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Who's Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success--And Won't Let You Fail
Synopsis
Disregard the myth of the lone professional “superman” and the rest of our culture’s go-it alone mentality. The real path to success in your work and in your life is through creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships” – deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential. Whether your dream is to lead a company, be a top producer in your field, overcome the self-destructive habits that hold you back, lose weight or make a difference in the larger world, Who’s Got Your Back will give you the roadmap you’ve been looking for to achieve the success you deserve.
Keith Ferrazzi, the internationally renowned thought leader, consultant, and bestselling author of Never Eat Alone, shows us that becoming a winner in any field of endeavor requires a trusted team of advisors who can offer guidance and help to hold us accountable to achieving our goals. It is the reason PH.D candidates have advisor teams, top executives have boards, world class athletes have fitness coaches, and presidents have cabinets.
In this step-by-step guide to the powerful principles behind personal growth and change, you’ll learn how to:
· Master the mindsets that will help you to build deeper, more trusting “lifeline relationships”
· Overcome the career-crippling habits that hold you back, once and for all
· Get further, faster by setting goals in a dramatically more powerful way
· Use “sparring” as a productive tool to make the decisions that will fuel personal success
· Replace the yes men in your life with those who get it and care – and will hold you accountable to achieving your goals
· Lower your guard and let others help!
None of us can do it alone. We need the perspective and advice of a trusted team. And in Who’s Got Your Back, Keith Ferrazzi shows us how to put our own “dream team” together.
From the Hardcover edition.
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About the Author
Keith Ferrazzi, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, has counseled the world’s top enterprises on how to dramatically accelerate the development of business relationships to drive sales, spark innovation, and create team cohesion. As a thought leader and advocate for corporate citizenship, he has rallied executives around initiatives to improve healthcare and education nationwide. Ferrazzi has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., and Fast Company, and has appeared on Today and other national TV. His previous book, Never Eat Alone, is a national bestseller. He lives in Los Angeles.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lose Weight, Get Rich, and Change the World
Maybe that sounds like the dubious title of some shameless self-help book, but it’s pretty much the most accurate way to describe the life of Jean Nidetch. Jean was a plus-sized housewife who enlisted her friends to help her stay on a diet. What she ultimately accomplished is remarkable. But how she accomplished it is something every single one of us needs to understand.
Jean was overweight. She was overweight as a child, she was overweight in high school, and despite endless diet regimens, her waistline kept expanding throughout her twenties and thirties. Eventually, this five-foot-seven-inch woman weighed 214 pounds, wore a size 44 dress, and fit the medical definition of “obese.” Jean tried diets and pills that promised to take off pounds, but she always gained back the weight she lost.
In 1961, at age thirty-eight, Jean started a diet sponsored by the New York City Department of Health. After ten weeks she was twenty pounds lighter, but starting to lose motivation. She realized that what she needed was someone to talk to for some support.
Her inspiration: Since she couldn’t get her pals to make the trek with her to Manhattan to sign up for the official health department regimen, she brought the “science” of the program to their living rooms in Queens. Jean and her friends would all lose weight together. Out of those first meetings grew Weight Watchers, today widely recognized as one of the most effective weight-loss programs in the world. Nidetch’s idea was simple: Losing weight requires a combination of dieting and peer support. She held weekly meetings with weight check-ins and goal setting to promote accountability, coupled with honest, supportive conversation about the struggles, setbacks, and victories of losing weight.
Eventually, Nidetch, who’d lost seventy-two pounds, rented office space and started leading groups all across New York City. In 1963 she incorporated. The company went public in 1968 and was sold to H. J. Heinz in 1978. (In 1999, Weight Watchers was again resold, to a unit of the company Artal Luxembourg.) As of 2007, Weight Watchers International had retail sales of over $4 billion from licensees and franchisees, membership fees, exercise programs, cookbooks, portion-controlled food products, and a magazine. Nidetch retired in 1984, leaving behind a legacy that has saved the lives of literally millions of men and women. As the company’s current CEO, Dave Kirchhoff, notes, “Though the science of weight loss has evolved over the years, the core of Jean’s program–support and accountability–has remained a constant.”
What’s so extraordinary about all that? Jean just wanted to get skinny, but through an inner circle of friends offering expertise, wisdom, honesty, and support she achieved far more than she ever imagined possible. Jean discovered what the great leaders and peak performers throughout history have always known: Exceptional achievement in work and life is a peer-to-peer collaborative process.
Behind every great leader, at the base of every great tale of success, you will find an indispensable circle of trusted advisors, mentors, and colleagues. These groups come in all forms and sizes and can be found at every level and in nearly all spheres of both professional and personal life, but what they all have in common is a unique kind of connection with each other that I’ve come to call lifeline relationships.
