Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke and I am very honored to be joined today by Dr. Ron Friedman. Dr. Friedman is an award-winning psychologist, the founder of Superteams Inc. and best-selling author of three books: The Best Place to Work, Decoding Greatness, and Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams. He's an expert on human motivation and peak performance and is contributing regularly to the Harvard Business Review, where his article, How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better, was a recent cover story. Welcome, Dr. Friedman. I'm so honored to have you as a guest on the show today.
It's very kind of you, Laurie. I'm so glad to be here.
I love a good origin story. So tell us yours as we get started. Did you grow up dreaming of conducting workplace research and writing books?
Yeah, like any child growing up in Brooklyn, I felt like, man, this is my path. No, I started out as a professor teaching at colleges and universities. I was a social psychology professor and I really enjoyed that work. But one of the challenges when you are a professor is you're basically teaching the same thing over and over again. And I love learning new things. And so I decided I'm gonna go off into the corporate world. And my job was to be a pollster. I measured public opinion, figured out what people believe, and then advised organizations and leaders on how to shape public opinion using psychological principles. And what I discovered while being in the corporate world is that there is a massive divide between the latest science and the modern workplace and everything from the way that companies hire to the way that managers motivate to the basic layout of the modern office. All of it just appeared blind to a wealth of research. So I turned my attention to writing a book. That was my first book. It was called The Best Place to Work, and in it, I took over a thousand academic studies and translated them into plain English so that regardless if you're a CEO or just someone starting out, you have the best research on how to create a great workplace written in plain English. But there was something missing from that book. And that is what do the best teams do differently? Because even within the best organizations, there's a lot of variability. Some teams are great, some teams not so great. And so in Superteams what I tried to do was introduce some new research on what the best teams do differently.
I think that's fantastic, and I appreciate the journey. You're clearly, as I was listening to your book, I'm an audiobook aficionado. So as I listened to your book and speaking to you just now, your passion is palpable. And I love knowing also that you have followed that inclination to make career pivots. Talk just a little bit about how passion has directed your journey and work, and also then how that connects to the research that you explored while writing Superteams.
I appreciate you saying that. it's not something I often reflect on, but I think you're right in terms of having a willingness to pursue interest. I think that we're all uniquely qualified to do certain things. And the way to find opportunities to see what it is that doesn't feel like work to you, that feels like work to everyone else, and then to find a way to monetize that. And so for me, I love learning about research, and I love translating into plain English. one of the ways I discovered this was in that job as a pollster. And as a pollster, you have to ask a lot of different research questions, go through a lot of data. And not only do you have to summarize that data, but at the end of the deck, you have to provide a page of strategic recommendations. And what I noticed in delivering all those presentations from polling is that the executives would always turn to the last page first. That's the only thing they wanted to know. They were glad that the research was done, but what they really wanted to know is what do I do about it? And so everything I write is written with an eye towards practical, actionable takeaways. Because it's great for you to understand the theory of why people feel the way they do, but what you really want to know is how do I impact it? And that's what I tried to provide here for leaders.
I agree. And kudos to you and to my listeners who haven't yet read the book. I'm gonna be linking it in the show notes, and I cannot highly recommend it enough. The book is superb, but there are also corresponding resources that just offer a playbook and just that much more practical application, a masterclass, a PDF that is just rich and dense and so easily re-referenced. But I was struck by three things that I would love to explore with you in our conversation and hopefully we can get through everything. But the book described how superteams meet, how they communicate, and how they make decisions. And we'll have to unpack each of those, but cherry pick something from the three of those that you'd love to walk us through first.
Okay, well, if you're an executive, then chances are much of your week is spent in meetings. And a lot of those meetings don't feel like a good use of your time. So I often deliver keynotes. One of the things I do in the keynote is I say, okay, I'm gonna show you some percentages on the screen, and I want you to stand up when you see the percentage of meetings that feel like a good use of your time. And we start with 80 to 100 and no one stands up. And then 60 to 80 and no one stands up. And usually a lot of people will stand at about 40 to 60.
