June 3, 2026 • 26 mins
Ron Friedman, author of Superteams, shares strategies for better collaboration
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a slightly longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
(00:23):
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Ron Friedmant to Before Breakfast.
Ron is the author of the brand new book Super Teams.
So Ron, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Thanks for having me, Laura.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm excited to have you here. Why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, So I started off as a professor's teaching psychology
at colleges and universities, and then I went off into
the corporate world and my job was to be upholster.
My role was to figure out what it is that
people believe and then advise organizations using psychological principles. And
what I discovered being the corporate world was that there
was a massive divide between the latest science and the
(01:01):
modern workplace. And it was everything from the way that
companies hire to the way that managers motivate, to the
basic cloud of a modern office just appeared blind to
so many great insights about how we can get people
to be more motivated and engaged and productive. So I
turned my attention to writing my first book, and that
was the Best Place to Work. And in it, I
turned over a thousand academic studies into plain English, so
(01:23):
that regardless if you're someone who's running an organization or
just starting out, you had the best research on creating
a great workplace. And in my new book, Super Teams,
I talk about how to create the best possible team.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Awesome, Well, teams are good. And yet this is the
question for you, Ron, what makes a team good? Because
I know in your book you do a lot of
comparisons between the best teams and everyone else to find
out what it is that the best teams do differently.
So how did you determine that a team was a
good team?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Like?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
What are the metrics there?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, So we ran surveys where we pulled thousands of
workers across a wide range of industries and we asked
them two key quess about their teams. The first question
was how effective is your team at achieving its goals?
And the second question is 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, a
(02:14):
very tiny group, about eight percent. We call them super teams,
and we look to see what are the super teams
doing differently compared to the average team.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah, and you found there were all sorts of different
things that they did. A lot of people think that
work is about teamwork is about collaboration, and it obviously is.
But one of the first things you talk about in
the book is that you found that super teams actually
prioritize individual focused time. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, I think that a lot of times organizations say
they want collaboration, but what they get instead is constant communication,
and that's not the same thing as collaboration. If you
look at the most successful collaborators, what they tend to
do is they tend to cycle between deep work and
then collaborative work to fine tune those ideas and just
to take a step back. So, what are the super
(03:02):
teams actually doing differently? The first key strength that we
found and we found three of them. The first key
strength is that they do a better job of getting
more done by better managing their time. Energy and attention.
And I'm sure that's an idea that is hugely appealing
both to you and too listeners of the show, because
you're so good at identifying these great productivity tips. That's
(03:23):
what they're doing at the team level. I think at
most organizations, people are left to scavenge for focused time alone.
And what we found is that, in fact, a lot
of the productivity tips that people use to create opportunities
for deep work end up slowing down the team because
one person's deep work is another person's bottleneck. And so
if everyone is individually incorporating these productivity tips, like they're
(03:46):
turning off their email, or they're batching their email, or
they're turning off notifications, that tends to slow the team down.
The best teams are collaborative in their approach to focus.
They're doing things like setting aside dedicated focus blocks for
ninety minutes where everyone can focus together without having to
respond to emails. Or they're doing things like meeting free
(04:07):
days where people have the opportunity to just really get
things done without having to constantly be interrupted. And so
the best teams are taking a team approach to solving
this focus problem.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
I love how you put it that people are scavenging
for time, because yes, a lot of the advice people
are giving to claw back this focus time from the
constant communication is about stopping the back and forth. But
we want to make sure that we have an opportunity
for both. And the problem is, you know, often, like
the whole forty hours a week is consumed in the
back and forth. So talk about this, how would you
(04:40):
run a schedule like as a team, like, how would
you talk about doing this so that everyone could have
that focus time? I mean you said sort of ground rules,
like what do you do?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
One of my favorite tips on the book is something
I call meeting guidelines, and meeting guidelines are a simple
fix to unproductive meetings. So here's what meeting guidelines mean.
It means getting clear with your team on what deserves
a meeting and what doesn't. A lot of organizations just
simply allow anyone to call a meeting for any purpose,
and unfortunately, many people use meetings as a crutch. It
(05:11):
prevents them from having to make a decision and it
gives them license to procrastinate because after all, they're waiting
for other people's input. So when you set meeting guidelines,
what happens is all those opportunities for unnecessary meetings evaporate.
