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Leading Without Authority: How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break Down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration

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Leading Without Authority: How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break Down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration

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Employers need us to seize opportunities, take the initiative, and build value for our companies.

Leaders are instead being asked to inspire team loyalty through their expertise, vision, and judgment.

co-elevation is a mission-driven approach to collaborative problem-solving through fluid partnerships and self-organizing teams. When we co-elevate with one or more of our associates, we turn them into teammates.

Position does not define power—impact defines power. Impact can be made in every role at every level, and when we prioritize bringing out the best in those around us, business growth and success follow.

“Your team,” I told her, “is made up of everyone who is critical to helping you achieve your mission and goals.”

My goal in our conversation was to help shift Sandy’s mindset away from seeing herself as a victim, and instead see herself as a leader of a larger team.

Every workplace suffers from office politics. The remedy is to lead a team of your own creation. To lead others who do not necessarily report to you.

You must awaken to the realization that for every goal you have, for every project or mission you have, you are responsible for leading a much broader group of people than the formal members of your team.

“We need to do work so great that you couldn’t possibly do it alone.”

Our networks have evolved into the primary medium for getting work done. And because everyone in most organizations is connected through these radically interdependent networks, our effectiveness is ultimately determined by our ability to lead, inspire, and serve our network. Think of it as a network of networks.

In short, we all need to think of ourselves as leaders, as innovators, regardless of our job titles. We all have to demonstrate initiative and encourage deeper collaboration so we can contribute the full range of our ideas and talents to what we do.

Industry disruption demands unprecedented innovation at a speed and scale that cannot be produced inside traditional organizational boundaries.

I ask every team that I work with the same question: “Who are the most critical people to help you achieve your goals right now, whether or not they are currently aligned to your org chart?” These are the people on your team. No matter who they report to formally in the chain of command, they are all members of the team you need to lead without authority in order to get things done.

This relationship awakening is the first step in the co-elevating process. You need to come to the table looking to disrupt your own thinking. If you want to achieve an outcome that has a greater impact than what you might have achieved on your own, you have to arrive with a sense of curiosity at the forefront of your mind. Set aside your conviction that your way is the right way. Open yourself to the assumption that others on your team have ideas that may be far better than yours.

OLD WORK RULE: Your team is limited to those who report to you or report to your manager. NEW WORK RULE: Your team is made up of everyone—inside and outside the company—important to achieving your project or mission.   OLD WORK RULE: Professional relationships happen organically over time and develop without purposeful effort. NEW WORK RULE: Professional relationships must be proactively and authentically developed with the people on our teams. This is the new competency of collaboration and productivity. It is critical to getting things done, more quickly.

Do the job before you have the job. That choice is always entirely in your own hands. And the way to begin is by accepting that it’s all on you.

But real leadership is not about telling others what to do. It’s about inviting others, encouraging others, getting others excited about new possibilities.

The best leaders start with an open mind and invite others to seek solutions with them. Truly great leadership is about genuinely caring about the other person’s success as you mutually learn and grow.

We’ve hit an inflection point where staying in our lanes is no longer an option. To have any shot at success today, with the relentless push to transform, innovate, and reinvent, we have to climb out of the bunker and reach out to the people who make up our teams. And when we find them, we have to do the work together: get to know them; work collaboratively; furnish genuine feedback; and offer guidance—and stay open to receiving all of the above from our teammates in return. We can’t wait for our team to find us.

I’m also not ignoring the reality of difficult situations. I’m saying, instead, that if success matters to you, you’re the only one who can overcome the obstacles in your way. Even when facing our most daunting problems, we have 100 percent of the power over how we choose to react.

To accomplish more, with full commitment and integrity, is one of the definitions of true leadership.

Uncertainty is where new value is created. Everything you want in life is on the other side of all your excuses for not trying.

If the mission is important, then you will do what you need to do to get the job done.

If you ever catch yourself being so deferential to the chain of command that you fail to speak your mind and hide the truth, you are not just letting yourself down, you’re letting the whole company down. You’re cheating your employer. It’s no different than if you falsify your expense report. It’s low-integrity, unprofessional behavior.