And you often see people holding out until the 0 to 20%. And sometimes it's the CEO. And so if you're have that experience where you feel like, man, all these weekly meetings are sucking up my time, there's a lot of great insights in this book. One of the insights that I want to share with you is something I call meeting guidelines. And meeting guidelines are just simple rules that communicate to your team what deserves a meeting and what doesn't. Most teams don't have meeting guidelines.
And so just about anybody can call a meeting for any reason. And the unfortunate truth is a lot of people use meetings as a crutch. It looks productive to everyone else on the team. It feels like things are happening. There's a meeting on the books, but it gives people license to procrastinate because after all, they're waiting for the meeting. And so meeting guidelines are, let me give you an example just to make it concrete. On my team, we have one simple meeting guideline, which is no decision, no meeting. If you have a question, pick up the phone.
If you have an update, send an email. Unless there's a decision to be made, we're not going to pull people away from their work. Another example of a meeting guideline is from the content marketing company, Percolate in New York City, they've got a meeting guideline that says no spectators. If you're not contributing to the meeting, you don't need to be there. It's not a criticism, it's respect for your time. And so I think when organizations get serious about eliminating some of this bloat.
If you really want people to feel like they're having a productive day and you want their team to be effective, that's a great place to start.
If you're coaching an executive who says, okay, I've drunk the Kool-Aid, I believe you, and I'm gonna implement this change. What are you going to say to him or her in order to help them to navigate the resistance that they're going to experience, Because you take away what feels very normal, the cadence of any given day or week, the way that we get information, right? Coach that executive and help to encourage them that it's worth it.
Okay, well, first of all, I want to share some research on meeting free days. Some organizations have have experimented with this, and we have research on what the impact is. And among organizations that have adopted two meeting-free days a week, the results are remarkable. Over 70% higher productivity reported by the people on the team, 50% less stress. That's half the stress. And people are far more likely to go home feeling satisfied at the end of the day. And if you want to retain your top performers, that's key. You want people going home feeling satisfied. And if you're listening to this, chances are you're someone who has at one point in your life worked on a Sunday morning and you know what that experience is like, where no one is emailing you, you have no calls coming in, and in just two hours, you can get more done than you would Monday through Wednesday. Why not give people that experience once or twice a week? Now, how do we implement it? Well, here's how not to implement it.
Don't implement it by saying, I just heard a great podcast, and you guys better buckle up because there are gonna be a lot of changes around here. We're gonna have meeting-free days, and here are my meeting guidelines. People resist changes that are done to them, but if they feel like they contributed to the change, they're far more likely to accept them. And so what I would urge anyone listening to this who's thinking about adopting meeting guidelines is to have a conversation with your team and say, hey, I'm curious about your experience. What's common among our best meetings, and what are some attributes of meetings that are not a good use of our time? And what if we thought about some ways of ensuring that more of our meetings look like the former rather than the latter? And the idea is you want to co-create meeting guidelines with your team and you don't want them to be rules. What you want them to be are experiments. One of the key differences between superteams and average teams is superteams experiment far more often.
And that starts with the experiments they run on themselves. And so what I would urge you is to consider a meeting guideline, adopt it for one week, and then discuss it with your team. Get some feedback. What worked, what didn't work, what are we going to try next? And if you can do that on a steady cadence of once a week, your team is going to be far better a year from now.
Absolutely.
And I have a strong hunch that that's a perfect bridge to the second topic, which was communication, because so many leaders and organizations use meetings as their primary communication or information distribution channel, which means they have so many of what you call, I love the term spectator in a meeting, you know, people that just get to sit there so that they can hear and know what's going on. And I suspect that as individuals pursue this, if they say we're going to pilot this for a week then we're gonna have to assess and also say, what are the communication gaps? Who felt left out? And then what are the leadership behaviors that shore that up, correct?
