2 Collaborate through Inclusion
The pandemic forced a sudden revolution in collaboration at most organizations. The necessity to begin operating through remote work exposed a rising awareness of what has always been true: collaboration has nothing to do with where employees show up for work; it has everything to do with how they show up. Outcomes have always mattered more than presentee-ism, even if performance hasn’t always been measured or rewarded that way.
As companies began reconsidering their policies toward remote work, there was a great deal of wrongheadedness in the debate. Many leaders continued to insist that physically proximate work is inherently the best form of collaboration, citing examples of teams that had lost productivity by doing remote work poorly. The trouble is that so many made the move to remote on a strict survival basis that they neglected to take full advantage of the opportunities remote work afforded. Relatively few organizations achieved higher levels of productivity by truly optimizing their remote work practices for greater collaboration and much wider inclusion.
At the same time, 2020 sparked a new awakening to the importance of diversity, equality, and inclusion in the workplace, as companies made earnest commitments to diversity metrics in areas such as pay equality, positional equality, and board equality. Through discussions with thousands of executives at the Go Forward to Work (GFTW) Institute, it became clear that leaders need to think beyond these metrics and strive to create an authentic culture of inclusion and belonging. There needs to be a matching commitment to having diverse voices heard within organizations.
Telva McGruder, chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer at General Motors, said it well: “If we can leverage the call for inclusion today around eradicating racism—using this as the hook to really get leaders to open up to let people be heard—it’s the right step forward for unleashing innovation overall.”
At Ferrazzi Greenlight, our coaching has long emphasized the important role of inclusion in collaboration, and the new world of work allows and requires that inclusion be accomplished at scale. Inclusion in the workplace must extend to race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and physical ability because it’s the right thing to do and because all successful innovation and transformation benefits from including the full diversity of voices and perspectives.
The trouble, however, is that few corporate teams display the inclusive culture necessary to lead our diverse workforce through the challenges of business transformation. In fact, most teams lack the essential collaborative behaviors proven to be most effective among top-performing teams. For example, studies at the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute (home of GFTW) have shown the following statistics:
- Only two in five executive teams begin the coaching program feeling that their teams are bound by caring, trusting, supportive relationships.
- Some 74 percent of team members are conflict avoidant and lack the courage to speak their minds.
- Around 72 percent of team members do not believe that they and their peers collaborate on the most important business problems.
- Some 71 percent of team members report back-channel conversations and gossip that obstruct honest airings of issues, deflate morale, and prevent teams from coming together as a single unit.
Inclusion is the vital ingredient missing from these teams. As Telva put it, “Inclusion is not just in service of the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] agenda. It’s core to any organization’s capability to transform.”
The pandemic forced many teams into crisis mode, and human nature bound them closer together in their unfamiliar, resource-deprived environment. Call it the Burning Man effect. Participants in GFTW research shared stories of becoming innovative out of urgency. They ignored turf to just get the job done, crowdsourced ideas, shut down silos, and brought their customers closer to them because the teams could no longer travel to the customers. They told of creating deeper partnerships with vendors because they had a stake in their vendors’ survival. Instead of grinding down vendors on price, the team members were calling to ask, “Are you OK?”
And in the most intimate form of collaboration, all of us were more readily open to each other as coaches for informal learning and professional development. We started realizing that there are people whose advice we could seek everywhere, but we had to reach out to them deliberately instead of waiting for the occasional serendipitous get-together.
From our perspective at Ferrazzi Greenlight, where we have been coaching teams toward collaboration and inclusion for twenty years, the pandemic revealed the efficacy of many practices we had long been advocating for. Back in September 2012, Keith hosted a webinar for Harvard Business Review called “How Virtual Teams Can Outperform Traditional Teams.” Between 2012 and 2014, he wrote more than a dozen pieces for HBR on high-return practices for virtual and hybrid team effectiveness, all based on millions of dollars’ worth of original research done by Ferrazzi Greenlight and its corporate partners.1
During the pandemic year of 2020 and afterward, we studied dozens of companies that had been suddenly immersed into the new world of virtual and remote work. When we introduced our high-return practices to these teams and then compared performance results to their pre-pandemic benchmarks, we documented sizable shifts in team efficacy across all the markers of high-performing teams. These markers included candor, accountability, and development. We also studied virtual teams that were not using our high-return practices and found that their performance had dropped. Virtual and remote teamwork works, but only if you do it right.
These and other discoveries about best practices and methodologies makes this the foundational chapter for radical adaptability. The chapter is organized in five steps that begin with your core team and show how to shift from traditional leadership competencies to co-elevating team competencies. From there we redefine and expand the definition of teams altogether. We show how to team out beyond internal silos and org chart boundaries. From there we move to using virtual tools to crowdsource solutions throughout the organization; we look at partnering with vendors and clients and co-elevating with peers inside and outside the organization for growth and development. These fundamental high-return practices for collaboration will be revisited throughout the book, and some of them are applicable in almost every chapter that follows.
Out of the pandemic, this new world of work has emerged with a dire need for new work rules in virtual, remote, asynchronous, and hybrid working styles. The pandemic introduced a culture of collaboration and inclusion that so many of us have advocated for so many years. Now we have a unique opportunity to institute permanent change.