So within my team, we have a simple rule, no decision,
no meeting unless there's a decision to be made. We're
(05:34):
not going to pull people away from doing their work.
If you have a question, pick up the phone. If
you have an update that's an email or a screen capture.
Another example of a meeting guideline in super teams is
from the company Percolate in New York City. They have
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
(05:57):
so what happens is when you have these meeting guidelines,
you can literally save people ten hours a week. And
one thing I didn't mention that I think until now,
is that most employees end up spending eighteen hours a
week in meetings and then another eleven hours a week
on email. That leaves about a day to do a
week's worth of work. That's the reality many of us
(06:19):
live in. And what happens when you have a week
to do a single you have a single day to
cram a week's worth of work, you look for ways
to create more time and a lot of For a
lot of workers, that means coming in late or working
on coming in earlier, or staying late, or working on weekends.
And that approach conserva you in the short term, but
if you keep working like that, invariably are going to
burn out.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Well, let's talk about the other sorts of collaboration that
people are trying to claw their time back from when
when we don't have a healthy work environment. That's things
like slack and like the frequent long emails like you
mentioned you have, you know, meeting guidelines. I'm curious about,
you know, things like slack and email, how people preserve
time for focus and yet also make sure that people
(07:00):
are responsive.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I think the key is getting clear with your team
on when we're going to be monitoring our message and
when we're all going to log off. And I think
this assumption that we all need to be available for
each other all day long is not just wrongheaded, but counterproductive.
And so if we as a group can agree that
between let's say nine to eleven every morning, we're going
to focus on't getting our work done, but between eight
(07:23):
and nine in the morning, and then eleven to twelve
in the morning, we're going to check our messages. That's
a perfectly reasonable response. Now, of course, there are going
to be vary variations depending on what industry you're in,
so an approach that can work for a creative team
might not work for a for a PR team. But
the point is to be deliberate and intentional about how
you're carving out time instead of just assuming that focuses
(07:46):
something individuals need to find time for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Is there a way to spend less time on email?
I'm curious about that one in particular.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I think there is, but I think that what it
ultimately comes down to is a carving out time for
on email hours. But beyond that, one of the things
we find that super teams do more often is that
they write out standard operating procedures that detail how a
project is supposed to be done instead of relying on
people to contact their teammates with constant questions. The more
(08:15):
specific you can get about how things are done the
right way, the less communication you need to have. And
so that's another way of freeing people up from the
constant communication that unfortunately sinks too many of our days.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Absolutely well We're going to take a quick ad break
and then I'll be back with more from Ron Friedman. Well,
I am back talking with Ron Friedman, who is the
author of the brand new book super Teams. So Ron,
I was fascinated to see that teams could super teams
(08:48):
could be remote or hybrid too. I think there's a
story out there that you know, the real teams, the
real productive teams are all in the same place, that
that's what real collaboration looks like. And you found that
it was really location agnostic.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's exactly right. So we often hear about CEOs who
call everyone back into the office with the assumption that
the team will be more effective and closer knit if
they're all in the same location, And in fact, there's
research showing that there's actually conflicting research on this. Some
research says we're working from home. Other research says we're
more effective working at the office because you were better
(09:22):
at establishing trust and have more collaboration. So in our study,
we looked at something completely different. We looked at where
are super teams more likely to occur? And what we
found is it doesn't make a difference. They're just as
likely to happen working remotely as they are hybrid and
in office. And that's because where a team works isn't
(09:43):
nearly as important as how the team works. And I
got to tell you, I get an inside look at
the way a lot of organizations operate and the number
of smart, ambitious professionals who lose hours of their day
commuting just so that they can get to the office,
fire up their laptop and attend the same zoom meeting
they could have included themselves in from home is heartbreaking.