Yeah, I think a big part of this is again the reflection. And what we find is that superteams are reflecting all the time. They are far more likely at the end of the week to look at their week and say what went well, what didn't work well, what are we going to do differently next week? And they're doing that on an individual level. So part of being a superteam is having individuals who are practicing that on a regular basis, having that reflection built in. Now, to be fair, it is really, really difficult to have bandwidth for doing that. I think a lot of your listeners are probably feeling overworked and overwhelmed. And a big part of that is because of where our time goes during the week. One of the things we did in our research was we looked at how average teams spend their week versus how people on superteams spend their week. And what we find is that the average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. Senior leaders, that number is far higher, generally 22 hours a week to meetings.
And then they're spending another 11 hours digging themselves out of messages. And what happens when you're spending basically three quarters of your week in meetings or messages? You look for ways to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends, or you're multitasking throughout those meetings. And all of that contributes to burnout. And so we need what we need to be thinking about is team-wide solutions for freeing up people's time, energy, and attention.
Because what we find in our research, and this is another one of those counterintuitive findings that we weren't expecting, is productivity tips. A lot of the things that we hear about online, about the ways of salvaging our time and attention, things like only checking your email twice a day or turning off your notification or put your phone in the other room, like all of those things can help make the individual more productive. They can, but they won't make the team more productive. And it's because when one person unilaterally decides I'm not going to be available between 9:00 and 12:00 or between 1:00 and 4:00, that creates a bottleneck for everyone else on the team. So I genuinely believe that productivity experts are solving the wrong problem. Because although yes, we can make individuals more productive, that doesn't necessarily lead to a more productive team if everyone's creating bottlenecks for one another. And so if we're looking to free people up to make them more productive, we have to address it at the team level.
I totally agree, and staying with that communication topic for a moment, what are some of the other communication attributes or mannerisms or observations that you encountered in your research that happen within superteams?
One thing that I think is important to appreciate is that they have a completely different perspective on conflict. A lot of times people view conflict as something to be avoided, as something that is not a marker of a good team. But in fact, what we find in our research is superteams view conflict as a tool for making better decisions. And when you approach conflict in that way, when you view it through that lens, when someone disagrees with you, it doesn't feel quite as stressful and it doesn't feel like a personal attack.
If you can take a moment to short circuit your defensive response and approach it with curiosity and say, I'm so curious about why why you believe that or tell me more about that. That leads to a more productive conversation and ultimately it leads to a better decision for the team as a whole.
Yes, totally agree. Making decisions and decision making was one of those core elements about superteams. And so much of your research about meetings and their prevalence and how quickly they're stacked contributes to cognitive capacity for decision making and leadership decision making. I'm curious if you'd offer anything on that. And quite simply the ability to make some of the courageous decisions that are necessary.
Yeah. So what we find is that leaders on superteams are far more likely to ask a question like, if this decision doesn't work out, why might that be? And that opens the floodgates for people to disagree with you. And on a lot of teams, it's just so easy for people to just nod along with the boss than to raise objections. But if you're looking to optimize for decision making quality, you have to be willing to ask that tough question. Just a simple question like, if this decision doesn't work out, what might that be? Or what might might be we be overlooking. A question like that has been shown to improve decision making quality by 30%. And that's remarkable. It's a simple question. Along the same lines, when we talk about how they communicate, One of the the key differences in how leaders on superteams run meetings is that they're more likely to ask another provocative question, which is what are you stuck on? On most teams, meetings are basically just an opportunity for people to show up what they got done.
It's just a celebration time where everybody talks about the past and what they got done the last week. And what we find is on superteams, the leaders are asking that tough question of what are you stuck on? And it does a couple of things. One is it normalizes challenges. It communicates that it's perfectly okay to be stuck on something because when you're doing difficult things, of course you're going to encounter obstacles. The other thing it does is it changes the meeting into a collaborative forum where everyone feels like they want to help the other person solve their problem. And so rather than a meeting feeling like something that gets in the way of being productive during the day, now people look forward to the team meeting because it's where they're going to get solutions to their toughest challenges.
And it invites collaboration, you're talking about curiosity. And when leaders lead by example with curiosity, it sets a powerful expectation or example for others. And it shows humility because it says, I don't necessarily have to have all the right answers just because I have this title. And it invites other people collaboratively to contribute to the progress that's necessary.
