. Trust the practices – adopt them and use them to shift toward becoming a dream team.
Transform: Share three takeaways from “Never Lead Alone” that the reader should walk away with.
Keith Ferrazzi:
- It’s the shift from hierarchical leadership to peer-to-peer teamship: A good leader gives feedback; a great leader ensures the team gives each other feedback. A good leader holds members accountable; a great leader ensures the team holds each other accountable.
- One of the greatest erosions of shareholder value comes from a single debilitating habit: conflict avoidance. There are simple daily practices, like candor breaks and using break-out rooms, that can build psychological safety and create a culture of candor.
- We don’t think our way into new ways of acting, we act our way into new ways of thinking – and that’s why practicing these new team habits is crucial to transformation. You can make culture change a task; a daily assignment.
