Why Great Teams Work Differently, with Ron Friedman

Career Sessions

Ron Friedman, organizational psychologist and author of 'Super Teams,' explores why high-performing teams succeed where average ones fail. H

Key takeaways

• Team performance is driven more by how teams work than where they work—location doesn't determine success.
• Individual productivity hacks often hinder team productivity because they create bottlenecks.

Main topics

• Team productivity vs. individual productivity
• The role of coordination in high-performance teams

Notable quotes

"How a team works is vastly more important than where a team works."

Conclusion

Great teams aren't formed by chance—they are built through intentional habits around time

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Think about the best team that you have ever been part of. Odds are, you didn't just accomplish more, you actually looked forward to going to work. You trusted the people around you. Meetings felt productive instead of draining. You challenged one another and you learned from one another and the whole truly became greater than the sum of the parts. Now think about the worst team you've ever worked on. Probably the same level of talent, if we're honest, same good intentions, and yet somehow everything felt harder. Communication was difficult, meetings multiplied, progress slowed, and often by the end of the day, you and probably everyone else went home exhausted. So what separates great teams from the average ones? Is it the leader? Is it the culture? Is it the talent? And are we asking the wrong questions altogether? Today's guest, Ron Friedman, believes we have misunderstood teamwork for years. He is an organizational psychologist, bestselling author, one of the leading experts on human performance at work. His new book, Super Teams, draws on years of research into what the highest performing teams actually do differently. And many of the findings are surprisingly counterintuitive. In our conversation, we're going to explore why most teams never reach their potential, the hidden habits that separate exceptional teams from everyone else, why so many modern workplaces make collaboration harder rather than easier, and how AI is posed to reshape teamwork in the years ahead. Whether you lead a team or work on one, this episode will change the way you think about what it really means to perform at your best. I'm J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Ron, thanks for joining me today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So let's dive right in. You have spent years studying high-performance teams across a broad range of industries. Before we talk about what the best teams do, what strikes you most about what the average or less than average teams do? Speaker 2 (1:55) Well, the tragic thing when you study average teams is how much of their time is spent wasted. According to our data, the average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week digging themselves out of messages. And the question is, what does that leave for actual real work? And it's about a day. And what happens when you have to do a week's worth of work in a single day? You find ways of creating more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends. And that approach is what is contributing to burnout. And so we spend so much time wringing our hands saying, why are people getting burnt out? A better question is, how do they Speaker 1 (2:32) manage to get any work done in the first place? Yeah, and I know you talk about a lot of things that go on, not just meetings, but other things that we do at work. They're well-intended, but they end up working against our individual and collective productivity. Talk about some of those. Speaker 2 (2:47) Yeah. So, you know, when you look online, you see a lot of productivity hacks. You see things like, hey, if you really want to get work done, put your phone in the other room or turn off your notifications or only check your email a few times a day. And that approach might work for the individual. And so what happens when you're working on a team is that one person's deep work becomes another person's bottleneck. And so when we studied what high-performing teams do differently, what we discovered is that the productivity tips that you would assume would lead to individual productivity and therefore team productivity end up not working that way. They end up having no effect on a team's productivity. And it's, again, because it slows down the team as a whole. The better solution, and this is what we find on high-performing teams, is they coordinate. together to say, okay, we're going to take a 90 minute on a Tuesday. Nobody has to check their email. Instead, everybody can get their deep work done. And then once that's over, we're all going to check our email together. And that enables teams to get more done by coordinating their efforts instead of relying on people Speaker 1 (3:49) just coming up with their own rules for themselves. Yeah, I think this is one of the interesting things that you really bring to bear. There's This assumption, as you said a minute ago, that individual productivity translates into team productivity. Literally, I was in a meeting just the other day where we were incredibly still talking about return to office and how many days people need to be in the office and having this debate about individual productivity versus what does it end up meaning for the team. And I think this is a counterintuitive thing that comes out of your research that individual productivity does not necessarily translate into team productivity. Certainly ought to be driving people to rethink some of the things that hacks or not, they've been told. Yeah. And Speaker 2 (4:30) to your point about a team's location, that's another counterintuitive finding that we uncovered in the research. And this might be a good opportunity for me to take a step back and just explain how we did this research. So my team and I interviewed over 6,000 workers in a wide variety of industries, and we asked them two simple questions about their teams. Number one, how effective is your team at achieving its goals? And number two, compared to... other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? And then we took the teams with a perfect score. It was a very small group, about 8 % of teams qualify. We call them super teams. And we look to see what do the super teams do differently. And we looked at everything from how they structure their day to how they run their meetings to even how they recover during their off hours. And what we discovered is that super teams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. They don't get stuck losing half their week to meetings. They are much more deliberate with their time. And we can talk more about how they go about doing that. The second strength is they don't just collaborate well. They actively make one another better. And the third is even when things are going well, they're not satisfied. They're constantly looking to build their skills and improve over time. And the encouraging piece is that every one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance. Now, within that research, we looked at what location are high-performing teams most likely to form in? Are they most likely to form in remote teams? Are they most likely to form in office teams? You might assume, okay, because there's more collaboration when you're in person, maybe that's the key. Or maybe it's the best of both worlds. You want hybrid teams to improve the chances of having a high-performing team. What we discovered is that location doesn't matter. And the reason it doesn't matter is because how a team works is vastly more important than where a team works. You can have everyone at the office, but if all they're doing is getting on a Zoom, which they could have attended two hours ago, that's not bringing out the best in people. The same issue arises in slightly different flavor in remote teams. What happens with remote teams is that they overcompensate for not being in the same room. And so they're sending more emails and spending more time in meetings. And so the bottom line is taking advantage of how a team works is critical. And you have to plan around what the team is trying to achieve, not simply bringing it down to. Where are we going to work? Because that oversimplifies the problem. Speaker 1 (6:50) Yeah, that short statement that you made in the book, how a team works is more important than where a team works, has been in my head since I heard it as I was listening to the audio book. And I think it's something that probably flies in the face of what a lot of people think and certainly forms the basis of all of these debates that are happening about how many days people should be in the office. The other thing that I think you're bringing up that's really important and I don't want to go by it is this idea that. These teams actually talk about how they want to work together and how they want to use their time. I can't think of any team that I have been on in recent memory that has gone through that step. That's unfortunate. Speaker 2 (7:25) And, you know, what I think it comes down to is being aware of some of this research. And once you have that awareness that how a team works is more important than where a team works, you can start asking some important questions like what constitutes a good meeting? The easiest way of eliminating these unnecessary meetings is. getting clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what doesn't. I call these meeting guidelines. One of the most interesting things I covered while doing the research on high-performing teams is when you look at super teams, they're much more deliberate with their hours in meetings. And so within my team, we have a very simple meeting guideline, no decision, no meeting. If you have a question, pick up the phone or send an email. If you have an update, send a video capture or share a spreadsheet. there's a decision to be made. We're not going to pull people away from doing their jobs. Another example of a meeting guideline that I came across while doing the research for super teams is no spectators. This is a meeting guideline by the company called Percolate in New York City. They have a meeting guideline, no spectators. If you're not contributing, you don't need to be in the meeting. And what all of these meeting guidelines do is they ensure that people's time in the office is well spent instead of having it just completely monopolized by things that feel like they're setting people back. which then forced them to make up for lost hours by multitasking or coming in after hours. Yeah, Speaker 1 (8:45) the meeting point certainly was a big focus in the first few chapters of your book. And the amount of