“The money saved in rent and travel costs doesn’t belong to the bottom line,” said Martin Lindstrom, author of the bestseller Buyology and one of the world’s top 20 business thinkers, according to Thinkers50. “It belongs instead to investments in collaborative culture. Now is the time to reinvent what organizational culture means.”
Practice Cocreation through Co-elevation
In 2020, the pandemic forced companies into a new standard of highly collaborative behaviors that we saw over and over again in our research on high-performing co-elevating teams. For a long time, polite, cooperative teamwork was sufficient to get the job done. Team members would operate independently, fulfilling their roles and assigned obligations, and would only slip into actual collaboration when it was necessary. On high-performing teams, however, the objective is to go beyond cooperation and create a dynamic of constant and unbounded cocreation. On such teams, interdependent members share accountability for each other’s results, pick each other up when one of them needs help, and share responsibility for crossing the finish line together. That’s the essence of what we call co-elevating teamwork, when team members together create results that also raise their capabilities as individuals. The new tools for virtual and blended teamwork make this message more compelling and more suited for the new world of work, where teamwork moves beyond mere cooperation and becomes truly cocreative.
How Fox Factory became a co-elevating team
Mike Dennison was a relatively new CEO at Fox Factory in Northern California when 2020 presented him with a set of complex challenges: How do we take on the organizational reengineering demanded by the pandemic, in the backdrop of local wildfires, social unrest, customer lockdowns, and overstretched supply chains? And how do we do all this and still remain on course with our audacious strategy, to double the size of our business to $2 billion within five years?
Fox Factory designs and manufactures high-performance parts for snowmobiles, mountain bikes, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, off-road cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles. The company traditionally operated as a set of product lines, with each product line leader accountable for its results. Mike was determined to bring the two divisions closer together, partly prompted by pandemic-related operational problems but mainly because cross-team collaboration toward unified goals would stimulate growth and create new value from team interdependency. Collaboration and inclusion—moving toward becoming a co-elevating team—was the way forward. In a virtual meeting with his newly integrated team members from around the country, Mike put the question on the table: “What can we do to increase our growth by 30 percent above and beyond acquisitions and the traditional growth plan?” He knew that Fox Factory’s ambitious future growth would only be achieved through a total reengineering of the company’s go-to-market and product-development strategy, but he did not restrict the question to one division or the marketing department. This was everyone’s problem to solve.
By the end of 2020, Fox Factory had achieved record quarters for both sales and earnings per share. The outstanding results, said Mike, “reinforced our confidence that we could handle any tactical crisis with strategic initiatives and with a new co-elevating operating system. While day-to-day work was being done, we were still able to implement real collaborative foundational management systems and processes for the future. That was a true testament to the alignment and unprecedented teamwork we were able to adopt within the organization.”
Pulling together as an integrated team was the only way to deal with so many crises at once. “We needed to remain incredibly nimble as shifting and new challenges changed daily, from Covid cases to wildfires to social unrest and, eventually, overstretched supply chains,” Mike recalled. “In fact, there were many weeks where we battled all the above at the same time. Success was measured both in terms of organizational and enterprise survival and real improvement toward our long-term goals.”
We have seen co-elevating teams like the one at Fox Factory create tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value through innovation and transformation, supported by people’s stubborn refusal to let each other fail. Keith has coached these same co-elevating behaviors and practices at some of the oldest and most hierarchical Fortune 500 companies, at entrepreneurial midmarket brands, and even at fast-growing startups. In all these instances, the highest-performing teams, fueled by co-elevation, were able to uncover unexpected growth and control downside risk. They shared the load of leadership and fought united like a band of brothers and sisters to achieve audacious goals and extraordinary results. Their first step on that journey was to explicitly agree to new behavioral norms for teamwork: to recontract.
Recontracting for co-elevation
The work of a true co-elevating leader is to promote a shared sense of responsibility among team members and nurturing a common ethos with which everyone is committed to each other’s success. Before the integration of Fox Factory’s operations, each product line would rise and fall on its own performance. But to achieve the kind of growth Mike desired, there would have to be bolder thinking that pushed the leaders of all product lines to seek new ways of collaborating. Product line team members had always had strong accountability and met their goals and commitments. In the face of a crisis, and with their new aspirations for growth, they had to become dedicated to hold each other accountable. Instead of the traditional hub-and-spoke concept of a team, with the leader at the center, co-elevation requires interdependency among team members in the form of candid peer-to-peer support and peer-to-peer accountability. Even when team members are competing for resources or put their opinions first, they can still commit to each other’s success as a foundation for mutual support. No one is successful until everyone is successful; the team crosses the finish line together.
The GFTW faculty members noted how naturally teams in crisis fell into many of these highly productive behaviors. Under normal circumstances, however, the best way to achieve this sense of shared commitment is by having the team agree to an explicit social contract for its collaboration. This process is described at length in Keith’s previous book, Leading Without Authority. The team members need to openly discuss and debate all the desirable attributes of team behavior and then agree to support each other’s growth and success in maintaining those behaviors. The transparency of the process and the contractual nature of the agreement make living up to the behavioral standards a serious commitment, even a matter of personal integrity.
Signing an agreement to adhere to specific behaviors may seem a little contrived, because typical collaborative efforts begin with little or no discussion of these issues. That is especially true when all the team members have known each other for years and are colocated. It is seductive to believe that if we are all working in the same space every day, then we all share similar understandings about commitments and accountability. And yet, we have all been in enough dysfunctional collaborations to know this is far from the truth. In any collaboration, a common social contract needs to be negotiated, or a faulty one is likely to be the norm.