These relationships are, quite literally, why some people succeed far more than others. In Who’s Got Your Back, I want to give you a practical guide to building an inner circle of lifeline relationships so you can do for your life what Jean Nidetch did for hers.
Well Connected and All Alone
Ten years after leaving the executive committee of Deloitte Consulting, I had been, at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, one of the youngest chief marketing officers in the Fortune 500. In 2003, my first book, Never Eat Alone, promoting the power of genuine relationships and generosity in our lives at work, had become a national bestseller. And from everything I heard back from readers and clients, the book was helping people change their lives for the better. I felt as if I was beginning to find my real purpose in life–helping others improve their careers and their companies. It felt so much more meaningful than putting “butts in beds,” as I would joke, as the chief marketing officer at Starwood. Shortly afterward I had fulfilled a lifelong dream by starting my own consulting and training company, Ferrazzi Greenlight–or FG, as we called it. To the outside world, I seemed to have it all–success, money, recognition, well-paid speaking engagements, a stack of appreciative fan mail, and a professional and social network the size of a midsized metropolitan phone book.
On the surface, life was great. But beneath, everything wasn’t as it seemed. The fact is, in terms of where I wanted the company to be, my business was disappointing me. I was feeling overwhelmed and isolated. It felt as if I was at a pool party, surrounded by friends and acquaintances, but instead of mingling and passing drinks, I was alone in the deep end of the pool, struggling just to keep my head above water . . . and no one seemed to notice.
I realized that I was behaving like a mediocre manager. Too much of our client work required me to execute it personally. Although I’d hired a handful of skilled executives to help me build FG, I hadn’t prioritized the time to coach them to do what I do, or to figure out a business that didn’t involve me doing most of the legwork. When my colleagues tried to intervene and take the burden off my back, too often I was disappointed with the results. My solution: I put my head down and tried to bulldoze through my problems, taking on even more, which caused me to neglect even more of the day-to-day management of the company and spend even less time coaching my team. I was on the road constantly, an absentee CEO. Our work was more than just a job to me; it was a mission I believed passionately in. I believed in it so much that I couldn’t let go when I should have. So I was racing around the country like a crazy guy. And yet FG was turning down business because I couldn’t do it all by myself.
It was an old behavior that I knew in my gut was tripping me up, yet I couldn’t see a pathway beyond it. It was a downward spiral.
People would tell me constantly that my energy level was contagious. But the fact is, drive and ambition can take you only so far. I was too busy getting on planes, meeting new or prospective clients, giving speeches, and grasping at every shiny new idea that came along, hoping the next one would somehow eclipse or fix all our problems.
How did it look to people around me–those people at the pool party, smiling and sipping their drinks while I was desperately treading water in the deep end? Got me–I never bothered to ask them. I never talked about my problems or shouted out for help. The people I needed were within arm’s reach the whole time–but I couldn’t see it.
Most of my team just tried to do the best they could with a CEO who was missing in action. But the irony wasn't lost on them: Keith Ferrazzi, the guy nicknamed “Mr. Relationship” by the media because of the success of Never Eat Alone and the size of my network, was failing at managing the relationships in his own company.
So often we know something in our lives isn’t working, but we ignore what our gut is telling us and keep on doing it anyway. I only wish I’d had the courage to tell the people around me, “Guys, I need help. I’m drowning here.”
Know Who You Are and Where You Belong
At their essence, my problems weren’t just business problems. For so many of the daily and strategic issues that a company faces, I relied on the world-class network I had put together, using the insights and guidelines I described in Never Eat Alone. I could turn to any number of clients, lawyers, bankers, vendors, or board members in my network for specific advice. But the help they could give me was relegated to a call here or a coffee there–dribs and drabs. I didn’t have anyone in my life whom I could turn to at any time for a completely candid, no-holds-barred discussion of what was really going on in my life and my business. I hadn’t established the kind of close, deep relationships with a few key people who would do whatever it took to make sure I never failed, and for whom I would do the same. The kind of relationship I’d had with my team at Deloitte.
On one level, I had lost touch with a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. When that happens, we lose the power to manage our shortcomings, and the result is self-defeating behaviors. Overcoming them is about, ultimately, knowing thyself.
Look at it this way: Success is the ability to create the results in life we truly seek and not, say, just the amount of money you make. People who have a clear picture of what makes them tick, who know their true inner motivations and priorities, simply don’t get in their own way. They can focus with energetic intention on their goals. It’s what allows ordinary people to live extraordinary lives.
Acquiring that knowledge is a journey with no single destination–and yet somehow we all still get lost at times. When we do, we need the external perspective of a lifeline–an eye-opening kick in the butt.
For me that kick came from a friend of mine, Peter Guber, the film producer and former head of Sony Pictures. In the course of one incredible day, my life began to change.
I’d dropped by Peter’s home to offer some advice on a book he was thinking about writing. In his li...
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