When people or events disappoint you, don’t run away, resign yourself to the situation, or succumb to self-pity. Take the rational response and just treat accepting your disappointments the way you accept the forces of the market—as a reality to be dealt with.

Instead of doing whatever it takes to get real results, lots of us play the victim card, clutching the victim mindset like a shield. How many of us never reach our highest aspirations because we pin the blame on circumstances or on someone or something else? How many of us suffer from déjà vu when a relationship or job ends in eerily the same fashion as a previous one? Once we accept the idea that it’s all on us, the excuse that we’re the victim goes away. That understanding gives us total freedom to act, to build co-elevating relationships, and to lead without authority.

Again, if a situation scares you, there’s probably something in it calling you to grow.

Studies show that the pain of rejection is indistinguishable from physical pain.4 But by experiencing what can be gained by leaning into that discomfort, it starts to get a little easier.

“There’s enough pressure from market forces we have to deal with so why let our own fear be yet another obstacle,”

If we want to succeed in a world where the pressure for constant change, innovation, and agility is massive and mounting, we have to seize the initiative. We have to change how we work with the people around us. If your goal is important enough, if it’s a mission that you believe will make a difference on your team, in your department, or in your company, then you owe it to yourself and your organization to take the first step.

Maybe you don’t believe in your company’s mission. But the bottom line is, if you are earning a paycheck, you owe it to the company you work for to give it your all. And you owe the same commitment to your colleagues.

You can’t climb back from the depths of addiction while hanging on to a victim mindset.

I came to believe that we are all addicts, in one way or another. We are all deeply dependent or addicted to behaviors that don’t serve us well. But we engage in them anyway.

One of the chief obstacles to overcoming resentment is giving up your insistence on being right. It’s a tough one. We’re conditioned to defend our views and positions. But letting someone else be right is the act of prioritizing your mission over your “rightness.”

OLD WORK RULE: Leadership is something bestowed upon you by the company or organization. It comes with the authority associated with your job title. NEW WORK RULE: Leadership is everyone’s responsibility. You must help lead your team, regardless of your job title or level of authority.

OLD WORK RULE: To advance in your career, you must do what’s expected of you according to your job description. NEW WORK RULE: To advance in your career, you should do whatever it takes to create value for your team and your organization, even if it’s not expected and even if it goes beyond your job description.

People do not want to be told. They want to be part of something. A new type of leadership is needed that is human, authentic, purposeful, and is about creating the right environment for others to flourish.

This ability to enlist team members and sustain their commitment is perhaps the most widely undervalued competency among leaders attempting to achieve transformational change. Why? Because while the rate of change is growing exponentially, our openness to change and to each other is rare and not growing at all.

If individuals are not prepared to come to the table and participate in a change movement, no amount of spending on process, strategy, or technology will deliver the desired results. Change is about people, and if people are not open to change, there will be no change.

To serve is to lead with generosity. To share is to open yourself up and build the bonds of true connection and commitment with others.

My success in building effective networks has always relied on generosity. It’s my prime directive. In any situation, I’m always asking myself, “How can I be of service?”

Adam Grant, author of the bestseller Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, has spent years studying the benefits of being generous with our time and expertise.

“This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers,” Adam writes. “They get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them.”

As you listen and learn more about the other person, constantly be thinking, “How can I be of service? How can I help them overcome their challenges? How can I elevate them? How can I help them to achieve their aspirations and dreams?” Think in terms of the shared mission. “How will enlisting and engaging this person help the mission and help them?”

The bottom line is that to lead effectively, your teammates must feel that you care about them.

Don’t say you care if you don’t yet feel it or believe it. People will smell your insincerity from a mile away.

I can’t emphasize enough the power we each have to grow personally and professionally when we grant another person permission to critique our work.

You may not actually like some of the people you need to co-elevate with. But that’s okay, as long as you pay them respect and genuinely want to help them to grow in service of the mission.

