There’s no shortage of leadership theories out there, whether it’s the leader as coach or the charisma-based focus of the “transformational” system. Some theories even reorient the idea of leadership itself, challenging what it means to head up a team. For entrepreneurs looking to avoid age-old pitfalls, one such option is the idea of “teamship” over leadership.
Developed by bestselling author and leadership expert Keith Ferrazzi, “teamship” seeks to unlock a team’s true potential by stripping away the negative aspects of the old hierarchical system and replacing them with mutual empowerment and what he calls “courageous conversations.” Ferrazzi is the thought leader behind the book Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship.
Ferrazzi, the former CMO of Deloitte, has spent two decades studying successful teams. He also helps others follow suit, whether they’re Fortune 500 firms or groundbreaking startups, and says the old model of top-down direction just doesn’t cut it anymore.
“Historically, leaders were elevated and [put on a] pedestal, and it was fine in the industrial era where a boss was directing people to do things,” Ferrazzi explains. “But the level of innovation that’s required today requires a much broader set of voices thinking up breakthrough solutions.… One person coming up with a direction is not going to get a breakthrough solution. We need the team to step up with full voice, arguing and debating until a better answer than [what] one leader could have created [is found].
“It’s all about how do you get a group of individuals [to the] highest performance possible, in the shortest period of time,” he concludes.
Problems with today’s leadership
Ferrazzi often has his work cut out for him. In looking at over 3,000 organizations, his Greenlight Research Institute has shown that teams are often “siloed” off from each other, he says, and more motivated to not get blamed for a failure than to create an innovative solution. Often, that leads to problems with conflict avoidance. Some 72% of team members do not speak up in meetings, he says, and 74% do not feel their team is accountable for shared goals. On anonymous surveys, Ferrazzi says most teams score themselves low in terms of courage, barely ever challenging each other.
Importantly, these issues don’t just apply to the corporate world. Even small business startups need to build effective new teams—and their margin for error is often slim.
Teamship in action
In co-founding TN Craft Butcher in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Andy Holmes sought to offer local customers the highest-quality meats—from Japanese wagyu to locally sourced pork and chicken and fresh-made sausages—then pair it all with a customer experience no mega-store could muster.
The store opened in April 2024, and currently feels more like an old school candy shop than a meat department, with pristine display cases showing off a mouth-watering selection. It’s best not to go in too hungry.
“You’ve got sommeliers that teach you about wine—we’re kind of the same thing for meats,” Holmes says with pride. “I got a business card in my pocket, but if I can get you to try a piece of steak or a hamburger… Man, I got you.”
But, having an excellent product wasn’t enough. With one manager, three team leaders and around a dozen employees, the staff met weekly at the start, but still felt disconnected. “The feedback mostly was just the team not knowing what the leaders are thinking or what the goal is,” Holmes explains.
According to the teamship model, the fix was to create an atmosphere where the team itself was involved in setting those goals. Ferrazzi developed 10 shifts to guide teams toward this new headspace.
- Co-elevation: Replacing the hub-and-spoke model of centralized direction
- Candor: Feeling free to say the tough things that need to be said
- Co-creation: Using collective insight and expertise
- Growth: Team members teaching each other
- Resilience: Taking responsibility for mistakes and carrying on
- Relationships: Building trust
- Agile: Learning to lean into changes in direction
- Celebration: Highlighting the wins
- Diversity: Leveraging the power of different viewpoints
- Alignment: Getting everyone pulling in the same direction
At TN Craft Butcher, Holmes instinctively implemented many of those shifts, and the results have been positive.
On top of traditional butcher services, they now offer fresh-cut sandwiches for the lunch crowd, cater huge events for Nashville’s vibrant celebrity population and sell popular gifts like Turtlebox outdoor speakers. Each of these ideas was improved by employee input. One of the most successful team suggestions was to feature in-store live music on Friday nights since they already had a small bar serving up local pints.
“I’m shocked at how well that’s been received. It’s been huge,” Holmes notes. “I try to talk to [the team] like their voice matters. … And then ask them point blank, ‘Hey, what would you do different with this? What do you think about that?’… Empowering them to have a voice is the only way I can say it and giving them some room to think for themselves.”
“It is shocking how the most prestigious, prominent organizations don’t stop and ask their teams these questions,” Ferrazzi notes. “They just follow through with the strategy that was handed down by the company and never stop and ask the team, ‘What do you think our biggest priorities are? And what do you think is standing in our way?’”
Exploring teamship at your organization
That’s great advice for getting a new team up and running, but it can just as easily help reform an existing group. Implementation doesn’t have to be as hard as you might think.
Ferrazzi says leaders can start with anonymous surveys to establish the team’s level of courage/conflict avoidance. Talk over the results, find agreement that, as professionals, you ought to be able to speak truth to each other with confidence and build buy-in for a new approach.
Encourage candor, and then start “stress testing” during regular team reports—it’s like the opposite of passively allowing team members to present their updates and then silently moving on to the next agenda item.
“By stress testing, we now say to the team, ‘This person’s going to give a presentation and we’re going to stress test it. We’re not going to let ‘em fail.’” Ferrazzi says. “‘So get your pens out… When we’re done with this presentation, we’re going to go in breakout groups of two, and we’re going to give them feedback on where the risks are [and] ideas for improvement.’”
In as little as six months, Ferrazzi says, teams who adopt these practices can see a doubling in the amount of team candor and transparency (for instance, going from a 1 or 2 out of 5 to a 3 or 4 out of 5). Innovation, psychological safety and even overall happiness can shoot up, too. And in an often-overlooked benefit, the leader ends up with significantly more time to pursue bigger goals than team maintenance.
TN Craft Butcher has seen that. With business roughly doubling over their first year, Holmes is now free to look at expanding operations. And to Ferrazzi, that result is available to pretty much anyone.
“I think everyone can be a better leader,” he says. “The reality is most teams are worse than mediocre. Most meetings are rife with conflict avoidance. Most teams talk behind each other’s backs, and those teams lack energy. But the practices we’ve curated over 24 years lift you up.”
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of SUCCESS+ digital magazine. Photo from PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock.com