That's exactly right. Part of having a team that keeps getting better over time, and that's another key difference between superteams and average teams, is having that psychological safety. And it's up to the leaders to create that experience. And how they create that experience on superteams is they do things like admitting when they don't know. You know, we often expect leaders to have all the answers, but the best leaders, ironically, don't. And they admit it. They'll say, Hey, I'm not sure, but I know who to ask.
And when a leader does that, it sends a signal for the team that not everyone in the room is supposed to have all the answers all the time. More important is having that appetite for finding out the right answer. And if you could create that mentality of it's safe to know as long as you have a desire for getting better, that creates a culture of ongoing improvement.
It does, and feedback is essential to that. And if you and I went to Google right now or searched for HBR articles or asked ChatGPT or Claude, how should I deliver feedback? There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of articles, but we're still getting it wrong because your research showed that feedback in the workplace is still very flawed. Give a couple pieces of advice or recommendations for how leaders can more effectively handle and deliver and receive feedback based on your research.
Yeah, so just for some context, over the last few years, my team and I have interviewed over 6,000 workers in a wide variety of fields, including many in the medical profession, and asked them two simple questions about their team. Number one is how effective is your team at achieving its goals? And number two is compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? And then we crunch the numbers. We look to see what the best teams do differently. What are the tens out of tens doing differently? We call them superteams. And what we find is three key differences. One is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. Second is they don't just collaborate well, they actively make each other better. And the third is they're constantly improving over time. And a big part of how they're constantly improving over time is they just have established far stronger feedback cultures. A lot of that feedback comes from the leader. Their leaders are better at delivering feedback that feels motivating rather than demoralizing. And that's a very important skill. And we can talk about how they manage to do that. But a big part of it too is that they're getting a lot more feedback from their colleagues. And so they are not just getting more feedback because their colleagues are quick to point out mistakes, it's because people on superteams are more likely to be proactively seeking out input from their colleagues and more likely to go to them and say, hey, what do you think of this? before they deliver something to a call to a client or to the manager. And so how do we deliver this feedback better? And why is it important? It's important because 97% of feedback doesn't get implemented. 97%. That's remarkable. 3% gets implemented. So what is different about the 3%?
Part of it has to do with the fact that much of what we've been taught about feedback is wrong. And so, Laurie, I I don't know if you've ever been taught to start a feedback conversation by saying, can I give you some feedback?
If you've ever been on the other end of that conversation, you know what's about to happen, which is you're about to be ripped to shreds. And so it makes people very defensive. That is not the correct way of doing it. You don't want people defensive because now they're in self-protection mode. They're not in a learning mindset at all. Another problem with feedback is that we often save it for performance reviews, and people know that their salary is tied to receiving this feedback, and that makes them very defensive as well.
We tend to really overload people with a lot of feedback at one time. And it's really difficult for them to make sense of it and know what's really important. And of course, the classic feedback sandwich where I'll tell you something nice about you, I'll rip you to shreds, and then I'll tell you something nice about you. And that just leaves people confused. So just a few research-based insights on how to deliver feedback more effectively. And one that I think is really important is to limit your feedback to one.
One thing at a time. You're not trying to create A players by dramatically overhauling people. Find one thing that people can do better and focus on that and make it a future focused conversation, not a past-focused conversation. So don't say, When you did X, did you know it did Y? So did you notice how when you sent me that report on a Friday night that I had to work all weekend? I really didn't appreciate that. Did you know it had that effect on me? Like that's how we're taught to deliver feedback.
A far better approach is to say, hey, the next time we work on a project together, how about we can agree that you send it to me on Wednesday so that I have a chance to fix it up and then deliver it on Friday? Are you up for giving that a go? That does a few things differently. One is you've limited it to one thing, it's future focused, and you've invited conversation around it. And because you're not making it about the past, people don't have to admit guilt.
They're far more likely to accept the feedback and adjust their behavior in the future.