“It takes time for givers to build goodwill and trust, but eventually, they establish reputations and relationships that enhance their success.”4

Earning permission relies instead on what I call the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they wish to be treated.” It requires sincere curiosity, patient listening, and learning about the other person.

Because it’s easier, the Golden Rule can be something of a trap. It can make you think well of yourself when you’re actually being a tone-deaf, presumptuous jerk. I’ve fallen into this trap plenty of times.

When you’re looking for ways to be of service to your team, be careful not to impose your own flavor of generosity on them without understanding their underlying desires and goals. Hear them for the powerful insights they are. You don’t have to embrace their choices, preferences, goals, or aspirations as your own. But you do need to understand them. It’s a lesson that’s worth its weight in platinum.

Each person’s blue flame is as distinctive as their fingerprints: Find a way to be of service to someone by helping them turn it up and burn more brightly. It is one of the greatest investments you can make in someone—I

We all still long for that connection. And even if our hunter-gatherer roots lie in our distant past, instinctively we realize that our modern-day survival depends on rediscovering community.

When Jennifer told me what had happened, I reminded her of the principle “Look for your part.” When our teammates’ behaviors slip, we have to ask ourselves, “What was our role in the matter? Why haven’t we been more diligent tuning in to their needs?”

“Blame is irrelevant when it’s our agenda, our mission that’s being sacrificed.

As each of us goes through life, we can make money (or lose money) with all kinds of business partners and associates. What’s far more precious is having people in our lives who are willing to serve, share, and care.

SERVE: This involves leading with a generosity of spirit and action in service of the other person, and your shared mission or goals, which you plan for, evolve, and execute together. SHARE: Vulnerably building connection and commitment between you and your team.   OLD WORK RULE: To convince your teammates to tackle a project or mission, you must make a passionate and persuasive case for it. NEW WORK RULE: To invite your teammates to join your project or mission, you must first earn permission to lead through serving, sharing, and caring.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “We believe you can only create a great product with a diverse team, and I’m talking about the large definition of diversity. One of the reasons Apple products work really great is that the people working on them are not only engineers and computer scientists, but artists and musicians.”6

Look, bold input is not for the fainthearted. It calls on us to set aside our fears of being judged or rejected for our biggest, most daring ideas. Bold input leaves no room for conflict avoidance because everyone loses when team members withhold their thoughts out of anxiety or insecurity.

“What are the top ten issues most likely to hold back our collaboration, given our culture and past experiences?”

The objective is to arrive at the most common collaboration-killers within your shared culture, and to give special recognition to what the group considers the top three. Everyone on the team is then asked to verbally promise they will avoid these behaviors. They also promise to point out with empathy and understanding whenever they observe themselves or other group members engaging in these behaviors. The key is to specifically agree, right up front, that you have permission to call out these behaviors without shame, merely in service of co-elevation.

When we remind ourselves to have empathy for each other’s old habits and rituals, it’s so much easier to commit to supporting each other in forming new ones.

The goal of co-elevating co-creation is to find the most powerful choices, not the easiest ones, and certainly not the most popular ones.

The leaders have committed to a solution, and they may put on a show of accepting feedback just so they can get consent for doing what they planned to do all along. In my experience, buy-in leaves people feeling flat, and less likely to put their hearts into execution of the plan. And when things start to go wrong, team members aren’t likely to volunteer their feedback and proposed solutions because they’ve already gotten the message that no one really cares what they think.

The invitation to collaborate suggests we work together on the next 60 percent and then keep iterating and inviting others to contribute toward the final desired outcome.

“Do we trust each other? Do we feel safe sharing our boldest, most critical ideas openly? Have we done the necessary, important work, to serve, share, and care with the broader team to make this collaboration possible?”

The stakes are enormous, because nothing kills shareholder value in a company with more certainty than a culture of conflict avoidance. At most of the companies I work with, conflict avoidance is rampant and everyone knows it.