Recontracting is especially important with virtual and blended teams, where there will most likely be remote workers who are not equally included. Adding remote team members can encourage the creation of new social norms for high-level collaboration within the organization. If you need an excuse to shake things up, the expansion of virtual and blended teams can give you a chance to be a change agent and seize the opportunity to recontract for a shared team culture of co-elevation and cocreation even better than what existed when the teams were colocated.
For any leader, initiating a candid recontracting discussion begins with a simple exploration of observable behaviors:
- Which working behaviors need to improve in order for us to achieve our immediate objectives?
- Which new high-return practices should we adopt to support and sustain our improved collaborative behaviors going forward?
Leaders can then ask the following questions, which are based on the benchmarking survey Ferrazzi Greenlight conducts with teams at the beginning of, during, and at the end of coaching engagements:
- Does our team have conflict avoidance? Do we challenge the thinking in the room and speak candidly even when it is risky to do so?
- Does our team have silos? Do we collaborate and create tangible value from the interdependencies that exist between us?
- Is our team encumbered by hierarchy or control?
- Are we dedicated to holding each other accountable, doing whatever it takes to cross the finish line together?
- Are our team members deeply committed to each other, leading with generosity and building caring, trusting, and supportive relationships with one another?
Maintaining psychological safety within the team takes deliberate and focused effort, whether your team members sit next to you at the office or live on the other side of the world. Recontracting goes far beyond the kind of casual relationship-building that occurs among office mates who nod at each other in the hallways and occasionally have lunch together. The contract has the benefit of reminding everyone what the ideal team behaviors are, causing them to reflect personally on where they might be falling short.
When Ferrazzi Greenlight begins work with a team, we ask the team members to rate their team according to twenty-two co-elevating statements. Then, through the coaching process, we survey the members and track the scores on all twenty-two of these statements as indicators of progress. First-rate executive teams at organizations like Fox Factory, Delta Air Lines, General Motors, Verizon, Unilever, Salesforce, and many others have gone through this process to raise their expectations for themselves and to raise their game.
Physical distance is not the main roadblock to co-elevation involving remote workers. The chief problems to be overcome involve strategic distance (a lack of team alignment) operational distance (a lack of well-oiled team process to operationalize the work), and affinity distance (the lack of team members’ commitment to one another). Studies show that of these three measures of distance, affinity distance has the greatest effect on innovation, trust, learning, and team outcomes.2 Close the gaps in affinity distance (commitment for each other’s success) among your team members, and most of the issues involving the other two dimensions—strategic distance and operational distance—will organically become much more manageable. And in no instance does physical distance register if a team has recontracted for co-elevation.
Leading a co-elevating team through the process of recontracting takes time, courage, and perhaps some coaching, but it should not feel like drudgery. The point of co-elevation is to get everyone striving to be better—better for their own careers and better for each other. It should be a joyous and expressive enterprise. During the height of the pandemic, when stress levels were high and exhaustion was rampant, more teams reported that the members felt more connected and committed to each other than they had ever before. People pulled together and committed to a new set of rules for that moment. Now the open question is, how can we sustain that sense of mutual commitment as a matter of choice, not crisis?
In that sense, co-elevation has much in common with a barn-raising, the Amish tradition in which everyone pitches in selflessly while learning from master crafters directing the work. To the Amish, raising a barn is hardly the sole function of a barn-raising. The gathering is also an opportunity to build relationships and strengthen their shared Amish culture. Some Amish refer to a barn-raising event as a frolic, from an Old Dutch word for “merry” or “cheerful.”3 You want your teams to function in the same way. If your collaborations don’t feel like frolics, it is likely that some of your teammates don’t feel psychologically safe, and your co-elevating team needs to resume its recontracting discussions.
As a critical new leadership art form, co-elevation improves over time and with the help of methods we’ve researched and identified as high-return practices. In 2020, as we shifted our coaching business to fully remote team coaching, we saw a powerful opportunity to test all these remote and virtual work high-return practices that we’d been developing for more than ten years. We found massive shifts in measurable change across all the teams we were working with—a 79 percent increase in candor, 75 percent increase in development, 46 percent increase in collaboration, and 44 percent increase in accountability.
After working with teams at NI, formerly National Instruments, CEO Eric Starkloff told us, “It was a breakthrough. 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.” He said that before our coaching, there had been a widespread assumption that collaborative and fast were at odds with one another when it came to decision-making. “The tangible change has been the ability to escalate and make critical business decisions faster. And [decisions] that stick, because the process is collaborative, and therefore, the buy-in is higher with many more inputs.”
High-return practices for collaboration
After the new social contract is agreed to among team members, it’s time to initiate a set of practices that support and encourage the new behaviors so they can grow into habits and rituals. Following the lead of Fox Factory, NI, and many others in 2020, here is how you can try some of the best high-return practices that we have identified at Ferrazzi Greenlight and GFTW Institute.
