Greenlight Research Institute
Mission: To radically transform work as we know it and co-create an exponentially better future.
We’ve continued to pioneer high-performing hybrid team insights to help you address the behaviors that block teams from reaching strategic goals. In addition, they actively transform teams with new habits that increase shareholder value. Ferrazzi Greenlight has created a vast research dataset from teams who have gone on the journey of transformation from mediocre to high-impact hybrid teams.
Keith Ferrazzi is the winner of the prestigious Thinkers 50 award, recognizing the most important thought leaders in the world.
the Future of Work
Diagnostic Assessments
in Research
Research Initiatives
Our global research initiatives continue to challenge industry experts, thought leaders, and changemakers after more than 20 years. Each initiative embraces and seeks to understand disruption in service of revolutionizing work as we know it and supercharging high-impact teams poised to drive towards an exponentially better future.
High Impact Teams
More than twenty years of serving and coaching teams to become High Impact Teams (HIT), and this soon-to-be-released study covers decades of quantitative data that first began in 2000 and is still ongoing. We hypothesize that by focusing so heavily on what it means to be a great leader, we’ve often lost sight of what it means to be a great team and a great team member. Leadership and Teamship are needed for extraordinary outcomes.
Through this research and our work with clients, we have cracked the code of team performance and seen seismic shifts in candor, collaboration, innovation, peer-to-peer accountability, energy, relationships, and business outcomes within Fortune 500 companies and unicorn startups.
Competing in the New World of Work
A seminal research study published by Harvard Business School Press focused on the organization and the teams that drive them forward. Specifically, the research dove into what we learned from the pandemic that we wanted to carry forward. We uncovered what it takes to sustain high-performing teams in the new world of work with more than 2,000 Fortune 500 executives, thought leaders and Unicorn CEOs. It revealed practices around workforce redesign and business model redesign we call Radical Adaptability™ that organizations are using to leapfrog traditional obstacles to growth and realize transformational outcomes.
The study became codified in a book titled Competing in the New World of Work in partnership with Harvard Business Press, released in 2022.
World Class Hybrid & New People Rules in a Virtual Word
Our research started in 2010 in Partnership with Harvard Business Review, where over a dozen published articles followed. The study specifically dove into high-performing remote and hybrid team and leader practices.
The switch to remote and hybrid work in 2020 and 2021 proved to be the best laboratory for our longitudinal comparative research. We identified interventions that remote and hybrid teams could adopt to fundamentally shift the performance of their organizations before and after adopting world-class hybrid practices. Teams that adopt these interventions – which redefine collaborative problem-solving, radically increase trust and candor, and move from traditional hierarchy to peer-to-peer accountability – often see a three-to-four times improvement in the key indicators of team performance.
Co-Elevation®
Over a decade of research set out to answer the often overlooked question: how can we all turn our colleagues and partners into teammates and truly reboot the way we work together? The study focused on non-hierarchical working relationships and how to achieve greater productivity among peers by breaking down silos, matrixed organizations, and how to work in networked, cross-functional teams.
The subsequent published work in both Who’s Got Your Back and Leading Without Authority focused on the role of the individual contributor in navigating peer relationships for better outcomes, rather than relying on the traditional organization chart and its role in defining the team. This work, referred to as Co-Elevation®, expands the definition of a team to be those we work with to achieve success; both a direct report and a networked team.
As Featured In
Featured Team Research Insights
![[Photo: Sashkin/Adobe Stock]](https://ferrazzigreenlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/p-1-91377530-dells-ai-re-invention-is-a-wake-up-call-for-every-enterprise-ai-reinvention.webp)
Dell’s AI reinvention is a model for every company
Dell’s AI journey shows what’s possible when enterprises apply rigor instead of hype. By tying AI directly to the P&L, focusing only on high-value areas, reengineering processes before automation, and scaling with governance, Dell drove $10B in new revenue while lowering costs—proof that AI maturity begins with people and process discipline, not technology alone....
