Co-Elevation: 5 Ways This Concept Can Boost Employee Performance

It might be time to rethink the typical organization hierarchy. There’s a chance it’s stifling — not helping — employees’ ability to become better.

There’s a new concept in performance: Co-elevation. It could be a fruitful way to help more employees perform better more often. With that, you also elevate the culture and improve company performance.

Co-Elevation Explained

Co-elevation is the set of behavioral commitments that a team makes to their mission and to each other.

The employees have an unwavering belief in winning together and pushing each other higher in the process. When they make the shift to this mindset, they usually grow and succeed – and cut the chances of running into unsuspected risks and failing.

“Too many teammates operate in coexistence. They do their jobs and don’t want to bother each other,” says Keith Ferrazzi, an executive team coach, Founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and author of Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship.

Teams that adopt the co-elevation mindset:

• Work together to achieve audacious goals
• Find value in their interdependencies
• Embrace and seek wisdom and insight from their peers, and
• Forge co-creative relationships through candid feedback and mutual accountability.

“The resulting outcomes almost always exceed what could have been accomplished through regular channels within the org chart,” says Ferrazzi. In fact, their research found teams that embrace co-elevation realize:

• 79% increase in candor
• 46% increase in collaboration, and
• 44% increase in accountability.

Take on Co-Elevation Concepts

While you might not be ready to turn your hierarchy and organizational charts on their heads, you can likely strengthen teams, engage employees and improve performance by adopting co-elevation concepts and practices. The change can make an impact across teams, departments and the organization.

“When we refer to a team, we don’t just refer to the org chart, we mean the group working to achieve what needs to get done,” says Ferrazzi. “Work happens in networks of teams. Upgrading teams and what it means to be a great teammate is one of the least-curated and underleveraged opportunities for accelerating business outcomes.”

So here are five best practices for adopting and maintaining the co-elevation concept:

1. Focus on Interdependency

Most teams have a leader — be it a manager, supervisor or simply a chosen team leader. In co-elevation, you want people to mostly rely on interdependency, creating a system where team members depend on each other to fulfill their responsibilities.

The key is to have each person responsible in their areas of expertise, skill and productivity. Everyone does their best job in sync with others or with speed and accuracy when teammates work consecutively.

2. Share Critical Information

Most people want to avoid conflict so they don’t always share negative feedback and thoughts. In a co-elevation environment, you want people to address elephants in the room.

“In the most world-class teams, there are no back-channel conversations, no critical direct messages between teammates about one another,” says Ferrazzi. “Instead, there is a shift to not withholding information from each other or the team that may be valuable to achieving outcomes.”

So, it’s not outright criticism. Everything – including, and possibly especially, negative feedback — is critical to team success. People need to know about shortfalls and bad behaviors just as much as they need to know shortcuts and best practices.

3. Increase Collaboration

Teams usually collaborate to come up with new ideas to tackle problems or create something new. But in an environment where co-elevation is practiced, they want to shift to a broader and more inclusive approach to collaboration — one that includes diverse thinking and a broader network of insight.

“I refer to this as a collaboration stack, a series of different modes of collaboration, from asynchronous to in-person, each of which must be purposeful,” says Ferrazzi.

4. Increase Awareness

“In organizations that operate in silos, they are often unaware of the challenges and needs of their peers,” says Ferrazzi.

Remind employees working toward a co-elevation existence to “think beyond themselves.” (It’s a phrase I tried to embed in my children when they were little so they’d grow up selfless, not self-centered.)

Have teams think about and work around the obstacles they might create for others on the team or those outside the group whose work could be affected by them.

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5. Act to Change Thinking

“One of my favorite sayings is, ‘We don’t think our way into new ways of acting, we act our way into new ways of thinking,’”  says Ferrazzi.

As you and/or your teams take steps toward co-elevation, you likely will accelerate innovation and realize breakthrough results.