Go to the breakout rooms
Virtual environments require frequent use of breakout rooms as acceleration pods of deeper collaboration. Avoid seeing yourself as the center of your team. Your job is to ask the smart questions and to break the team into smaller groups of two or three people. During each breakout, have everyone take notes in a shared document and then come back to the larger meeting with reports from their group. Even if you do not have time for formal report-outs from each group, the owner of the question will have the benefit later by having access to everyone’s written input. Our research shows that teams that operate in this way solve problems faster and get bolder contributions from many diverse voices. That’s because people who are conflict-averse are reluctant to share openly in a big room and feel more psychologically safe in breakout rooms of two or three people. Organizational behaviorist Amy Edmondson and her team of researchers at Harvard define psychological safety in four simple dimensions. Team members feel safe under these conditions:
- When it is permissible to make mistakes
- When sensitive topics are openly discussed
- When team members are openly willing to help each other
- When differences among team members are welcome, that is, when team members feel free to be themselves4
All of these factors are enhanced in small groups, where team members feel the safest to speak openly in service of the team, its mission, and each other. People in small groups have more courage to express themselves about difficult questions. They will self-critique and weed out weaker ideas. When groups return to report back, our research institute has found little evidence of dilution of courage or candor—an estimated 15 percent dilution at most. That’s because of the power of the intimacy in the breakout rooms. Team members don’t want to lose face by watering down their candor when they leave the breakout and rejoin the main group. Commit at least 50 percent of meeting time to work in breakout rooms, and you will see the value of deep candid collaboration radically accelerate.
Practice collaborative problem-solving
All these tools are critical to executing on collaborative problem-solving (CPS), one of most powerful virtual meeting frameworks we know. Developed through many years of coaching Fortune 500 executive teams, CPS focuses on a single business-critical question or several of them in a sixty- to ninety-minute meeting. For at least half of the session, the team breaks into small groups of three or four people to discuss the question or questions and report back. The questions could involve how to achieve a specific upside goal or mitigate a specific downside risk. Craft the question carefully so that it’s easy to have up-or-down answers. What innovations could we bring to the retail experience? What’s most likely to derail us in the next six months? From there, everyone preps by drawing in data and insights from their wider teams. Everyone is also clear on who will make the final decision: who owns the question. The question owner gives instant feedback, for example, either a clear “Yes, we will do this,” or a “No, and here is why not,” or a “Maybe we will look at this and do more research.”
The aim is not consensus; it is robust dialogue and an action-oriented conclusion. The most powerful element of CPS is the small-group breakout process, because it encourages candor and diminishes conflict avoidance. When meetings consist mainly of time-wasting report-outs, that’s often a symptom of a team struggling with candor and failing to collaborate effectively. CPS can break the logjam and open up the possibility of fewer meetings and more asynchronous collaboration. As later chapters will show, CPS is an essential meeting framework that can be used to accelerate results through every application of radical adaptability.
Cut back on meetings
No matter whether they’re in person or online, about one-third of your meetings are an absolute waste of time and energy. Meetings also take a heavy toll on the mental focus of individual team members. Too many meetings during the day is the reason so many people work nights and weekends just to catch up with work that requires unbroken periods of time for deep concentration. At GFTW Institute, we’ve studied asynchronous collaboration, which is a way of using virtual tools to accomplish better and more thoroughly what you might have scheduled a meeting for. Asynchronous means doing more work through collaborating through written or recorded form without meeting at the same time. This kind of work allows team members time to express themselves clearly and commit themselves clearly. The keys to successful asynchronous work include (1) simplified, concise communication; (2) clearly identifying the decision-maker for each action item; (3) making every communication transparent to the whole team; (4) being responsive to every communication you receive; and (5) allowing your team time to review the material you share with them.
GitLab and Dropbox are just two of many companies that now have a policy of “asynchronous by default” to encourage team leaders to avoid scheduling meetings. Both companies offer handy guides on etiquette for asynchronous collaboration and writing tips as well.5 A reasonable goal to shoot for is a 30 percent reduction in meeting hours next month. Start with a conversation that relaxes everyone and arouses empathetic feelings for one another. Go deeper than the superficial small talk you might make at the start of an in-person meeting. With team members scattered at different locations, it’s important to warm everyone up to their shared humanity, so they’re more than floating faces on a computer screen.
Share the sweet and sour
If you must meet, open meetings with relationship and empathy. For larger meetings, a good way to conjure the spirit of empathy quickly is to begin by asking everyone to share something sweet and something sour in their lives. The sweet could be something simple, like an achievement by your child or anticipating a friend’s visit from out of town. The sour might push people for greater vulnerability, however, to speak of a loved one in the hospital or a spouse having difficulties. Social scientists have long advocated using the power of vulnerability and empathy to bring people together, an idea popularized by best-selling author Brené Brown.6 Empathy is always of value in an in-person context, but it is absolutely necessary online.
Conduct a personal-professional check-in
With each virtual encounter, whether it’s a meeting or a call with someone you have not spoken to for a few days, be sure to do a quick personal-professional check-in at the start. What is really going on personally with you? What is really going on professionally? We add the word really because effective co-elevation requires team members to have a sense of how everyone is is doing mentally, emotionally, and physically. This goes beyond sweet-and-sour small talk. You need to understand what’s on your teammates’ minds if you want to operate at the full potential of your team relationships. Once teammates feel invited to share their lives with each other, miracles can happen out of such conversations—miracles of service and commitment that build lasting, trusting relationships.
