Leadership to “teamship:” becoming a high-functioning team

Transforming into a high-functioning team means empowering and trusting your team to self-enable: “teamship” is the way to do it.

Artemis 2 astronauts inspect their rocketship. Courtesy NASA.

Introduction

Tarang Amin, CEO and Chairman of e.l.f. Beauty, has established himself as a passionate and purpose-driven leader. He’s fully immersed in leadership, and that extends to pushing his team to self-enable, becoming powerful, self-directed leaders in themselves. Under his guidance, e.l.f. has grown from $125 million in market value to $6 billion.¹²

Leadership coach Keith Farrazzi highlights Amin’s achievement in his book, Never Lead Alone. He credits Amin with creating a unique social contract at e.l.f. Beauty — a new way of working, and a new level of commitment. New joiners are told, “at e.l.f., you’ll grow faster than anywhere else.” Joining e.l.f. “puts your career on a rocketship,” (a metaphor that’s leveraged throughout e.l.f.’s ethos). But, says Amin, “you have to want it.” He adds that you’ll only realize that rocketship-like growth if you are honest, curious, and hungry, and “you’re willing to give in order to get.”³⁴

He’s talking about a new form of leadership, something that Ferrazzi refers to as “teamship.”

If you’re new, welcome to Customer Obsessed Engineering! Every week I publish a new article, direct to your mailbox if you’re a subscriber. As a free subscriber you can read about half of every article, plus all of my free articles.

Anytime you'd like to read more, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Teamship

Ferrazzi’s approach relies on shifting away from waiting for feedback or enablement. He advocates taking leadership opportunities at all levels — making it happen, not waiting for it to happen.

That means pouncing on opportunities to create a better environment. Creating the conditions and taking those opportunities. It can start with little things, like celebrating success. At the heart of teamship is building a positive, trusting environment based on practices of constructive feedback, supporting the group and pushing toward positive outcomes. “Co-elevation” is a term Ferrazzi uses to describe it: an environment where everyone supports and elevates their teammates.

It also means leaning into those honest, curious behaviors Amin prizes so highly. In this team-enabled model, there’s no room for destructive behavior, or back channeling, or criticism inspired from negative emotions (like using it to put someone down).

Building your rocketship

Amin and Ferrazzi are both describing a vehicle to create high-impact teams, through the power of co-elevation. It’s a technique you can use as an individual contributor, and it becomes even more powerful if your whole team participates.

In this article, I’ll talk about both the individual and the team-led approach, and show how you can adopt a few simple practices to launch your own rocketship.

It’s a transformation led through action — not about “mindsets” and organizational changes. It’s practical, and happens in the day-to-day.

Core practices

There are core practices that enable the move from leadership to teamship. Among the most important, in my mind, are:

• Shifting from conflict avoidance to candor.

• Shifting from individual reliance (“hero culture”) to team resilience.

• Supporting peer-led co-elevation (not leader-led).

• Adopting truly agile practices.

• Becoming a team that celebrates and recognizes success.

• Avoiding silo culture in favor of alignment.

Here’s how a team starts to shift toward these practices.

A new social contract

The first step — let’s call it “fueling your rocketship” — is a shift away from waiting on leadership to recognizing that leadership is everyone’s job. What’s more, the team needs to recognize that we’re all allowed to do it. We can create that sense of enablement through some simple assignments and activities. In other words, by just doing it.

Part of this social contract means being open to feedback, both giving and getting. That’s where the honesty, curiosity, and hunger comes in. This is an open contract to give and get different kinds of feedback between peers; the type of feedback that has traditionally come from leadership alone:

• Ideas. Giving feedback on ideas has, traditionally, been the limit of most peer-to-peer feedback. We’ll still offer plenty of feedback here — on projects, solutions, organizational and technical ideas.

• Peer-to-peer performance. Offering peer-to-peer performance feedback is probably going to seem new. This is the new social contract: that it’s OK to offer performance feedback to your teammates, and more. It means being willing to have constructive discussions about how well you are doing in your job, and offering the same to others.

• Competencies. Again, the subject of competencies has traditionally been reserved for leader-led feedback. This means giving (and getting) feedback on capabilities, skills, and personal enablement. It means coaching your peers and learning from your peers when it comes to your abilities, and developing those abilities.

• Style. Style is likely the toughest area to offer (and receive) feedback. This means having an open conversation about interactions with others. For example, maybe a particularly over-enthusiastic team member has the habit of cutting other people off. This can cause others to shut down, which is unhealthy for the team.

This new contract is going to demand some social change and resilience within the team. Open communication and candor needs to be in everyone’s mind. It means being open to honest feedback, but also offering honest feedback. No backchannels, no attempts at undermining a colleague. Some coaching will surely be necessary — not just to reinforce positive practices, but also to elicit feedback from a team that has been trained to hold it in.

Practicing team resilience

Creating a self-elevating team happens best through simple, day-to-day practices. Not a complicated process you have to remember — but, instead, a simple thing you do whenever you need it. At the core is peer-to-peer feedback — something that we can encourage in different ways through different activities.

If you use the referral button below, you’ll earn free premium access to Customer Obsessed Engineering. Just three referrals will earn a free month!