(10:07):
And making the most of our our time together in
the same location requires intention and planning. It's one thing
to require everyone into the office another to say, look,
we're going to leave it up to you to figure
out where your most effective, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
we're going to have strategic conversations. So get your pre
reads in on Friday so that everyone can show up
ready to contribute. The latter is taking advantage of what
(10:29):
togetherness has to offer while empowering people to be productive
in the way that they work best.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Is there anything that remote or hybrid teams do need
to pay attention to, specially to make sure that they
are maintaining that that close knit sense.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think there are opportunities for any team to work
more effectively, and that applies to remote teams. I think
remote teams have to have some clear rules about when
video calls, for example, are useful and when they or not.
One of the things I talk about in the book
is that we've defaulted to video calls ever since CO
and THEY and during COVID. It's served a purpose. It
allowed us to feel like we were on the same
(11:05):
page and seeing each other's faces and we weren't alone.
But there are some important costs to video calls that
we often often ignore.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So in real life it's completely unnatural to stare someone
in the face for an hour straight on video calls.
Looking away feels rude, and so we overcompensate and it's exhausting.
And so there's research showing that if you are on
video calls all day, you're going to have less energy
and make worse decisions than if you had those same
(11:33):
conversations on the phone. Now, to be clear, there are
that opportunities for doing video calls when when they're actually
quite valuable. So for example, if you're just establishing a
relationship or there's a disagreement in those cases, getting on
video calls makes complete sense. But because you're you can
see the other person's face and you're less likely to
and misinterpret what they mean. But unless that's the case,
(11:56):
if you already have a relationship and there's no disagreement
in place, there's no reason to use video calls. Stick
to phone calls. You'll have a lot more energy as
a result.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Well, let's get to that place of trust, because one
of the things that super teams are built on is
having a lot of trust in your colleagues. Now, obviously,
trust is something we can build up over the long
haul of working together and knowing that the other person
is there for you. But you talk about some ways
that you can kind of build that trust more quickly,
like when a team is starting up. What are some
ways that we can quickly build trust with a colleague.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Well, one of the things that is I think really
fascinating is that trust is built on reciprocity, and so
the more trust you give, the more likely it is
to be reciprocated. Now, let's take a step back for
a second, because one of the things I do in
the book is I talk about what are the three
pillars of trust? What is trust actually founded on and trust,
by the way, just to define it for people, because
it tends to get fuzzy for a lot of folks
(12:47):
in terms of like the idea of trust gets thrown
around in leadership circles a lot. But what is the
actual definition of trust? Well, trust is being willing to
take on risk while still expecting a positive outcome. And
so if I trust you to do a good job
with this podcast, making myself vulnerable while still expecting the
podcast to sound great at the end. And in the
(13:10):
book I talk about what are the three pillars of
trust in the workplace? Because it does vary depending on
your role, So the things that define trust in a
working relationship aren't necessarily the same elements that define trust
with a doctor or with a neighbor. So at work
it comes down to three things. One is competence, how
well you do your job. The second thing is care.
The second pillar is caring how much do you care
(13:32):
about other people? And the third pillar is consistency how
predictable are your behaviors? And you need to have all three.
Any time one of these pillars is missing, trust tends
to degrade. And so, for example, you can have someone
who's really caring and really consistent. But if they do
a bad job, that trust is going to break down.
(13:52):
And so what it comes down to, I think is
identifying for any relationship where you're trying to build trust,
figure out where the opportunity these are for elevating any
of the pillars that may be weak.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
And how can we turn a colleague into a friend?
So you know, obviously, when you like the members on
your team, this has all sorts of positive benefits, and
friendship is something that has developed. What can we do
to turn a colleague into a friend.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
In the book, I talk about the psychology of friendships,
and there are some recent findings in the science of
friendships that I think are really interesting. One of them
is to assume your colleagues like you. Most of us
dramatically underestimate how well liked we are, and that leads
us to pull away and act in ways that make
us less likable. So, for example, if you're joining a
(14:42):
party and you assume people don't like you, you may
be slightly withdrawn or less likely to smile. But being
more extroverted and smiling more actually gets people to like
you more, and so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
The second tip I discussed in the book is being
really curious. People love to talk about themselves. The more
questions you asked, the more likable you tend to be
(15:02):
be viewed as. So I give the tip of think
less like a ted speaker and more like a podcast host.