“To have a successful idea meritocracy, you have to do three things: 1. Put your honest thoughts out on the table. 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn. 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding if disagreements remain so that you can move beyond them without resentments.

The key obstacle to candor on most teams and in most company cultures is a lack of psychological safety. People must feel safe and secure in their positions in order to risk speaking out and sharing their ideas and thoughts openly.

Once everyone’s agreed to commit to being candid in their input and feedback, it’s time to prepare for conversations, thoughts, and ideas that may hit some sensitive nerves. Passion is understandable—even encouraged—in collaboration, but it’s smart for the team to discuss in advance how to work through any exchanges that grow overly heated.

The challenge facing all companies today is that real change does not come about through incremental improvements. It comes through what’s commonly called 10x thinking. If the typical goal in your company is to achieve a 10 percent improvement in cycle time for new product development, ask yourself what it would take to achieve ten times that result instead. The magic of 10x thinking is that it forces us to think in such radically new ways that even if we end up achieving only a 2x or 3x improvement, that’s still exponentially greater than what would have been gained incrementally.

What ideas have we killed in the past that we never should have walked away from? What could truly transform how we serve customers? If our company were to adopt some elements of the apps and other technologies that we all love in our own lives, how could our own customer experience be transformed?

The small group meetings serve as a valuable analysis phase, so that only the most intriguing and useful results of their discussions are brought back to the larger group. At that point, another valuable psychological dynamic kicks in: The reports to the larger forum by each small group are more likely to be expressed with greater candor and courage than one would expect to hear going around the room in a big meeting. Why? Because the person assigned to report back to the larger group wants the social approval of the other two people in their smaller group. The small group’s spokesperson doesn’t want to look cowardly or let down the other members by failing to include the richness and candor of the opinions expressed in their discussion.

In a collaborative environment, try embracing the idea that you may be wrong. If it turns out to be true, you’ve learned something, and that’s a cause for celebration.

When everyone recontracts to accept that even a great idea can be improved or perfected by bold input from others, it’s much easier to keep an open mind.

If you find that your own position has shifted and you’re ready to concede a point, be sure to openly acknowledge the team members who helped you see the light.

That’s another reason I recommend approaching each new collaboration with the assumption that even with our best prior thinking, we are still at merely 30 percent of the final answer, and the rest has yet to be co-created.

What’s needed in such circumstances is the up-front discussion that perhaps someone must give up turf for the project or mission at hand to really break through.

For the tribunal, all the parties lay out their competing cases along with their candid arguments against the other cases in an open meeting before the agreed-upon authority or decision-making body. By then, everyone has agreed in advance that backchannel lobbying prior to the tribunal is unacceptable and that they will not do it. It’s all in the open, and they have also agreed in advance to abide by the tribunal’s decision.

Ideally the tribunal authority should be the lowest-ranking person around who has real decision-making power and agreed-upon objectivity. But in many instances, the CEO is the person needed to resolve big cross-disciplinary disputes. For transformational collaborative culture to take root and grow, the message must come from the top that seeking novel solutions, surrendering turf, and employing the new work rules are behaviors that will be commended and rewarded.

Set expectations at the opening meeting. If it’s not yet time for a decision or if you’re just getting broad and early input, it’s important to acknowledge this much at the beginning of a meeting. Otherwise, some members of your team may feel the lack of a resolution at the meeting’s end means the meeting was a waste of time. At the end of each meeting, I go out of my way to thank everyone for their input and promise to keep them posted on next steps.

Five minutes before the meeting wraps up, run down the key ideas that were discussed and offer your take on each one, in terms of yes, no, or maybe: “Yes, we’ll do it.” “No, it’s not time for that.” “Maybe we should look into that more.”

If you are the decision-maker in the room, you owe it to everyone to be transparent about the direction of team decisions. And if you’re not the leader or decision-maker, you owe it to the group (in the spirit of mandatory candor) to ask the leader to run a “yes, no, maybe” exercise on the meeting’s key points before the group disperses. This way, everyone comes away from the meeting knowing what was decided and what the next steps are for each decision point.