Maximize your use of online collaborative tools
The pace of collaboration is quickening as bold ideas become more portable and shareable. A new generation of online apps have greatly improved the capabilities for asynchronous and real-time collaboration among team members. That way, teams can cut back on meetings, or when meetings are necessary, members who missed them can catch up later by watching the video. Look beyond those tools to a new generation of virtual whiteboards and apps for brainstorming and collaboration that make asynchronous collaboration easier and more effective. Many of the new apps offer fast and useful group feedback through polling and survey features borrowed from the world of social media and gaming.
San Francisco-based startup Mural is one of the companies that gets it, with its motto, “Solve important problems faster.” It allows users to invite unlimited numbers of visitors to digital workspaces, where they can break into groups, set meeting timers, and vote on ideas, all while integrating with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other popular platforms. Teams from IBM, Intuit, and GitHub have signed on to Mural because it has caught on to the need to be simple, fast, and fun to use.
Take candor breaks
Team members who truly care about each other will offer candid criticism to express sincere concern for the good of the team—the essence of co-elevation. But if you ever get the sense that everyone’s avoiding the elephant in the room, calling a candor break is the best way to discover what is being held back. Pause the meeting when the time feels right, and ask the team, “What’s not being said?” Ask for a candor break, then go into breakout rooms, where everyone addresses that same question. Take notes in each breakout room, then share them with the whole group.
Break through Silos by Teaming Out
The animating principle of co-elevation is what we call teaming out—reaching beyond the organizational limits of your team to draw in others to cocreate solutions. During the pandemic, we observed how this dynamic drove companies to blow apart their organizational design and tear up their organization charts to look for bold ideas by teaming out across their businesses. I (Keith) titled my previous book Leading Without Authority to point out this shift in the definition of leadership beyond bureaucratic limitations. Everyone is a leader. Everyone is obliged to speak up and step up when the occasion calls for it.
For every leader, teaming out begins with the question “Who’s my team?” In the new world of work, the answer is not what you’ve traditionally thought of as your team. Members of your team include whomever you think might be critical to achieving your mission. You must be willing to look beyond organization design and lines of authority and consider the people—inside and outside the organization—who are needed to join you in cocreation.
From there, you must reach out to those people through the three leadership points of serve, care, and share. Ask how you can be of service to them. How can you demonstrate that you care about the mission but also about them? What can you share of your own experience that makes it easier for your associates to connect with you? From all these perspectives, how can you build the bonds of mutual commitment? These are the principles our colleague Rob Whitfield, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, coached into play at Aflac, one of America’s leading insurance companies.
Serving, caring, sharing
Virgil Miller is not a man who misses his numbers. President of Aflac Group and executive vice president and chief operating officer of Aflac U.S., Virgil is a former US Marine who was determined to push forward the company’s digital transformation.
“I started a digital journey with Aflac years ago,” said Virgil, who has studied the science of teams and collaboration. “Our digital transformation has been in flight, and we continue to pilot new tools. But I felt this would be a great time to accelerate and to get people to think differently. To do that, I needed our teams to be pushed and to be challenged and really collaborate more.”
At the front line, Aflac’s call center was caught between serving internal and external clients—fielding calls from existing customers, the policyholders (typically a benefit administrator at an employer), and sales agents, intermediaries, brokers and agencies, with sales accounting for about a third of incoming calls. The problem was that the call center was part of the operations reporting line, but sales was not. The answer was to break through the silos on the org chart and bring together the sales team and the customer support team in the call center to design digital solutions that worked for both teams. The challenge for both groups was to lead without authority—to show they could collaborate to solve a problem that affected both of them without needing an explicit executive mandate to initiate action.
Digital automation and a new approach to peer-to-peer coaching was the answer. Fifteen of the most digitally advanced sales reps were given the responsibility to transform how the call center was run. They became the vanguard of a digital-first movement. They coached their peers on accessing information through a new set of online training articles, video tutorials, and a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) channel that was spun up in a blistering six weeks. Instead of needing to phone the call center for help, sales agents learned through peer-to-peer support to rely on these new tools. Call and chat volume fell by 40 percent, while there were substantial improvements in agent experience, and in customer experience as well. Annual savings for Aflac, if the program were to be repeated throughout the organization, was estimated at millions of dollars.
The reduced strain on the call center agents has made everyone happier. “There’s always been intermittent collaboration between the call center and the sales team,” said Nicole Evans, director of customer service center process, innovation, and control. “But since Covid, it has been what I would call a rekindled romance. And it has helped us all better understand the necessity of moving digital, increased our desire to do it, and given us a shared sense of purpose.” Put another way: the Covid crisis accelerated transformation for Aflac, not just digitally but culturally. Amid a crisis, Aflac found an opportunity to co-elevate.
“I’ve been at Aflac [for] twenty-eight years, and I’ve never seen the level of collaboration and partnership that I’m seeing today,” said Blake Voltz, vice president of customer solutions center operations. “It has allowed us to understand the needs of both teams and develop a program that capitalizes on our strengths.”
Faculty with GFTW Institute observed a recurring theme in 2020: solutions previously seen as impossible became apparent when people looked beyond the boundaries of their organization and their control. The pandemic forced many to recognize the severe limitations of their organizational hierarchies and how important it is to cut through those limitations in the new world of work.
Earning permission to lead
The most exciting aspect of building strong co-elevating teams in the new world of work is that the process is not exclusive to reporting relationships or confined by organization design. The co-elevating ethos of empathy, generosity, and candor naturally compels the group to expand the boundaries of its reach beyond the tight inner circle. Great teams keep expanding their reach using all the tools and practices discussed so far, putting them to use in expanding the teams’ reach far beyond the limitations of their core team members. They team out by redefining the shape and scope of the team according to the mission at hand, not the org chart.