Don't worry so much about impressing others, try to be impressed.
And the final thing, and this is taken from the
story of Scalia and Ginsburg, who famously diametrically opposed Supreme
Court judges, who ended up becoming best friends. How do
they become such great friends? It wasn't because they did
(15:23):
trust falls or icebreakers. It was because they found ways
to make each other better. And that's a real key,
is find ways to make other people succeed in their role.
In the case of Scalia, he was a grammatical savant
and he would improve Ginsburg's writing, and Ginsburg, in turn,
was really good at helping Scalia modulate the tone, the
emotional tone of his decisions not to alienate people. And
(15:46):
so in both cases they made each other better.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Love that all right, Well, We're going to take one
more quick ad break and I'll be back with more
from Ron Friedman. Well, I am back talking with Ronen Friedman,
who is the author of the brand new book Super Teams.
So just a little bit more about the teams before
we get to your schedule. Ron, this is sort of
(16:10):
between you know, individual schedules and teams. You found that
members of super teams were more likely to exercise. Now
that seems a little bit unrelated, so maybe you could
explore that for us.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, A lot of times when we think about exercise,
we focus on our health. But one of the more
surprising findings in the last few decades is that exercise
also makes us smarter, and it's for some very concrete reasons.
When we exercise, we get more blood flowing to our brain,
which helps us sustain our attention and makes us less distractable.
It activates the memory reasons of the brain, so we
(16:43):
are able to soak up information more quickly and retrieve
it when we need it. And critically, exercise puts you
in a good mood, and when you're in a good mood,
you do everything better at work, including connecting with colleagues
and winning over new clients. And so exercise isn't some
something that makes us look good or feel good. It
actively makes us better at our jobs. And on super teams,
(17:04):
we find that they exercise more often. Members of super
teams tend to exercise for eighty four more minutes per week.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
That's a lot. That's almost as many minutes as we
need to be exercising. Not quite, but it's getting there.
But is this something that people were I mean, this
was kind of more like people do before or after
work though, right, this doesn't necessarily like you know, they
go and go as a team to the gym over lunch.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
That's right. In fact, one of the one of the
more fascinating findings in the research on super teams is
we looked at what are the amenities they have at
the office, and we look to see Arthur particular amenities
that make a team more effective. And among those amenities
that we tested were office gyms, and super teams were
not any more likely to have an office gym. In fact,
(17:48):
there were all these amenities in our study where you
included everything's like ping pong tables and collaborative spaces, and
the only office amenity that made a difference when it
came to team performance was having a quiet space to
do folks to work, and that says so much about
what people really want from their workplace, and it's why
so many people prefer to work from home. It's because
most offices are have become an attentional war zone. And
(18:11):
so if you're looking to lift up your team's performance,
create a focus based don't worry about the ping pong tables.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, less foosball more. Have people work from home twice
a week, that's probably a better management there. So Ron,
let's pivot to your schedule here. You know, this is
a show called Before Breakfast. Do you have any sort
of morning routine?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I walk my dogs and I listen to podcasts like
this one, and I find that Yeah, I find that
it really helps focus my attention on the big ideas
instead before I get lost in the minutia.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, is there a what does the rest of your
schedule look like? So you get up, you walk your dogs,
What does the work day tend to look like? From there?
The workday?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well, here's a tip that I think some people might
benefit from. So I actually uhould to teach productivity courses,
and one of my favorite tips was to always make
up your to do list the day before, but don't
worry about the order and which you're going to do things,
just kind of doing an information dump of all the
things that you are at the top of your on
the top of your mind. And once you've written that list,
(19:10):
I find it's much easier to disconnect. But then the
first thing I do after breakfast is I'll sort the
list in terms of what's most important to least important.
