Teaching others helps you grow

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Teaching others helps you grow

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, shares how being of service to others has transformed his life and business.
In this interview, Keith discusses how you can apply “being of service” to your life and business. Here, he discusses Greenlight Giving Foundation’s Teach & Grow program.

Well, the first time I realized Teach & Grow was real was when I woke up and said, “Listen, Keith, you can’t stand on stage every day and give lectures and talks and work with clients about how to be a better leader and engage more deeply with your employees who can then turn around and engage customers – you can’t train folks in this intellectual property and not have realized that if you’re not moving in that direction every day more and more yourself, you’re a damn hypocrite.” Right?

In part, it’s core to my DNA; I never stop growing. I have to grow, and I’m constantly looking for new ways to be a better leader, and that’s an assumed position for me. But what I have found is that if an employee of Ferrazzi Greenlight goes out to an inner city school and teaches our intellectual property, they own it more than they ever did before. If they’re going to go out and teach inner city kids how important it is to build relationships to get out of their cycle of poverty, then they better come back and realize that they have to put their own Relationship Action Plan into place.

One of the things that’s very important to me is, as you begin to learn something about our intellectual property and the reason why we, as an organization, are better than most at human behavior change, [it’s because] we don’t just teach stuff – we change habits, we change addictive, old, bad behaviors. And a part of that is an immersive, experiential or what we call “mission-based” learning system which forces people to do stuff. And part of what we tell people to do is that, to finish learning it, you’ve got to go teach it – and if you can’t teach it then it’s really never going to solidify in your soul.

To download the full transcript of Keith’s podcast on The Power of Giving, click here. To listen to this and other Social Capitalist podcasts, download them at iTunes.