This process of teaming out includes whoever outside the formal team is needed to get the job done. The key is to adopt a leading-without-authority mindset. To achieve this, follow four basic steps to reinvent your team scope and earn permission to lead:
- Redefine who your team is. In the case of Aflac, people had to see beyond their operational authority of the call center to define the solution differently—to digitize the sales organization. Once they did, they saw a way to transform the situation they had struggled with for years, getting squeezed between two customer groups they were desperate to serve with limited resources.
- Accept that it is all on you. Crisis creates audacity and a resourcefulness that is often not seen outside of such extreme circumstances. Post-pandemic, we need to tap into the same resourcefulness as a regular source of inspiration and opportunity, to ignore silos and boundaries, and to team out through co-elevation.
- Earn permission to lead. Remember the three words serve, care, and share. How can you be of service to a teammate today, for example, giving the sales reps hours of their day back to them? How can you demonstrate that you care by creating and paying for an initiative that would better serve them and their needs? What can you share of your own experience to make it easier for your teammates to be of service to you? How can you express your care as Virgil did, by reaching out and building a relationship with the head of sales to ensure that the call center initiative was seen as it was intended—an improvement in service of the sales organization?
- Cocreate the solution with this broader team. The value of broader inclusion is that the team can find solutions that are not available to those with more limited exposure to the problem at hand. For example, the collaboration between the sales and call center/operations teams at Aflac helped define solutions that would work for both teams.
Hybridize Teamwork for Inclusion and Crowdsourcing
After a few months of using their new remote tools during the pandemic, some organizations truly seized the advantages of engaging teams in a new way. They began to explore how online inclusion and collaboration could fuel innovation at scale. By experimenting with these new tools, global companies like Google, AT&T, and Deutsche Telekom began crowdsourcing bold ideas about product innovation and policy development across employee networks.
Research has shown how this form of inclusion can improve both business growth and employee morale, engagement, and retention. One study concluded, “Because many large companies have pockets of expertise and knowledge scattered across different locations, we have found that harnessing the cognitive diversity within organizations can open up rich new sources of innovation. Indeed, internal crowdsourcing is a particularly effective way for companies to engage younger employees and people working on the front lines.”7
Survey platforms and other tools to support such rapid and efficient outreach have been around for years. Most, however, had been underutilized as mere one-way broadcast media. Even remote town halls were often produced as noninteractive video presentations. For many companies, it took the pandemic’s shift to remote working to reveal the tremendous potential of virtual tools to promote collaboration and inclusion at scale.
Fabian Garcia, CEO of Unilever North America and Mike Clementi, Unilever’s head of global people ops and North America head of HR, were two partners in such an innovation. In 2016, they launched a commitment to diversity and inclusion under the banner Every Voice Matters. But it took until 2020, in the throes of the pandemic, for the program to gain true momentum. The year 2020 produced some of the best financial results Unilever North America had ever seen. But Fabian and Mike wondered, how can we sustain the pace of growth and change into 2021 and beyond?
“I think what 2020 did was accelerate what was already there and compress it,” Mike explained. “It was a pressure cooker of work. We realized there was no way we were going to repeat the level of ambition with just muscle and sweat equity. We needed to be more precise around the way that we engineered work. We started to then think about ‘how do we do it?’ and understanding that there isn’t the capacity to repeat in 2021 unless we made better choices—it was all about choices. Then it was about getting new thinking and multiple people working on it.” And that’s where internal crowdsourcing came into play.
Annual planning at Unilever had always cascaded down from leadership. The year’s top strategic priorities were chosen and handed down to the next level for execution. But in 2020, Fabian and Mike opted to crowdsource ideas from senior managers (below the executive leadership team) to identify the greatest opportunities for growth and the likely risks they needed to avoid. Crowdsourcing allowed the organization to open the aperture wide for new ideas to flow in. Teams were invited to think strategically and submit ideas that promised enterprise-wide impact, while squads were formed to fine-tune all initiatives. To build a sustainable basis for this work, Unilever built crowdsourcing time into people’s daily schedules—making it clear that the work was high priority and high visibility.
“We had some people work in natural teams and some volunteer to be part of the squad for the year ahead,” said Mike. “We had very strong engagement [and] new ideas and wrote clear objectives and key results that were signed off by the top team.”
From an initial list of more than ninety initiative submissions, six priorities emerged to help Unilever win in 2021. When leaders actively reach beyond their businesses to seek out fresh ideas, listen, and act on the solutions, the benefits stretch beyond the commercial impact of whatever result is put into practice, whatever new product is launched, or whatever service is taken to market. This inclusive approach to collaboration on the most important questions facing the business—its future success and direction—creates an alignment with mission that will filter through the organization. To the evergreen culture question, “Why are we doing this?” there is no better answer than “I was among the voices that said we should.”
Deepen External Partnerships
Faced with a pandemic-driven disruption of traditional go-to-market models and supply chains, many companies seized the opportunity to co-elevate with both customers and suppliers—to reach out and draw them closer in. Virtual tools added speed and scale to such collaborations, allowing businesses to tap new sources of external information and insight that they had never directly engaged with before. These deepened external partnerships, forged in the chaos of the pandemic, have been revealed as an essential collaborative best practice in the new world of work.