I use a question that helps orient me to what's
most important to me. So, for example, over the last
few months, I've been really focused on super teams, and
so the question I might ask is how important is
(19:30):
this item to helping me get this book out in
front of the most number of people? And so I'll
sort it that way. And that orienting question will be
different for every person, but it's really valuable to identify
what that question is for you.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah, and whether what you're doing that day is helping
advance you towards your goals. Do you structure certain sort
of works at different different times of day or anything
like that.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Well, one of the things we know from the researchers,
we're better at doing creative work when we're tired, better
at doing focus work when we're sharp, and so I'll
often think of that. I'll keep a list of ideas
to think about that I will examine before I go swimming,
for example, because I find that the mind wandering that
happens when I'm swimming is very conducive to having great
(20:15):
creative ideas.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Now, swimming is not an exercise form that I hear
all that often from people, because the logistics are a
lot harder to exercise. I mean unless you have like
a very conveniently pool right outside your door or something,
which maybe you do, but you how do you make
that work?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I appreciate your curiosity for this. Yeah, I would be
the same way. I'd be asking the same kind of
questions I go to I got collect gym memberships. Just
the way I put it, I think there are worse
things to collect in the world. I have about four
or five gym memberships, and I go to one for
because it has a pool. I go to a different
one because it has great exercise equipment without a television.
I find the televis really distracting at the end of
(20:51):
the day when I'm tired. Another one has a great
basketball court or a pickleball. Community exercise is definitely a
big part of my life. And it became that way
once I started seeing some of the research on exercise.
And I think a big breakthrough for me was recognizing
that exercise wasn't something I selfishly do for myself. It's
literally part of my job. If I want to have
(21:13):
great ideas, I need to exercise. If I want to
have sustainable energy, I need to exercise. And so I
think viewing it that way as an investment in my
future performance has been incredibly valuable.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Do you get good ideas while you're swimming laps?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Definitely? And I keep a notepad it's time. Yeah, I
keep I keep a water proof notepad. They sell them
on Amazon, and it comes with a pencil and you
drop down your ideas and just keep it right by
my lane, right next to my water bottle. I love it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
I love it. It's like the ideas from the shower.
You get them, very hard to capture them. But if
you can figure out the water proof idea, it'll be
it'll be great. So ron I always ask my guests,
what is something you've done recently to take a day
from great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, this happened yesterday. So I recently got my copy
of Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. I'm not sure if
you're familiar with her.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I've heard of her, but yes, okay, she.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Does great work. And in the book, Laura, I'll just
refer to her as you just for the sake of conversation.
You talk about being very deliberate with thirty minutes a day,
particularly at the end of the day, and just if
you can take advantage of thirty good minutes at the
end of the day, your entire day will be improved.
And I did just that. I went for a walk
(22:22):
with my wife. It was a very long walk. It's
like that kind of the first really warm day of
the year here in Rochester, New York, and it was
just like so refreshing. We talked about everything, and we
went kind of went down memory lane. We have an
elementary school very close to our home, and my son
is no longer there. He's now in middle school. So
we went walking by the elementary school and just talked
about all the great memories we had of him growing up.
(22:44):
And I have you to thank for that.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Oh wonderful. Well, I'm so glad you guys got this
nice walk in the evening. I think a family walk
is one of the best ideas out there, and I
love when people do that with their golden hours. What's
something you're looking forward to right now.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I'm looking forward having these book launch done.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
I understand. I understand for sure, but it'll be fun
to see it out there. So where can people find you?
I understand you have some resources that might be helpful
for people.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, we've built a lot of resources to go with
the book so that people can really implement the ideas.
I know. It's just one of the challenges with reading
a book is you have all these great ideas and
you never really put them to use. And so I
wanted to really make this actionable for people, even if
they're not leading a team, just to incorporate some of
these great strategies that we uncovered by studying super Teams.
So we created a website it's Superteamsmasterclass dot com and
(23:35):
if you go there, you'll be able to download a
free masterclass as an action plan with all the best
practical strategies, and it even comes with a discussion guide
that you can use to share the best insights with
your team. So that Superteam's Masterclass dot com.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And even if you aren't leading a team. I mean,
are these strategies that you can use, Like I mean,
you're an individual contributor, you've got a manager. Are these
things you can put into practice?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Absolutely, And just to give you a flavor of some
of this, one of the things that I find is
really effective is to talk to your team about creating
an experiment. When you position an idea as an experiment,
like let's say you want to try a meeting free afternoon,
and it's really tough to sell that to your boss.