“Constant collaboration is at a new premium. It’s no longer about hiring great talent. It’s about hiring talent that will make the team great.”

OLD WORK RULE: Collaboration is a fallback you resort to when you can’t get the job done yourself and really need other people’s cooperation and resources. NEW WORK RULE: Collaboration and partnership with your team members is the new normal, and is essential in co-creating transformative ideas and solutions that will lead to more regular and consistent breakthroughs and outcomes.

The cadets supported and encouraged each other because they wanted everyone to be better.

Wherever you see people in a high-performance organization engaging honestly and expressing themselves fully, those are surefire signs of a highly supportive coaching culture.

Coaching and mentoring in the workplace are more important today than ever, given how rapidly changing market conditions require individuals and organizations alike to keep reinventing themselves.

We value being liked more than we value helping a colleague, helping the team meet its goals, or helping the company’s mission. We want to be nice.

She calls it manipulative insincerity—when you don’t challenge your colleague, because, ultimately, you don’t care about him or the mission. It’s the absolute opposite of radical candor, which is all about challenging because you care.

This is the language to use. The approach is careful, but it’s not overly diplomatic BS. It’s purposeful without being accusatory. The opening is an expression of caring: “I have thoughts that you might find beneficial.” The middle section expresses Daphne’s own vulnerability, and how she has benefited from this kind of feedback in the past. And in closing, she makes it clear the decision is up to Carter, giving him complete control over the outcome of the conversation—or whether the conversation will even happen. She explicitly requests his permission, which he is free to decline.

Whether or not you have a formal management title, my advice is to never assume you have permission to coach just because of your position or rank.

Without our teammates’ explicit consent, we have no idea if they’re truly open to our feedback.

I urge you never to deliver personal feedback without requesting it in return.

Remember, even if we are leading the team, we are never above anyone on the team. We’re right there on the ground beside our teammates, continuing to grow and develop with them. We set the standards in our engagement with them. Moreover, we really do want their candid feedback, differing perspectives, and coaching.

In that sense, coaching feedback is truly a gift. Once you’ve given the gift of feedback, it becomes the other person’s property. It’s for them to consume, consider, analyze—or discard.

Again, since our feedback is a gift, we must be prepared for the possibility that our teammate may not accept it. As with an ugly tie from Aunt Ginny at Christmas, they have the right to thank us and put it in a drawer without ever trying it on. Your job is to humbly offer to help someone with the issues and concerns they are facing, not force them into a response. If they don’t want or accept your gift, then you have to let go. Accept them for who they are and where they are on their personal and career development journey. Work with them up to the limits of their ability, and keep trying to reach out to them at the level of permission you have earned.

Even when we feel we haven’t earned permission to give direct, candid feedback, we can always use language that helps our teammates discover their own truths. Here’s where asking questions and inviting them to reflect on past failures and successes can help them see their behavior and come to their own insights.

A question that is essentially framed as, “Why did you send Peter in to lead that negotiation when he has so little experience?” will make the entire team feel interrogated. A much better approach is to ask, “What are your thoughts about how Peter led that negotiation?” Now you’re asking for their feedback and advice, which makes them less defensive. They no longer feel obliged to explain and justify their decisions.

Again, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

To cultivate the level of trust required to be a great coach, it’s crucial to listen with complete focus and care.

“Something happens in the space ‘between brains’ when people interact. Your intention for the conversation, your emotions, and your regard for the person will impact their willingness, desire, and courage to change. You have to stay present and aware to sustain trust throughout the conversation.”

Coaching often fails when it’s more about the person giving it than the person receiving it. Make sure the feedback you provide is for your teammate and not for you. Check yourself before you say something that might be taken as criticism.

So when we deliver candid feedback, we have to be sure that our ego is not involved, and that the concern is positioned around what we know people want for themselves.

