The Science Behind High-Performing Teams (with Ron Friedman)

Radical Candor: Communication at Work

In this episode, Kim Scott interviews psychologist Ron Friedman about his research into 'superteams.' They explore the scientific principles

Key takeaways

• The creative process requires an 'incubation period' where individuals step away from information consumption to allow ideas to surface.
• Superteams are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings and 54% less likely to rely on recurring, soul-crushing meeting schedules.

Main topics

• The Science of Superteams
• Optimizing the Creative Process

Notable quotes

The characteristics of the best teammates are the ones that don't just feel good. They move the team forward.

Conclusion

The episode provides actionable, science-backed frameworks for leaders

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) And so what's interesting about the characteristics of the best teammates is what's not on that list. So again, it's knowledgeable, dependable, and good communicator. What's not on the list is funny. What's not on the list is good listener, right? Those are very positive characteristics, but they don't make the top three. And the question is why? And the answer is, it's because the characteristics of the best teammates are the ones that don't just feel good. They move the team forward. So being funny, being a good listener, that's great, but you're not making everybody better. And what we find again and again is that the best teammates find a way to make the team better. Speaker 1 (0:42) Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott, and while the rest of the Radical Cantor podcast team is on sabbatical, I am talking to the authors of some books that I have read and loved and am thrilled today to have with me Ron Friedman. Ron, PhD, is an award-winning psychologist who helps leaders build high-performing teams. He is the best-selling author of The Best Place to Work, and Decoding Greatness. His new book, Super Teams, The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, reveals what the very best teams do differently. And that is what we're Speaker 3 (1:22) going Speaker 1 (1:22) to talk about today. Ron, welcome. Speaker 3 (1:24) Thank you, Ken. Speaker 1 (1:25) I love your book, and I love the structure of it. It leaves me feeling calm. One of the first frameworks that you suggest is how the creative process works. So can you describe how the creative process works and demystify it for folks? Speaker 3 (1:45) Sure. I think the part that most people miss is the incubation period. So you soak in a lot of great information and then you need to go away and do something else. Get yourself out of the mindset of consuming information and just letting it kind of sit there while you distract yourself, ideally with physical activity. If you can, for example, go for a walk or go swimming, all of a sudden the best ideas rise to the surface. And so if you're looking to be creative, not just productive, but also creative in the solutions you come up with, you need to build that into both your day at home and at the office, either by scheduling some brief breaks or by at the end of the day, like I do try to go to the gym and ideally kind of have top of mind the problems you're looking to solve and then let the solution come to you. Speaker 1 (2:32) I love this so much because I always describe when I was writing Radical Candor, I said the second hardest part of Radical Candor was getting inside my own head. And Speaker 2 (2:43) for Speaker 1 (2:43) that, I needed long, expansive stretches of time alone. where sometimes I was writing, but more often I was walking, as you say. I was taking long walks in my neighborhood and walking alone and feeling like, oh, I'm not doing anything. I'm just taking these long walks. But it was very productive time. And then the hardest part, of course, was getting back out of my head. And that's sort of your, I think, verification phase where you need other people. Speaker 3 (3:16) Yes, you actually want feedback from your people on your solution because if you just try to come up with it on your own, invariably you kind of go in a circle. And so there is a point where you want to test your ideas. And I think a lot of this kind of flies in the face of how we think about productivity at work. When we think about productivity at work, a lot of times we think it's about grinding. It's about the more hours you work, the more successful you'll be. And if you look at the cognitive science about how great ideas come about. Actually, what's really vital is that people have that restoration phase. And so how you spend your off hours is just as crucial to your productivity as how you spend your nine to five. And no one is that more important for than the leader. In fact, one of the studies that I talk about in the book is research showing that when a leader has a restorative evening, their team performs better the next day. Now, that sounds crazy. Why would him taking a night off help her team? be more effective. And it's because a well-rested leader shows up in a better mood. And when people feel like the leader's in a good mood, they enjoy their work more and they try harder. And so there's a whole reframing I try to do in the get more done section of the book that helps people understand that it's not just about hours spent. It's the quality of the hours and what you do after work as well. Speaker 1 (4:34) Yeah. So you break the book down into three sections and the first is get more done. So let's double click there. And I love. Reminding people, when I started writing Radical Candor, there's this you, your relationships, and then your responsibilities. I had a coach who got up in front of a whiteboard and he drew a wheel. And he said, what happens when the center of the wheel is out of alignment? Can it go faster? The answer is no, it's going to slow everything down. And the same day that this coach was telling me that, I had an employee come to me and say to me, and this was like very painful feedback. He said, I know what kind of day I'm going to have, Kim, based on what mood you're in when you walk in. And I was like, oh, no. But I can imagine that there's a lot of truth to that. So how does your research square with that? Speaker 3 (5:32) It's funny to Speaker 1 (5:33) hear Speaker 3 (5:33) you say that because I can relate to that having worked in the corporate world. And I think that is in some ways reflective of the fact that, you know, obviously people pay more attention to the leader, but you also have to be a kind of a charismatic leader for people to find you so contagious that that is the impact you're having. So maybe take that in a positive light as well. So, yeah, let me tell you about the research. So here's how we did the research for this book. So my background is I worked in polling for many years and then and I also worked in psychology. And I got the experience of being in the corporate world after being a psychology professor. And that opened my eyes to the disconnect between the latest science and the modern workplace. So that led me in my first book. That was the best place to work. And in it, I took over a thousand academic studies and translated them into plain English so that. Regardless of whether you're just someone starting out or a CEO, you have access to the best research on how to create a great workplace. But there was something missing from that book, and that is what do the best teams do differently? Speaker 1 (6:30) Yes. And Speaker 3 (6:31) because even within the best workplaces, you're going to have a lot of variability. Some teams are going to be great. Some teams not so great. So in