If you go to your boss and you say, hey,
how about for the rest of our lives, Tuesday afternoon,
we just don't do any meetings, that might be the
(24:18):
thing you want to say. But the strategy that will
probably be way more effective is to say, Hey, I've
noticed we've been doing a lot of meetings, and I
wonder if we might be able to try this idea
I read about in this book Super Teams of trying
out Tuesday afternoon for an hour and a half, no meetings.
Let's just see how it goes, and we'll see how
the team feels, and if we all feel a lot
(24:38):
more productive, maybe we can try it again. If you
position as an experiment, it's way easier for people to
accept and to try, because it's really hard to tell
your team no, I'm not willing to try an experiment.
And so that's just one new example exactly. So just
this one example of one way you could apply it.
And also we didn't get to talk about this, but
in addition to looking at what the best teams do differently,
(24:59):
we looked at what the mem of those teams do differently,
and so we found a lot of the tips that
work for individuals also work in the team level. So
things like planning your week in advance, reflecting on what
went well, what didn't well, time boxing, all of those
strategies applied to individuals no matter what team they work on.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Absolutely well. You'll have to read Super Teams to learn
more about all those So Ron, thank you so much
for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(25:43):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(26:07):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a slightly longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
(00:23):
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Ron Friedmant to Before Breakfast.
Ron is the author of the brand new book Super Teams.
So Ron, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Thanks for having me, Laura.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I'm excited to have you here. Why don't you tell
our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yeah, So I started off as a professor's teaching psychology
at colleges and universities, and then I went off into
the corporate world and my job was to be upholster.
My role was to figure out what it is that
people believe and then advise organizations using psychological principles. And
what I discovered being the corporate world was that there
was a massive divide between the latest science and the
(01:01):
modern workplace. And it was everything from the way that
companies hire to the way that managers motivate, to the
basic cloud of a modern office just appeared blind to
so many great insights about how we can get people
to be more motivated and engaged and productive. So I
turned my attention to writing my first book, and that
was the Best Place to Work. And in it, I
turned over a thousand academic studies into plain English, so
(01:23):
that regardless if you're someone who's running an organization or
just starting out, you had the best research on creating
a great workplace. And in my new book, Super Teams,
I talk about how to create the best possible team.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Awesome, Well, teams are good. And yet this is the
question for you, Ron, what makes a team good? Because
I know in your book you do a lot of
comparisons between the best teams and everyone else to find
out what it is that the best teams do differently.
So how did you determine that a team was a
good team?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Like?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
What are the metrics there?
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, So we ran surveys where we pulled thousands of
workers across a wide range of industries and we asked
them two key quess about their teams. The first question
was how effective is your team at achieving its goals?
And the second question is 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, a
(02:14):
very tiny group, about eight percent. We call them super teams,
and we look to see what are the super teams
doing differently compared to the average team.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah, and you found there were all sorts of different
things that they did. A lot of people think that
work is about teamwork is about collaboration, and it obviously is.
But one of the first things you talk about in
the book is that you found that super teams actually
prioritize individual focused time. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, I think that a lot of times organizations say
they want collaboration, but what they get instead is constant communication,
and that's not the same thing as collaboration. If you
look at the most successful collaborators, what they tend to
do is they tend to cycle between deep work and
then collaborative work to fine tune those ideas and just
to take a step back. So, what are the super
(03:02):
teams actually doing differently? The first key strength that we
found and we found three of them. The first key
strength is that they do a better job of getting
more done by better managing their time. Energy and attention.
And I'm sure that's an idea that is hugely appealing
both to you and too listeners of the show, because
you're so good at identifying these great productivity tips. That's
(03:23):
what they're doing at the team level. I think at
most organizations, people are left to scavenge for focused time alone.
And what we found is that, in fact, a lot
of the productivity tips that people use to create opportunities
for deep work end up slowing down the team because
one person's deep work is another person's bottleneck. And so
if everyone is individually incorporating these productivity tips, like they're
(03:46):
turning off their email, or they're batching their email, or
they're turning off notifications, that tends to slow the team down.
The best teams are collaborative in their approach to focus.