How Elite Organizations Transform Good Teams Into Extraordinary Ones
“Most organizations don’t fail from lack of talent or strategy—they fail because they’re stuck in outdated leadership models.”
Teamship flips the script: shifting from hierarchical leadership to peer-to-peer co-elevation where teams share the load, challenge with candor, and build trust through deliberate practices. The result? Faster decisions, higher accountability, and breakthrough performance that traditional leadership simply can’t deliver....
AI transformation: 4 ways to build human-centered movements that deliver results
PDF Button Organizations are bleeding capital on investments in artificial intelligence (AI), with often little to show for it. As executives throw cash at expensive tools and chaotic pilot projects, the promise of AI-driven transformation remains elusive. The problem isn’t the technology. Too many leaders rely on traditional change management thinking and old-school training methodologies....
Talent Reimagined: How AI Will Elevate Human Potential
PDF Button AI is often cast as a villain in the workplace—an unstoppable force of automation, poised to replace jobs and disrupt industries. But what if we flipped the script? What if, instead of replacing human potential, AI became the most powerful force for elevating it? Imagine a world where every employee has a hyper-personalized...
Culture change isn’t about flowery rhetoric—it can be turned into a simple assignment, why the future of work is peer-to-peer collaboration
PDF Button Organizations often talk about the types of culture they want to see—a candid culture, a collaborative culture, an accountable culture, a customer-centric culture, an agile culture, an inclusive culture, a resilient culture, or a culture with a growth mindset. But they miss that it all can simply boil down to the execution of...
A New Social Contract for Teams
Starkloff’s journey highlights a broader lesson: organizations often focus too much on individual leadership competencies and too little on team behaviors. True transformation begins with teams committing to a new social contract—embracing candor, collaboration, and accountability as the foundation for innovation and growth....
Our Research Partners
Recent Teams Research Insights
From pilot mania to portfolio discipline: how the best companies are escaping AI purgatory
PDF Button By Keith Ferrazzi, Wendy Smith, and Dan Roberts According to the now well publicized MIT-affiliated research and reporting, fewer than 5% of enterprise AI pilots ever deliver measurable business value. The other 95%? They’re still stuck in what we call AI Purgatory: exciting demos, scattered pilots, and vanishing trust. For the past couple of years, corporate leaders...
The Freelancer Who Refused To Be Replaced By AI
PDF Button When tools like Claude went mainstream, many knowledge workers felt uneasy. For freelance copywriter Leigh Ann Shelton, the impact was immediate and financial. Shelton’s job was to do what good copywriters have always done: translate a client’s voice into persuasive marketing language. Websites. Campaigns. Brand messaging. The kind of work that depends on...
My Ah-Ha Moment On How Much AI Is Transforming Team Collaboration
PDF Button For the past two years, many conversations about AI in the workplace have revolved around productivity. How do we get more output? How do we automate tasks? How do we reduce cost? All important questions. But they’re still focused on efficiency while the real performance breakthroughs in organizations don’t come from speed alone....
Why AI Adoption Stalls, According to Industry Data
PDF Button Companies in most industries are investing heavily in artificial intelligence: 88% of companies reporting regular AI use. Yet many leaders report familiar frustrations. AI adoption stalls. Performance gains plateau. Employees experiment with new tools but don’t integrate them deeply into how work actually gets done, leaving executives increasingly concerned about ROI. Our research suggests...
How One AI-Native Founder Scales At 5× Without Becoming The Bottleneck
PDF Button By any conventional startup logic, LumberFi should already be slowing down. In just two years, the construction-tech platform has gone from zero to more than 70 employees, 5× annual growth, and recognition from both NASDAQ and the NYSE as one of the fastest-growing companies in its category. But founder and CEO Shreesha Ramdas is already...
How leaders are protecting culture while AI rewrites how work gets done
PDF Button Across large enterprises, AI is moving quickly from experimentation into daily work. That shift is forcing leaders to confront issues they can’t delegate to technology: how performance is measured, how people are supported through change, and how values show up when machines start doing more of the work. Not every company is approaching...
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