Unlock Your Dream Team

We provide leading-edge research-based teams transformation, and we help transform organizations by transforming your teams.

Play Video
This is the ‘good to great’ of teams. Ferrazzi Greenlight provides simple practices that unlock team potential by rebooting the culture and boosting performance.

Is Your Team World-Class and Radically Adaptable?

The world of work has experienced an inflection point, and we have an opportunity to change how our teams work finally – it’s overdue.

Our research with more than 2,000 executives shows troubling statistics:

  • 81% say that their team is not operating at anywhere near its full potential
  • 74% of teams don’t believe members are accountable for shared goals
  • 71% of teams are failing to engage in the most critical business problems collaboratively
  • 63% of teams don’t think they’re good at iteratively prioritizing and managing competing demands

Many teams are operating under outdated mindsets about how collaboration should happen between them that inadvertently suppress team potential.

0 %
increase in sales
team productivity
0 %
Not Collaborating on
Critical Problems

Myths Holding Teams Back

Seventy-four percent of team members do not think their team is accountable for shared goals and responsible for each other’s success. Most teams are individuals accountable to their siloed numbers and accountable to their leaders, but we need to awaken to the untapped power of peer-to-peer accountability. Seventy-one percent of team members do not believe they and their peers collaboratively engage in the most critical business problems. We needed to create a word for it – Co-elevating teams. Here you find an equal commitment to achieving the requirements of their responsible silos and recognizing their responsibility for holding each other accountable. They collectively do what is needed to achieve enterprise value creation and transformation. This new social contract includes an increased commitment to bringing problems to the team and asking for input on our work versus the traditional defensiveness of holding our cards close to our chest. Opening up time in your team for more collaborative problem solving, your organization can bust silos and shift from hub-and-spoke to Peer-to-peer, where teammates can cross the finish line together.
Seventy-two percent of team members avoid conflict. We need to awaken to candor and realize how erosive conflict avoidance is to a team: it leads to our missing bold innovations and exposes the team to unnecessary risks quietly recognized by others but not articulated. Unfortunately, too many teams still operate under conflict avoidance and believe that feedback only comes from our superiors. This state is a striking contrast to that Co-elevating agreement, a commitment to going higher together, which builds a team culture where we care enough about each other’s success not to let each other fail.

We all know meetings are overabundant; by one estimate, up to $283 billion is lost annually from unproductive meetings. The shift we need to move to is that collaboration starts asynchronously. The primary data we have collected is a powerful awakening for leaders and teams as it reveals that asynchronous collaboration can reduce meetings by up to 30% and increase bolder decisions with broader input.

Only 41% of team members believe caring, trusting and supportive relationships exist with other team members. Building relationships in the team on a foundation of commitment and empathy is critical to providing an environment for forgiveness and caring enough to challenge each other. We call this “trust,” but trust breaks down into professional performance and personal relationships. Both need repair.

Only 49% of teams respect and value what other team members contribute. And we have even further to go with proactively building and strengthening solid and committed relationships, particularly in an increasingly hybrid work environment. Without underlying trust and commitment among the team, there is no wonder we see significant gaps in almost every team in high integrity professional behaviors like candor above. The High Return Practices to engineer relationships, empathy and commitment within the team include Long Slow Dinners (the actual detailed practice of shared storytelling), Personal Professional, and Sweet and Sour Check-Ins.

Seventy-one percent of team members do not believe that they and their peers collaboratively engage in the most critical business problems. Awakening to redefining collaboration to be much more inclusive. Most believe that the more inclusive you are in your collaboration, the slower and more watered down the outcomes are. Our data shows very little proactive recognition that we now work in networks and that we should systematically work with external stakeholders who are critical to our success. The opposite is true. Taking broader inputs into decision-making can create bolder and faster decision-making. We call this “Teaming Out,” and never before has it been so approachable than in an increasingly hybrid and remote world of work. The High Return Practice will be a systematic process of hybrid and remote Collaborative Problem Solving and the new research around “The Collaborative Stack.” We will also reveal the practice of “the power of three” associated with small group collaboration.

Fewer than 30% feel they have a collective responsibility to lift each other’s energy and mental well-being. Awakening to mental health and resilience is more than an HR department’s offering of nice-to-have well-being programs and a safety net in times of personal crisis and shifting it to a team’s commitment to collective resilience and each other’s well-being and emotional growth. During the pandemic, we buckled down and wrestled through the crisis as so many teams have done in grave times of the past, but over two years, that brought us to the breaking point; it was not sustainable. Our research during this period has shown that how we perform the work and how difficult it is to get things done in old ways of working contributes more to a team’s resilience than the external stressors. A Co-elevating team feels responsible for tuning each other’s energy like a corporate athlete. The practices start with bringing it out of the shadows and agreeing that this is a team obligation. In addition, we add regular shared energy check-ins, peer-to-peer celebration practices, and working new work routines and personal well-being into each team member’s formal schedules to be described in the piece.