They're doing things like setting aside dedicated focus blocks for
ninety minutes where everyone can focus together without having to
respond to emails. Or they're doing things like meeting free
(04:07):
days where people have the opportunity to just really get
things done without having to constantly be interrupted. And so
the best teams are taking a team approach to solving
this focus problem.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
I love how you put it that people are scavenging
for time, because yes, a lot of the advice people
are giving to claw back this focus time from the
constant communication is about stopping the back and forth. But
we want to make sure that we have an opportunity
for both. And the problem is, you know, often, like
the whole forty hours a week is consumed in the
back and forth. So talk about this, how would you
(04:40):
run a schedule like as a team, like, how would
you talk about doing this so that everyone could have
that focus time? I mean you said sort of ground rules,
like what do you do?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
One of my favorite tips on the book is something
I call meeting guidelines, and meeting guidelines are a simple
fix to unproductive meetings. So here's what meeting guidelines mean.
It means getting clear with your team on what deserves
a meeting and what doesn't. A lot of organizations just
simply allow anyone to call a meeting for any purpose,
and unfortunately, many people use meetings as a crutch. It
(05:11):
prevents them from having to make a decision and it
gives them license to procrastinate because after all, they're waiting
for other people's input. So when you set meeting guidelines,
what happens is all those opportunities for unnecessary meetings evaporate.
So within my team, we have a simple rule, no decision,
no meeting unless there's a decision to be made. We're
(05:34):
not going to pull people away from doing their work.
If you have a question, pick up the phone. If
you have an update that's an email or a screen capture.
Another example of a meeting guideline in super teams is
from the company Percolate in New York City. They have
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
(05:57):
so what happens is when you have these meeting guidelines,
you can literally save people ten hours a week. And
one thing I didn't mention that I think until now,
is that most employees end up spending eighteen hours a
week in meetings and then another eleven hours a week
on email. That leaves about a day to do a
week's worth of work. That's the reality many of us
(06:19):
live in. And what happens when you have a week
to do a single you have a single day to
cram a week's worth of work, you look for ways
to create more time and a lot of For a
lot of workers, that means coming in late or working
on coming in earlier, or staying late, or working on weekends.
And that approach conserva you in the short term, but
if you keep working like that, invariably are going to
burn out.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Well, let's talk about the other sorts of collaboration that
people are trying to claw their time back from when
when we don't have a healthy work environment. That's things
like slack and like the frequent long emails like you
mentioned you have, you know, meeting guidelines. I'm curious about,
you know, things like slack and email, how people preserve
time for focus and yet also make sure that people
(07:00):
are responsive.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I think the key is getting clear with your team
on when we're going to be monitoring our message and
when we're all going to log off. And I think
this assumption that we all need to be available for
each other all day long is not just wrongheaded, but counterproductive.
And so if we as a group can agree that
between let's say nine to eleven every morning, we're going
to focus on't getting our work done, but between eight
(07:23):
and nine in the morning, and then eleven to twelve
in the morning, we're going to check our messages. That's
a perfectly reasonable response. Now, of course, there are going
to be vary variations depending on what industry you're in,
so an approach that can work for a creative team
might not work for a for a PR team. But
the point is to be deliberate and intentional about how
you're carving out time instead of just assuming that focuses
(07:46):
something individuals need to find time for.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Is there a way to spend less time on email?