this book, in Super Teams, what we tried to do was do a… Very comprehensive study looking at what the best teams do differently. And the way we did that is by utilizing some of that polling experience where we interviewed over 6,000 knowledge workers. And we asked them two simple questions about their teams. The first question was, how effective is your team at achieving its goals? The second question was 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 tiny group, about 8 % of teams qualify. We call them super teams and we look to see what do the super teams do differently. And what we find is that they share some very key strengths that enable them to perform at a higher level. The first strength is super teams get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. The second is They don't just get things done. They make each other better. And the third is even when things are going well, they're not satisfied. They're constantly looking to build new skills and improve over time. And the inspiring message that I try to relay to leaders is that each one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve his performance. And Speaker 1 (7:55) have more fun at work. Speaker 3 (7:56) Exactly. Speaker 1 (7:58) The more people Speaker 3 (7:59) enjoy their work, the better they perform. Speaker 1 (8:01) Yeah, yeah. And so you talk a lot in the get more done section of the book, in the first third, about meetings. And meetings might seem to some people like where... productivity and collaboration go to die. But meetings are really important. If we go back to that creative process, there's the preparation, like you're gathering all the data, or in my case, I wasn't gathering the data, I was just living my life. And then incubation was like, I was trying to make sense of my life. Illumination, I had some ideas, and then I had to bounce my ideas off. I had to get out of my own head. And I think that that is true for a lot of people. Meetings are essential for that verification process, but you also need some meeting-free times. in order to make sure that you can actually incubate and illuminate your thinking. You had some interesting suggestions about meetings. Speaker 3 (8:59) Yeah. So when we talk about how super teams get more done, one of the things that we need to contrast that with is how the average team operates. And so let me give you a snapshot. Speaker 1 (9:09) The Speaker 3 (9:09) average worker loses 18 hours a week. to meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week digging themselves out of messages. So emails, Slack, text messages. Speaker 1 (9:19) What Speaker 3 (9:20) does that leave for real work? Speaker 1 (9:21) Well, Speaker 3 (9:22) it's about a day. What happens when you have to cram a week's worth of work into a single day? You look for ways to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends, or you multitask. any one of those combinations ends up contributing to burnout. And so, you know, we ring our hands saying, how come all these people are getting burnt out at work? Better question is, how do they manage to get any work done in the first place? And so if you look at super teams, what you find is that they are much more deliberate with their time at the office. And that starts with being a lot more intentional around meetings. They're 50 % better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They're 54 % less likely to schedule recurring meetings. And recurring meetings are particularly insidious because they're so difficult to remove from your calendar. Kim, if you and I have a recurring meeting, in order for me to break that habit, I need to have a very uncomfortable conversation with you. And I need to thank Kim. I don't feel like our time together is valuable anymore. It's a little bit like breaking up with someone professionally. People don't Speaker 1 (10:26) want Speaker 3 (10:26) to have that uncomfortable conversation. So they keep going to this soul crushing meeting week after week. The other thing that super teams do is that they don't just play defense on meetings. They play offense on focus. They set aside dedicated focus blocks during the day where people can get real work done without having to answer email or attend meetings. They do things like meeting free days, except they don't call them meeting free days. They call them get things done days because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiative. And so, you know, when we talk about meetings, yes, absolutely. Meetings have value. But I think a better phrasing of that statement is well-run meetings have value. And part of having a well-run meeting is being clear on who actually needs to be in the room. And it's also about having leaders who lead those meetings with some uncomfortable questions like. What are you stuck on? That was a question that we encountered in the research again and again, is that the leaders of the best teams are asking those uncomfortable questions. What are you stuck on? Because if you think about how most meetings are run, it's basically a parade of achievement. Everyone goes about, here's what I did this week. And yeah, we clap our hands. And here's what I did this week. And that's great. We should have that positivity. We want to build that momentum. Speaker 3 (11:38) A better use of the time is when a leader says, hey, what are you stuck on? Now everyone has to think about that obstacle that they're procrastinating on. And it completely changes the tenor of the meeting because now it turns the room into a collaborative forum where everyone is trying to help everyone solve their problems. And it becomes a meeting that people actually look forward to attending because they know they're going to get solutions to their real problems. Speaker 1 (12:02) Yeah, it's going to help them get out of their head. And for that, they need other people. So one of the things that you wrote that you suggested that I've been thinking a lot about is that super teams have two days a week to get stuff done. But what if your super team is like salespeople where the work is meeting with, like, how do you deal with that? Speaker 3 (12:24) Yeah. So first of all, just to be clear, the two days a week comes from a... study that was published in the MIT Sloan Journal that showed that that was the optimal time is for a knowledge workers to have two meeting free days a week. Now, that said, I think all of this is directional. You need to customize this to whatever it is you're trying to achieve. I think a question that leaders really need to wrestle with is rather than trying to find wholesale solutions for, quote unquote, the best way of doing things. It's to work backward from what we're really trying to achieve. So in the case of a sales team, obviously availability is crucial. Part of it might be solved by one person being on call while the rest of the team is able to actually get stuff done as opposed to everybody being on call all the time. Or it can just be a dedicated focus block where we don't take calls from 11 to 1. That's another. option. But all of it ultimately needs to come from the team collaborating together and developing guidelines where everyone is solving these issues together. Speaker 1 (13:23) You Speaker 3 (13:23) know, along the same lines, one of the key tips in super teams that I think has really resonated with a lot of leaders I speak to is having meeting guidelines. So having a clear set of rules with your team about what constitutes a meeting and what doesn't. a lot of teams don't have any kind of guidelines. Anybody can call a meeting for any reason. And it's how all of our calendars get all booked up. So if somebody has a question, meeting. If somebody has