Ideally, co-development is like a tennis match. Sometimes we serve and sometimes we receive service. We offer candid feedback to our teammates when needed, they offer feedback to us, and back and forth we go. But when we’re just starting out, sharing our candid feedback about a teammate’s performance is often too daunting. If you sense that you haven’t earned enough permission to do so, then don’t. Try first asking your teammate to help you develop. Then later, if the exchange has gone well, weave in an offer to do so in return.

And if you suspect you’re past the point of needing development—think again. Everyone at every level benefits from it. “Never stop learning,” Indra Nooyi, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, once told Fortune magazine. “Whether you’re an entry level employee fresh out of college or a CEO, you don’t know it all. Admitting this is not a sign of weakness. The strongest leaders are those who are lifelong students.”

Just because you’ve earned the permission to offer candid feedback doesn’t mean you can assume it’s always welcome. Even when we have established a solid foundation of trust, and candor rules the day in our relationships, it’s still easy to overstep.

As givers of feedback, we must own how our candor lands. We must offer our candor and feedback in ways that are meant to foster dialogue—not to win arguments. It’s just lazy and self-indulgent to care so little about the viewpoints of others that you assume they will accept your point of view on your terms. And that hurts your efforts to advance the team’s mission and goals.

Hearing our weaknesses articulated or our poor performance called out tends to trigger defensiveness in most of us.

Some people struggle with feedback because they think it’s actually a directive they have to follow. That’s a holdover from the days when managers ruled by fiat. But it is not true. You have the right to assess whether the feedback will help you become a more effective team member. That said, it’s essential for your professional growth and success that you don’t miss out on the powerful potential insights and course correction that can come from caring feedback.

Our teammates aren’t Vulcan mind readers. We need to help them understand us, and request that we coach each other in working together.

Team leaders often think they are being “kind” by not sharing feedback that will hurt someone’s feelings, but kindness requires the courage to be candid. It’s easy to confuse kindness with weakness, but true kindness requires strength. High-performance environments rely on candor and transparency, because that’s what it takes to create rich, collaborative partnerships that produce extraordinary results. DANIEL LUBETZKY, CEO, KIND Snacks

OLD WORK RULE: When it came to growing professionally and developing both hard and soft skills, you looked to your manager, and to performance reviews and training programs. As a manager yourself, you generally only offered developmental feedback to someone who was formally assigned to you as a direct report. NEW WORK RULE: We seek out our team for development and growth. We offer teammates the candid feedback they need to develop and improve their skills, performance, and behavior because we are committed to their success and to the success of the greater mission.

Professional trust is built when work expectations are met. But they can get strained when different points of view arise from different professional experiences.

Whenever we lead without authority, serving our teammates as their champion and cheerleader is one of our highest-leverage responsibilities. Praise and celebration are key complements to caring and accountability, and accelerants to opening porosity as well. When we offer praise and celebration to someone today, it will make our next difficult day together that much more manageable.

“If we shy away from telling them where and how they’re excelling, then how will they know to continue the good stuff?”

There’s a saying that if you’re going through hell, you have to keep going. Celebration and praise provide the fuel that restores and sustains us, helping us to keep moving forward through stretches of extreme difficulty.

And when you celebrate people for doing things right, you’ll find they’re so much more energized and engaged in fixing what they’ve done wrong.

Criticism is only half the job of coaching. The other half is celebration. When you celebrate your teammates publicly, it builds your brand as a co-elevator and serves your mission by attracting others to join with you.

Some people need us to believe in their capabilities more than they’re willing or able to believe in themselves. We need to champion these people, who, for whatever reason, aren’t great at championing themselves.

What these people need to do, what we all need to do, is recognize what we’ve overcome in the past and celebrate it, with an eye toward what we can achieve next. Take your past victories and project them into the future. By recognizing and celebrating what you’ve achieved, you can open the door to possibility. Next, share this spirit of hope with your teammates. Celebrate their achievements and successes when they’re feeling down or lost or overwhelmed.

There is no greater gift you can give someone than the gift of hope. By helping them to see themselves and their abilities with fresh eyes, you remind them they are fully up to facing any challenge before them.

I also feel grateful for those people willing to challenge my ideas and to hold me accountable.