What Well-Trained Leaders Lost Sight Of

Businesses focused on what it means to be a great leader and perhaps lost sight of reinforcing the importance of being a great team and a great team member.

A new direction is required, or we’ll risk…

  • Hub-and-Spoke management hindering agility and exhausting leaders
  • Turf-oriented prioritization putting function or division above that of the organization
  • Conflict avoidance amongst leaders holding collaborative innovation back
  • Silos holding the organization back from the benefit of repeating the value from interdependencies
  • Leaders struggling to prioritize and manage competing demands iteratively

In other words, leaders, teams and organizations will continue failing to reach their full potential without teamship.

A New Social Contract for Team Transformation

We must recognize that the transformation of an organization begins with the transformation of its teams.

Teams need a new social contract to drive investment in unlocking their amazing potential and change how we work together.

Teams of human beings can accomplish extraordinary things.

We aim to Unlock Team Potential and transform the world.
How we do that is by transforming organizations through transforming teams. We teach teams how to Co-Elevate® and become Radically Adaptable so they can become world-class, high-impact hybrid teams powering organizations that transform the world.
Unlock Your Team’s Potential through Well Researched and Tested
High-impact Hybrid Behavioral Practices

We’ve cracked the behavioral code behind the world’s most effective executive teams: strategically, operationally, and behaviorally.

These teams share a powerful combination of values and tested behavioral practices that lead the highest performers to put their egos aside, put the mission first, and share the leadership load with peers.

Virgil Miller

“Let’s get to the key point: this process is a driver of results. FG focuses on action plans and on tying those actions to results. So, it’s not just great team behavior coaching and giving advice; at the end of the day, this is a driver of results.”

Virgil Miller, EVP; President, Group & Individual Benefits Divisions, Aflac

We call the Methodology
Co-Elevating High-Impact Teams

Each Co-Elevating High-Impact Teams (HIT) engagement is custom-designed to the team and organization’s needs, goals and mission. It utilizes our well-researched and tested set of high-return practices we repeatedly coached into your team over multiple sessions.

High-return practices (HRPs) allow your team to achieve extraordinary results. We designed them to shift your team members away from outdated behaviors and facilitate lasting, positive change.

And they can be employed in all contexts—in-person, fully remote, and hybrid.

Hybrid Teams Can Enable Much More Than Before

Dating back to our original work with HBR in 2010, we have known that all global teams are hybrid teams, and now all teams are hybrid, working from different offices and remote locations.

For companies that execute hybrid well, like our client National Instruments, it enables many possibilities never considered before and boosts collaboration. However, firms fail by trying to merely bolt on in-person practices that often hold back colocated teams.

We are hands down the #1 expert on high-performing hybrid teams. So when the pandemic struck, our clients received these tested practices and resources needed for an agile transition into the new hybrid and remote world.

0 +
Years Spent Research
the Future of Work
0 +
Executive Team
Diagnostic Assessments
0
Million Dollars Spent
in Research

Go Higher Together with High-Return Practices

and Become a World-Class High-Impact Hybrid Team

It’s about winning and crossing the finish line together in service of each other and the mission.

“The tangible change has been the ability to escalate and make critical business decisions faster, and ones that stick, because the process is collaborative and therefore the buy-in is higher. In the past, we thought collaborative decision-making and fast decision-making were at tension … There’s no way we would have been able to react with the sort of speed and get the sort of buy-in we see today. It was a breakthrough and realization that there are ways to run a remote forum that are motivating, create energy, and accomplishment”

Eric Starkloff, CEO, National Instruments

Move your team from...

  • Hub-and-Spoke to Peer-to-Peer shared leadership and coaching
  • Conflict avoidance to candid discussions yielding constructive conflict and executable results
  • Passive resistance to change to a team hungry for constant improvement and innovation
  • Silos to cross-collaboration that generates tangible value from interdependencies
  • Turf-oriented to shared mission, goals, and accountability
  • Struggling with agility as an operating system and iteratively prioritizing and managing competing demands
  • Suboptimal to a team reaching its full potential with a new social contract

Your team will cross the finish line together by harnessing peer-to-peer commitment, candor, and collaboration.

“We went from an engineering construction company to one of the world’s leading providers of cyber. From a company launching satellites to leading expertise in missile defense with our own software and hardware products. We produced two Covid products during the pandemic. Those have been huge outputs of this journey — just the unleashing of innovation.”

Chuck Harrington, former Chairman & CEO, Parsons

Chuck Harrington

Eight Key HIT Team Predictors

Candor: The team does not avoid conflict. Members challenge one another openly and speak candidly in service of our mission, even when it feels risky to do so or when we are outside our area of expertise.