At Dow, Inc., the bold, inclusive approach to external partnerships helped make 2020 a year of innovation and transformation. Dan Futter, Dow’s chief commercial officer, explained how the business generated 80 percent more leads in 2020 than it had in even its historically best years. Its new digital engagement strategy was the dominant driver of this growth. Prior to 2020, Dow had relied on relationships with existing partners and trade shows to generate business leads. But when the pandemic shut down live events in the first quarter of 2020, Dow had to rethink its customary approach to lead generation.
“If you’d have asked us what we were doing,” Dan said, “most people would have said, ‘Oh, we’re trying to replace what we always did in person.’ It was going to be a digital facsimile of the old way of working. By about June, it was, ‘Hey, well, this doesn’t have to be some pale imitation. This remote-first strategy is different. It gives us opportunities to do things better than we did in the past, and it overcomes some of the limitations of doing things in person.’ ”
Using digital tools opened up new opportunities for Dow to work with its small customers, the thousands of bench chemists and formulators who use Dow products but who had lacked direct communication with the company.
“What we were able to prove is that digital-first was a great democratizer for us,” said Dan. “It meant that we could talk to anybody at any time, irrespective of the gaps between us and how we transacted, and so we suddenly had our know-how and the insights of those customers brought together in a way that had never happened before. It was a superb opportunity for us to get more people at the table.”
Market information that used to be filtered through a distribution chain now reaches Dow directly from frontline customers—and at a previously unimagined scale. “Where I used to talk to one chemist at a time, now I’m talking to hundreds at a time,” said Dan. “Where I used to not get any insights about the market other than what was fed to me by my distributor, now I can get that direct from the people engaged in the market and the insights that come from it. It’s absolutely real, and we’re just scratching the surface of where that can get us to.”
At Dow, 2020 was truly a year of finding growth through a radical approach to inclusion and collaboration. Instead of exchanging emails, the company is deeply engaged in virtual, synchronous collaboration with its partners, and there is no intention to snap back to old ways of working. Besides opening up new dialogues, digital virtual tools have been used to cocreate solutions in real time with external partners. “I used to have to jump through all sorts of security hurdles to do an external WebEx,” Dan recalled. “And we never had shared my team space with customers. We suddenly said, ‘Why are we keeping all these security barriers? Let’s have a shared program, a team space. We can be sharing stuff with one another twenty-four hours a day around the world. What’s the next innovation? What have we just discovered? What have we just tested? What have we just learned?’ ”
As Anup Sharma, senior vice president, global business services, for LyondellBasell Industries, explained, 2020 was an inflection point for partnership building of this kind: “We have been committed to leveraging this time of disruption to defy the traditional vendor relationship standards in our industry.”
One of the world’s biggest plastics, chemicals, and refining companies, LyondellBasell joined with Air Products, a global industrial gases business, in a collaborative effort to make one company’s off-products become a value generation opportunity for both. From LyondellBasell’s perspective, the collaboration spans three key themes: mutual investments, reliability, and sustainability. Each company will execute changes in processes, meetings, and mindsets over time to drive the collaborative relationship throughout the organization—leading to a regular cycle of transformative review.
Rob Whitfield explained how this reframing of a traditional transactional relationship between two organizations in the chemicals industry—sometimes collaborators, sometimes suppliers, sometimes competitors—has found the potential to unlock a 10X opportunity in the future.
“There had been efforts in the past to work more closely together, but the companies were in a coexistence state rather than doubling down on where they could do more together,” Rob said. “They were leaving so much on the table when it came to opportunities to innovate around resources. In order to gain 10 percent, they were overlooking opportunities for 10X results.” The pandemic prompted a switch to virtual meetings and gave new momentum to collaboration. Conversations that started individually in each firm eventually became team conversations and then cross-company conversations.
External collaboration of this kind is responsible for this book and the enormous amounts of research behind it. Ferrazzi Greenlight was one of many consulting firms that saw its pipelines and projects grind to a screeching halt in the spring of 2020. We recognized the opportunity to dig deeper in our research and to serve and build even deeper relationships for the long term.
For years Keith had partnered with Frank Congiu of LHH as hosts of dinner parties for chief human resources officers. In fact, Frank and Keith hosted one such dinner in Manhattan on March 4, 2020, the night before the first set of lockdowns threw the country into a standstill. Soon afterward, Frank and Keith committed to pull together all the chief human resources officers they had been convening for years and give them a forum to be available for each other during these tumultuous times. Keith reached out to friends and clients at World 50, Dell, Anaplan, Verizon, SAP, EY, Salesforce, and many others to do the same with our respective clients. We would all just serve, with no expectation. A series of virtual roundtables followed in which we discussed the disruption and how we might turn it into an inflection point for future of work. Within months, this group of participants would evolve into what we now call fellows of the GFTW Institute.
We ensured that the early roundtables began on a positive note, and that co-elevation was the objective. Frank recalled, “We always started by asking people to open with what their silver lining was. Participants would share stories about spending more time with their children, not getting on airplanes for the past few months and foreseeable future, getting to know colleagues better by seeing inside their homes and family lives. Once we moved into the call, HR leaders were in a good mindset and ready to share the best practices of what their company was doing and how they were doing it. It turned into a great forum for best-practice sharing.”