That's such fantastic advice. And I agree. And even just practicing some of those things. When it comes to communication and leadership communication, it is so difficult. And something I consider, I know that you do. I talk about it with my coaching clients all the time is just wanting and needing to have the right words in the moment and feeling like we're never going to. But practicing that, a couple of key scripts that you can just kind of keep in your pocket and have practice it. Say it out loud a couple of times pre-game a crucial conversation so that you can in fact hit that target that you just described. So spot on.
Absolutely.
Do people really go into difficult conversations without pre-gaming? That's remarkable to me. Yeah.
I think far too often, absolutely, because in the day-to-day they are just kind of rolling from one thing to the next to the next and there's never any margin. But again, that that key piece, even if it's just two minutes, and sometimes as you're thinking about it, putting that note, I do it on my iPhone's notes app, something that's key that I want to make sure this is the exact message that I have to make sure I communicate. And then like pulling it out.
Looking at it for a couple of minutes before I start my first meeting of the day and then pulling it out and laying eyes on it one more time before that. And that's a great tactic to make sure that we're not walking in and just hoping we can wing it and fingers crossed.
Yeah, so I'm super curious. One of the things that you talked about was the question of where do superteams live? You know, are they in traditional settings, in office, remote, hybrid? and and your your research on this I I thought was fantastic.
Yeah, so there's a lot of conflicting evidence on this. Some research says we're more productive working from home because we have fewer distractions. Other research says actually we're better off at the office because then we can create that belonging and and the far higher creativity when we're all in the same room. And so in our research, we looked at a completely different question, which is where are superteams more likely to emerge? Are they more likely to emerge working from home? Are they more likely to emerge working at the office, or perhaps the best solution is the best of both worlds, hybrid. And as it turns out, the answer is none of the above. Superteams are just as likely to occur in each one of those settings. And it's because how a team works is vastly more important than where a team works. So on the one hand, yeah, you can have everyone in the office, but if they're all commuting two hours each way, just so that they can get to the office and turn on their laptops and join the same Zoom call they could have attended from home.
That doesn't lead to high performance. A far better approach is to say, okay, look, we're gonna f leave it to you to figure out where you work best. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we're all gonna gather together as a group. So get your pre-reads into everyone on Friday so that people can show up ready to contribute. That's taking advantage of what togetherness has to offer while still empowering people to work in a way that they work best.
Love that so much. And you know, I I'm noting that our time is starting to run short, but I have a list of a couple of things, and maybe we can just kind of keep these to key sound bites, but there are there are several things. There are four or five here that I just found so fantastic in your research that I'd love to make sure we give a small amount of airtime to. The first is what's one amenity that you found predicts a superteam?
Yeah, so it's not the office dog, it's not free coffee, and it's not an office gym. The one amenity is having a quiet space to do focused work. That's the only amenity that is predictive of having a high performing team, and it's why so many people want to work from home is they think it they'll have fewer distractions. And and what it speaks to is the fact that most offices are just an attentional minefield. And if you really want people to collaborate effectively, You don't want constant togetherness. You want the opportunity for people to do private individual work and then giving them the opportunity to get together as a group.
Yes, I love that emphasis on focused work. In superteams, where does accountability originate? This one I loved so much.
So we ask people a simple question, which is when things go wrong on your team, who do you feel worse about letting down? Is it your manager or your colleagues? And on superteams it wasn't even close. Eighty-two percent said, I feel worse about letting down my teammates. And it we just all work so much harder when we know our teammates are counting on us. And that's what you get when you have a superteam.
Absolutely. And that just validates the next piece, which was just your evidence that confirms what I've seen in so many other research studies that in superteams close friendships are common. And it's so easy to discount social connection and and and friendships at work. But your research tells us one more time in a very evidence-based truth, it can't be overstated.
That's exactly right. And and they'll give you some concrete reasons why friends make us better at our jobs. For one thing, when you're surrounded by people who know and like you and respect you, you can devote less bandwidth worrying about whether you fit in and pay more attention to actually doing your job. The other thing it gives you is you get more honest feedback. If people don't know one another or they're not feeling close, they're gonna stay quiet if you're making mistakes because they don't want to rock the boat. But if you're making a mistake, your friends will pull you aside and say, hey, you might want to reconsider this.