Collaboration and Co-Creation: The team does not have silos. Members collaborate and create tangible value from our interdependencies.

Teaming Out: The team is not encumbered by hierarchy or control. All members strategically build authentic, deep relationships with external stakeholders who are critical to our success.
Peer-To-Peer Accountability: Members meet their goals and commitments. We hold one other accountable and are dedicated to doing whatever it takes to succeed together.

Development: The team is a group of seekers aware and open about our growth areas and proactively providing coaching to our teammates.

Energy: Members maintain engagement and accept responsibility for elevating one another’s energy, celebrating our successes, and expressing gratitude.

Relationships: Members are deeply committed to one another. We lead with generosity and make caring, trusting, and supportive connections.

Outcomes: Our team is achieving its full potential as it pursues breakthrough innovation and transformation.
Discover how your team & organization stack up by
taking our free team diagnostic now

How does a Co-Elevating High-Impact Teams Work?

Ferrazzi Greenlight pioneered team coaching and the use of the staff meeting as the inoculation point for change. Through more than 20 years of research, we have found that coaching teams over an extended period and in a transformation-focused staff meeting setting offers unparalleled outcomes and bottom-line returns.

The results far exceed those achieved through one-time events or coaching focused on individuals.

Throughout the program, we help your team take the critical next step of converting awareness into action by creating behavioral change and installing a set of proprietary high-return practices that have been shown to spark exponential growth. Each of the sessions functions like a scrimmage for a sports team. In a psychologically safe environment, your team members collaboratively engage on your most pressing business problems, encouraging them to try out new behaviors and gain real-time feedback from the coach and their peers. We dissect behavioral blockers as they appear, purge bad habits, and practice new behaviors until they are engrained in the fabric of your team and your organization’s culture.

High Impact Teams Transformation Chart

Co-Elevating High-Impact Teams Create Unprecedented Value For An Organization

We guarantee that your team will develop supportive relationships, emerge with a shared sense of ownership of outcomes, and generate heightened tangible value from their interdependencies.

Further, we’ll equip them with high-return practices that stimulate a broader cultural change that will impact every meeting in which they participate.

What does unlocking your dream team look like?

Parsons CEO Chuck Harrington’s audacious vision to reinvent the company for the future was stalling. He wanted pushback and constructive conflict among his leadership team but was met with heads-down execution and what felt like passive resistance.

Harrington partnered with Ferrazzi Greenlight to ignite the company’s innovation culture within a year. By the end, they were able to transform from an engineering construction company to one of the world leaders in cyber, defense, and critical infrastructure and go public.

Case Study

How Parsons reinvented itself and went public in one year.

What if this Doesn’t Work for My Team?

Keith Ferrazzi - Speaking

We’ve heard concerns before. Sometimes it comes in the form of, “what if my team is too broken for this to work?”

We treat clients like friends and only ally ourselves with companies and people we believe in strongly. And we believe deeply in ensuring delivery of the highest value and measurable results.

Here’s how that translates into a promise to you:

If we do not deliver on meaningful moving the needle for your team across the eight key HIT dimensions, we’ll partner with the team to iterate to get it right. And if that still does not produce results, we’ll issue your company a refund.

We are this confident in our work. If we do not show you improvements, we did not earn your money.

To date, none of our clients have taken us up on our guarantee. Ever.

Best,
Keith Ferrazzi, Founder and Chairman, Ferrazzi Greenlight

Clients

What Some Of Our Clients Say

“Ferrazzi is the ultimate game changer helping firms large and small find their right path through a volatile new world. I was nervous at first to invite him inside the tent, but it was an overwhelming success.”

Ted Cronin, CEO & Founder, Manchester Capital Management

Debra Fiori

“With the building of trust and candor over time, these sessions were our secret weapon to helping each other brainstorm and solve barriers, challenges, and opportunities to drive growth in the business.”

Debra Fiori, former CHRO, Parsons

“Our work with Ferrazzi Greenlight radically accelerated our growth, which enabled our strongly indpendent executive team to address key tenets of our strategy, shape our team and our future.”

Peter Diamandis, CEO, XPRIZE

Mike Clementi

“For us, it is all about the impact these sessions have over time. The major benefit is the collaboration and trust that the team has. They are often heard saying, ‘how can we make this better together’ they have a clear methodology based on both experience and science and brings it together in an engaging manner where the team feels the needed change and puts the model immediately into action. Strong recommendation for all teams.”

Mike Clementi, EVP of Human Resources, Unilever

High-Impact Teams Coaching

Transform the way your people work together and build teams, departments, and an organization that can uncover new growth opportunities, respond and adapt to rapidly changing markets, and win big.

Change Management

Change how your team initiates, plans, delivers and celebrates transformation efforts. We bring together proven approaches such as the best of new enrollment methods, co-creation, peer-to-peer coaching, and engaging experiences that empower teams to achieve their highest potential.