For decades, if a team was effective and successful, its performance was ascribed normally to the role and abilities of the team’s leader. The leader was seen as the ‘hero’ of the team, essentially responsible almost single-handedly for the team’s results!
But this elevated view of the leader was always too narrow, of course, in its focus and under-appreciated the role and behaviour of teammates and their responsibility to each other. In today’s fast-paced and more democratic business environment, even the most talented leaders surely can’t succeed alone: they need to mobilize the full, collective potential of the whole team.
And, certainly, research strongly indicates there’s a crucial need for leaders generally to up their game in terms of engaging employees (for example, Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace” 2025 survey found that only 21% of employees globally felt positively engaged at work).
‘Co-leadership’ or ’empowered’ leadership are two terms that refer to this collective view of a team, which is, I think, an appealing and more progressive way today to view leadership that is in tune with the more open, ‘socialised’ approach often expected nowadays in organisations.
A recent book I liked on this subject is ‘Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from leadership to Teamship‘, by popular leadership author, Keith Ferrazzi (2024). It suggests an overall framework of behavioural and process changes needed to move to “teamship”. Together, they involve a move from traditional ‘command and control‘ leadership towards team-members co-leading their team together.
What are these ten ‘shifts’? I give a brief outline below:
- Shift from leader at centre of a hub to ‘co-elevation’:
The traditional situation in teams is that team-mates focus on doing their own jobs and only seek or accept collaboration with colleagues when absolutely necessary and instead worry only about pleasing or following the instructions of the team’s leader, who acts as the centre of everything in the team.
In contrast, with teamship, team-mates avoid ‘silo-thinking’ and commit to the mission of the team and to each other, showing an unwavering belief in working together, supporting each other, and ‘pushing’ each other (what Ferrazzi rather flamboyantly terms ‘co-elevation’) to achieve higher and higher levels of learning and performance. The key is a feeling of mutual accountability, based on close relationships between teammates and open/mutual encouragement and support. In essence, this shift is about teammates committing to a ‘collaborative’ social contract between themselves (the idea here is similar to that of a ‘team-charter’ used by some teams).
2. Shift from conflict avoidance to candour
This shift involves everyone in the team committing to raising and sharing their views, concerns or criticisms openly with all teammates, rather than using private, restricted conversations with individual colleagues. Teammates commit to care enough about each other’s success, so that nothing will be withheld from each other or the team that might be valuable to achieving better outcomes. The driving belief is that the stress on candour and openness in the team, backed up with good psychological safety, will act to surface more opinions, more diverse ideas, more facts and better insights, which will all significantly improve team decision-making.
Several specific tactics are suggested in the book for how to encourage team candour. One simple tactic is for a leader to seek a pause once or twice in team-meetings and ask team members “what is not being said in this room that should be said?”. Another tactic is to breakdown meetings into smaller groups (up to three individuals is ideal) to consider a topic or an aspect of the topic before reporting back to the whole team.
3. Shift from accidental relationships to deep, team-based bonding
This shift involves moving from accidental or by-chance relationships built up at the proverbial office watercooler to deliberate, planned relationship-building that builds sincere and deep understanding and trust amongst teammates.
Trust is the critical glue that holds relationships together and, Ferrazzi stresses, the foundation of all successful teams. Crucially, it involves teammates not just trusting the professional skill of colleagues but also personal trust – the kind where you feel you know and respect somebody in terms of their character and values and you can be confident in their integrity and honesty. Such trust is only developed by individuals spending time with each other – ideally socially but at least in a very reassuring and relaxed context – and opening up (sometimes likely some degree of vulnerability) about themselves and their lives beyond just work (e.g. hobbies, family life, ambitions, worries, values).
Ferrazzi suggests a few useful tactics to foster team-bonding. One suggestion is what he calls a ‘sweet and sour‘ session, which is a quick round-robin at the very start of a team meeting to ask team members to spend a minute sharing something that is going well and then something that they are finding more challenging in their life right now. Another tactic is holding at regular intervals what he calls an ‘intimacy dinner’ (not the best of titles, I think!) at which team members are invited to remember and share a selected moment or story from their lives that was significant in making who they are today.
4. Shift from individual resilience to team resilience
This is about making it the collective job of teammates to lift up and sustain each other’s energy, motivation and mental/emotional wellbeing, rather than leaving it to each individual or the job of the team leader or the HR department. Watching out for each other, supporting each other and having each other’s back is the driving principle.
A simple teamship practice the author suggests is what he calls an ‘energy check-in‘ at the start of regular team meetings. This involves asking each teammate the question “where is your energy level today on a scale of 0-5, and why?” The practice gives a formal, regular space for the team to share openly what they might be struggling with (professionally or personally) and backs up each team member’s expected day-to-day duty to support colleagues.