And finally, you yourself are more willing to ask for feedback because you're not as afraid about how that reflects on your competence. And so for all those reasons, friendships at work, it's not about creating a nice, cozy experience. It's about bringing out the best in one another.
But it's just adjacent to so many other important findings in The Best Place to Work, which is, you know, we need to have belonging and we need to have creative, collaborative environments. And it decreases the incidence of burnout. There's just, there's so much, but it is so easy and we have to really nudge ourselves intentionally to not discount that importance and say, well, it's work. It's not about friendships.
100%. And I'll just add to this that I think that One of the more counterintuitive findings for me in superteams, it's actually not something that people often ask me about, but I think it's interesting, which is that the best friendships don't emerge from icebreakers. They're much more likely to emerge when people look for opportunities to make one another better. And if you can bond over doing a good job together, having that friendship comes second and more naturally becomes a lot easier. And I use the example of Scalia and Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justices, about how close they were, despite being ideologically on the extremes of either side. And it's because they each shared unique strengths that they used to make the other person better at their job. So Scalia was a grammatical expert. And whenever Ginsburg made a grammatical error in her work, he would correct it for her privately so that she could distribute her opinion and look great in front of her colleagues. And Ginsburg was actually really good at helping Scalia modulate his emotional tone. So when he was going over and above and would alienate people, she would tell him to tone it down.
And so both of them bonded over their interest and doing great work together. And that's what paved the path for them to then bond over the opera and shopping together and celebrating New Year's Eve together for years on end. And so it has to start with looking for ways to make your teammates better, not icebreakers.
Yes.
And your point just is beautiful in that for any of us who have experienced just the richness that comes from a diverse or very strongly contrasting relationship, like you just described, or if you're a big idea person and you don't attend to the details as much, how can it be difficult but so vital and rewarding and produce much more sustainable and impactful work when you collaborate with someone who covers your blind spots? It's amazing.
A hundred percent. Yeah. So in the research, we call that complementarity. And so you're looking for people who have strengths where you don't. Those are often the best teams, which is why if you look at the most effective teams, it's generally people who have counterbalancing strengths. And so on the best sales teams, for example, you have one person who is selling, another person does the marketing, the third person who's doing the the delivery. And if you can find three people who have those overlapping skills, you're gonna have a very effective sales team.
Okay, so one last finding that I thought was super unique and I loved it, but I was just so grateful to see it confirmed in your research is that high-performing teams, movement and exercise is core to how they live together. Share what you found.
Yeah, so when we think about exercise, we think about losing weight or looking good or living longer. And yeah, all of those outcomes are are there. But arguably the biggest benefit of exercise is that it makes you smarter at your job. And it does so for a number of concrete reasons. One is when you exercise on a regular basis, you get more blood flowing to the brain, which enables you to sustain your attention more fully, makes you less distractable, improves your verbal fluency, which is just the fancy way of saying finding the right word at the right time, which you need if you're a leader.
You also are activating the memory regions of the brain. So now you're soaking up information more quickly and you're retrieving it when you need it. And finally, exercise puts you in a good mood. And if you think about anything you need, any anything that we're trying to accomplish at work, whether it's connecting with colleagues or winning over new clients, being in a good mood is essential to doing that well. On Superteams we find that they exercise on average 84 more minutes a week.
And that exercise isn't just about making them healthier. It's about bringing out the best of one another on their teams because now they're bringing more energy to their work.
I have just found our conversation to be such a delight. I'm so grateful for the work that you've put out into the world in your former two books and in this one as well. As we close, tell the listeners just a little bit about where they can follow you. I'll make sure to include links in the show notes.
Yeah, I appreciate that. I have a website, Ron Friedman PhD, and my company, Superteams Inc., delivers keynotes and workshops and leadership trainings. We're all about bringing the science to leaders so that they can build high performing teams.
Your book absolutely nailed the dead center of that target, and this conversation was such a gem. Thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Laurie.