“One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2014. “[But] it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets…[If] you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments. And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time whether they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”

What really matters is that companies that don’t continue to experiment, that don’t embrace failure, eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.”

“Absolute honesty is something you simply cannot afford to dispense within a team effort as difficult as that of missile development.”14

If we want our teammates to be proactive in getting things done, and, if we want them to inspire and motivate each other, then that is what we need to seek out, praise, and celebrate, whenever and wherever it occurs. What we reward with praise is what others will aspire to achieve. What we celebrate is what we will receive.

As you leverage the tribe for the benefit of the tribe, its membership grows, its reach expands, and, with proper kindling, co-elevation can spread like a brush fire.

Any change starts by exploring opportunities, not by looking for obstacles and sowing division.

Transformation on this level is a team sport, and we all have to play an active role in it. Ultimately, by helping to promote and instill a proactive, co-elevating mindset in each team member, our own burden gets lighter, as each individual initiates change with their peers, in pursuit of our collective goals, and in fulfillment of our shared mission.

Whenever someone speaks disparagingly about a co-worker, flip the conversation so that the venting turns into positive action.

Don’t indulge in venting. And don’t allow yourself to become a passive participant by ignoring it, either. Remember your responsibility as a leader to promote co-elevation among the team.

When we accept responsibility for the success of all members of our team, we are committed to helping them grow and develop and reach their full potential.

Does blowing off steam actually help? No. It doesn’t get you any closer to solving the problem at hand. It’s akin to sitting on your back porch, nursing a Budweiser and kvetching about how you want to change jobs, without actually beginning a job search. It’s empty talk with no action. It does nothing to serve the mission at hand.

True leaders leave no one behind. Going higher together means together. Summon all your skills in serving, sharing, and caring, leverage the tribe for the tribe, and bring your maverick teammate back into the herd.

It’s all on you to create a co-elevating team that achieves its mission and transforms your culture. Again, at the beginning, you have to do the heavy lifting. But when you are truly co-elevating and co-developing with your teammates, you’ll inspire that behavior in others. Then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to reach out, to co-create, to co-develop, and to ensure a level of co-elevation that says, “I won’t let you fail.”

The burden of responsibility becomes lighter when the mission is shared. That’s how all of us go higher together. That’s when we can each achieve 10x of our own capabilities and 10x on our goals. It’s the tipping point where a team can spark a movement, and a movement can change a culture.

OLD WORK RULE: Co-workers who are uncooperative, difficult to work with, or not contributing are avoided and written off. NEW WORK RULE: If one team member is holding back the mission in any way, the team gets to enlist the help of other teammates to elevate that team member and their contribution.

We are committed to the mission and to each other’s success: We will not let each other fail. In fact, we will ensure each other succeeds. We will elevate each other as we work together to achieve our shared mission. Collaboration: We will collaborate, not sell each other on our ideas or bleed into consensus. We will be insatiably curious while breaking through to new levels of innovation. We will respectfully challenge the other’s ideas and provide the candid feedback on the mission to attain better outcomes. Development: We commit to helping each other develop our skill sets and/or behaviors so our performance improves. We give each other permission to trust our instincts and to give the candid feedback the other person needs to hear so we can grow. Speak truth: We will speak the truth in service of the mission and each other. We give each other permission to trust our instincts and give feedback and candor when needed. We will see and receive such candor in service of each other because we care about each other’s success. No victims: Nothing will stand in the way of our transformation. We will divorce ourselves from the momentum of the past and will not accept any victim language. We will check each other if someone slips into a victim mindset and speaks like a victim. Look to ourselves first: When feeling frustrated with the other person, we will look to change our own behavior first, asking, “What’s my part?” before finger-pointing and blaming others. Spend the time to serve and care about the person: We commit to serving and sharing with each other to deepen our relationship and building the psychological safety, so the other person knows we genuinely care about them. Celebrate: We will celebrate and praise each other’s performance and our wins.

Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Your personal stories, told and celebrated, are fuel for this movement.

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