And the result? Roundtable participants were able to take fresh thinking—rooted in evidence of what was working elsewhere—back to their leadership teams at a time when everyone was feeling stretched. “I have clients that have shown up to the roundtables and others who have not,” Frank said. “And overall, I would say the people who have gone outside of their organization and leaned on peers have been more effective. This is the power of crowdsourcing ideas and collaborating with external partners.”
Frank added that companies like Synchrony, Wolters Kluwer, and IBM have seen an uptick in their employee engagement scores from practices they learned in these sessions. “That happened in a time when you’d assume that scores might go down,” he said. “I’d also say these people show up more connected and interested in general when I meet with them. I suspect they have plenty of external engagement, but they seem to be particularly grateful for the model we have created of deeper sharing and commitment.” According to Frank, there was a triple win—for LHH, for clients, and for himself in terms of professional development. “Not necessarily something I learned, but certainly something I confirmed is how important it is to lead with generosity,” Frank explained.
This simple, powerful idea of inclusion—reaching out to draw people closer in—ultimately blossomed into the GFTW Institute and this book. You are reading the fruit of a deeper client and partner collaboration coming out of the pandemic.
Expand Your Personal Coaches in a Remote World
Our research showed that the most intimate level of collaborative inclusion that ramped up considerably during the quarantines and social distancing of 2020 was an increase in executives’ willingness to open themselves up to each other for advice and counsel. Many leaders evolved personal support networks of advisers and coaches throughout the pandemic. Our discussions at the GFTW Institute told how they reached out more frequently, and in deeper ways, primarily because of the unprecedented need for shared insights, assisted by the virtual tools we all began using and by all the time freed up by the decline in business travel.
On a personal basis, many of us reached out to old friends we’d lost touch with for open, more vulnerable sharing and peer-to-peer coaching. The virtual environment lent itself readily to tapping into advice from peers inside and outside the company, and even outside our industry. We learned to bulletproof our ideas with people we respected and admired and with a more diverse set of individuals—like old friends who had a perspective completely outside our organization’s culture. In our own work, we’ve been blessed that some of our team meetings have been joined by thought-leader friends like Peter Diamandis, Jim Kwik, and Vishen Lakhiani, and in return, we’ve been honored to join and help their teams.
One powerful lesson granted us by the pandemic is that we can generously serve each other as coaches for learning and development, even if we never see each other in person. Before the pandemic, we might have met serendipitously at a sales conference, for example, or down at the bar at the end of the day, when peers share struggles and stories as they commiserate and problem-solve. When the remote work environment of the pandemic erased these opportunities for informal learning, leaders at some companies stepped up to formalize the kind of learning that had previously happened by chance. With so many employees stressed and time-constrained, there was an urgent need to connect them with organized peer-to-peer coaching resources.
WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) always prided itself on the power of providing certified coaches in support of members (customers), and members in support of members. As WW evolved its business model along the digital spectrum to offer online coaching and workshops, the company also decided to pilot formal coaching among its new online coaches. Small groups of three coaches met weekly to share coaching struggles and solutions as they journeyed from physical to online coaching. They explored how to make the best of online workshops, how to engage members best online, and how to balance personal responsibilities (like childcare and home education) with coaching responsibilities. The coaching became a formal system for peer-to-peer support and advancement in a new way of working.
At Merrill Lynch, where there had already been the company’s robust peer-to-peer Advisor Growth Network, the isolation of the pandemic spawned a peer-moderated semiweekly podcast with three to four thousand of Merrill’s financial advisers dialing in weekly. “That’s unheard-of,” said CEO Andy Sieg, “to have that many advisers stop what they’re doing on a regular basis to hear what the firm and their peers have got to say.”
The dynamism and free flow of ideas among the leaders at the GFTW Institute has been a grand, ongoing exercise in teaming out—an antidote to the quarantined world, with inclusion as the driving force for innovation and growth. As your co-elevating teamwork takes shape and evolves, you want to keep looking for opportunities to reach outward to draw more people in. It’s not enough, however, to lead a dynamic cocreating team into a rigid, hierarchical management structure. These new tools and best practices will not achieve their potential in terms of speed and flexibility if they are controlled by a slow, internally focused bureaucracy. Creating value in the new world of work is defined by team empowerment and customer-centricity—the central principles of agile management, which is the subject of the next chapter.
GUIDING QUESTIONS How to Compete in the New World of Work
Do we come together as a team with a shared commitment to radical collaboration, and not only in times of crisis?
The most successful companies ignore organizational structures to ensure that everyone on the team crosses the finish line together. By recontracting with a commitment to co-elevation and employing a set of high-return practices that foster inclusion and collaboration, we can uncover unexpected revenue and risk-mitigation opportunities.
Do we harness innovation and collaboration beyond our team and from all corners of our organization?
We have known about the wisdom of crowds for centuries. With the widespread use of communication and collaboration technologies, radically inclusive companies systematically cast a wide net across the organization and, in doing so, generate a broader set of innovative ideas and collaboration opportunities.
Do we leverage a broader external ecosystem of customers, vendors, and partners to drive higher levels of collaboration?
With the pandemic, we found ourselves in the trenches together, facing common challenges. As a result, what were once transactional relationships suddenly became deeper and more empathy driven. Radically inclusive companies deepen external partnerships and find opportunities to co-elevate with customers, vendors, and partners—and even competitors.