5. Shift from team meetings to broader forms of thinking and collaboration
The team meeting is traditionally seen as the first form of inclusion and collaboration, but Ferrazzi urges organisations to secure much wider and more diverse input from more stakeholders and by not just using in-person/real-time gatherings but also more technology-based and asynchronous collaboration tools. A familiar example of collaborative technology is Google Workspace (with its stack of apps, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms Chat features). Such tools particularly suit how more organisations nowadays have some degree of remote or distributed working amongst their staff, often working at different times.
Ferrazzi urges leaders in future to think of collaboration not as a meeting but what he calls a ‘collaboration stack‘. This involves getting team members plus, crucially, other relevant/influencing stakeholders outside the team itself (what he calls ‘teaming-out’) to consider together a given problem or issue and for everyone’s views/experience/advice to be shared openly together. Contributors can be working at different locations, at different times, in the office, or remotely, in in-person meetings or online or other non-personal media.
After all this varied input is examined, leaders can then plan and hold the more traditional meeting to make decisions, with a focused agenda and particular choice of attendees based on all the input submitted before the meeting.
6. Shift from sequential working to ‘agile’ team working
This is about adopting agile principles as a standard operating system for modern work across an organisation, including at the team-level – as a major way to raise adaptability, flexibility and speed of change. Ferrazzi recognises that agile can come in different flavours and has often proven challenging where organisations have tried it beyond IT development projects, but he urges leaders to embrace the shift by keeping things simple.
A core feature of agile working in teams is breaking down projects and initiatives into short sprints of work (typically between a few weeks to a couple of months), and at the end of each sprint, team members openly share and review their progress, identify learning/innovation opportunities, and then hone/agree tactics together for the next sprint. Supporting this basic approach to work, the author urges leaders to ensure there is a clear customer-centred brief of goals and requirements for each project and that that it is clearly defined who is to drive the project, who has final decision-making authority, who needs to be consulted and who needs to be kept informed.
7. Shift from a culture of leader-led praise to peer recognition
Typically in most organisations the giving of praise happens infrequently and, moreover, relies on the leader/boss choosing to give it. Under the conditions of teamship, praise is given out often, openly and freely by all, based on team members recognising each other’s actions.
To foster such a culture, particular practices Ferrazzi recommends include: the leader intentionally day-to-day in an impromptu way making praising remarks about a team member that are bound to get back to the person concerned; asking at the end of weekly team meetings for team members to identify successes they or others have achieved over the week; a monthly ‘peer celebration’ round-robin meeting where each team member identifies and expresses gratitude for the work or assistance of a colleague; and a periodic formal recognition/award event or promotion where management calls out and celebrates notable work or behaviour of particular team members.
8. Shift to a team culture stressing diversity, inclusion and belonging
Much has been written over recent years about the role at an organisational level of diversity and inclusion policies and how they stimulate improved cohesion but Ferrazzi urges leaders to also pay heed to their relevance at a team level. He argues that shifting to diversity, inclusion and belonging is about embracing the broadest talent in a team and providing for all perspectives in a team to be heard, so that there can be improved performance and innovation.
He doesn’t actually propose many tactics or practices to help in this regard. Three practices he does suggest are: getting team members to share examples of when they have felt ‘otherness’ in their life (i.e. distinct or different from others around them); getting team members to talk about areas of their life or career where they have had to face obstacles or where an achievement of theirs was partly down to inherited privilege or good fortune; and holding off making a recruitment decision if you don’t have a wide slate of candidates.
9. Shift from leader acting as team coach to a team of peer-to-peer coaching
This echoes shift 1 above in terms of recommending a culture of ‘co-development’ or, what Ferrazzi also calls a ‘team of seekers – a continuous culture where team members actively and openly give each other feedback, challenge each other, and support each other to achieve their ‘best’ selves. Obvious examples of areas which peers can challenge and feedback to each other are each other’s ideas, performance, competencies and working style.
A key teamship practice the author recommends is what he calls ‘open 360‘. This is basically a periodic round-robin for giving and receiving feedback in a team setting. Every team member shares one thing they appreciate/respect/admire about each teammate and one thing they suggest the person could do differently to elevate their performance and success further. To be effective, obviously, there must first exist a decent level of trust, psychological safety and mutual commitment between teammates.
10. Shift from silos to closely aligned work based on a common ‘north star’
Traditionally, in most organisations people have little awareness of the challenges, needs and work of their peers, so everyone tends to focus on themselves and their part of the organisation. In contrast, Ferrazzi argues, in world-class organisations, everyone feels united and aligned under a single, driving vision and set of goals (‘north star’) for the whole organisation, plus within each team teammates feel aligned and committed to a shared mission that acts as the north star for their specific team.
For this shift Ferrazzi doesn’t propose much in the way of novel teamship practices, instead mostly pointing to the combined effect of the practices he proposes under the other shifts above. The one proposal he does make is basically for teams to hold periodic discussions dedicated to reviewing team alignment. For such meetings, he suggests a few types of reflective questions to pose, including “what will our customers’ world look like when we reach our ultimate mission?” and “what are the biggest items to tackle along the journey to reaching the team’s north star?”