I'm curious about that one in particular.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I think there is, but I think that what it
ultimately comes down to is a carving out time for
on email hours. But beyond that, one of the things
we find that super teams do more often is that
they write out standard operating procedures that detail how a
project is supposed to be done instead of relying on
people to contact their teammates with constant questions. The more
(08:15):
specific you can get about how things are done the
right way, the less communication you need to have. And
so that's another way of freeing people up from the
constant communication that unfortunately sinks too many of our days.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Absolutely well We're going to take a quick ad break
and then I'll be back with more from Ron Friedman. Well,
I am back talking with Ron Friedman, who is the
author of the brand new book super Teams. So Ron,
I was fascinated to see that teams could super teams
(08:48):
could be remote or hybrid too. I think there's a
story out there that you know, the real teams, the
real productive teams are all in the same place, that
that's what real collaboration looks like. And you found that
it was really location agnostic.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's exactly right. So we often hear about CEOs who
call everyone back into the office with the assumption that
the team will be more effective and closer knit if
they're all in the same location, And in fact, there's
research showing that there's actually conflicting research on this. Some
research says we're working from home. Other research says we're
more effective working at the office because you were better
(09:22):
at establishing trust and have more collaboration. So in our study,
we looked at something completely different. We looked at where
are super teams more likely to occur? And what we
found is it doesn't make a difference. They're just as
likely to happen working remotely as they are hybrid and
in office. And that's because where a team works isn't
(09:43):
nearly as important as how the team works. And I
got to tell you, I get an inside look at
the way a lot of organizations operate and the number
of smart, ambitious professionals who lose hours of their day
commuting just so that they can get to the office,
fire up their laptop and attend the same zoom meeting
they could have included themselves in from home is heartbreaking.
(10:07):
And making the most of our our time together in
the same location requires intention and planning. It's one thing
to require everyone into the office another to say, look,
we're going to leave it up to you to figure
out where your most effective, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
we're going to have strategic conversations. So get your pre
reads in on Friday so that everyone can show up
ready to contribute. The latter is taking advantage of what
(10:29):
togetherness has to offer while empowering people to be productive
in the way that they work best.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Is there anything that remote or hybrid teams do need
to pay attention to, specially to make sure that they
are maintaining that that close knit sense.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
I think there are opportunities for any team to work
more effectively, and that applies to remote teams. I think
remote teams have to have some clear rules about when
video calls, for example, are useful and when they or not.
One of the things I talk about in the book
is that we've defaulted to video calls ever since CO
and THEY and during COVID. It's served a purpose. It
allowed us to feel like we were on the same
(11:05):
page and seeing each other's faces and we weren't alone.
But there are some important costs to video calls that
we often often ignore.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
It.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So in real life it's completely unnatural to stare someone
in the face for an hour straight on video calls.
Looking away feels rude, and so we overcompensate and it's exhausting.
And so there's research showing that if you are on
video calls all day, you're going to have less energy
and make worse decisions than if you had those same
(11:33):
conversations on the phone. Now, to be clear, there are
that opportunities for doing video calls when when they're actually
quite valuable. So for example, if you're just establishing a
relationship or there's a disagreement in those cases, getting on
video calls makes complete sense. But because you're you can
see the other person's face and you're less likely to
and misinterpret what they mean. But unless that's the case,
(11:56):
if you already have a relationship and there's no disagreement
in place, there's no reason to use video calls. Stick
to phone calls. You'll have a lot more energy as
a result.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Well, let's get to that place of trust, because one
of the things that super teams are built on is
having a lot of trust in your colleagues. Now, obviously,
trust is something we can build up over the long
haul of working together and knowing that the other person
is there for you. But you talk about some ways
that you can kind of build that trust more quickly,
like when a team is starting up. What are some
ways that we can quickly build trust with a colleague.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Well, one of the things that is I think really
fascinating is that trust is built on reciprocity, and so
the more trust you give, the more likely it is
to be reciprocated. Now, let's take a step back for
a second, because one of the things I do in
the book is I talk about what are the three
pillars of trust? What is trust actually founded on and trust,
by the way, just to define it for people, because
it tends to get fuzzy for a lot of folks
(12:47):
in terms of like the idea of trust gets thrown
around in leadership circles a lot. But what is the
actual definition of trust? Well, trust is being willing to
take on risk while still expecting a positive outcome. And
so if I trust you to do a good job
with this podcast, making myself vulnerable while still expecting the
podcast to sound great at the end. And in the
(13:10):
book I talk about what are the three pillars of
trust in the workplace? Because it does vary depending on
your role, So the things that define trust in a
working relationship aren't necessarily the same elements that define trust
with a doctor or with a neighbor. So at work
it comes down to three things. One is competence, how
well you do your job. The second thing is care.
The second pillar is caring how much do you care
(13:32):
about other people? And the third pillar is consistency how
predictable are your behaviors? And you need to have all three.
Any time one of these pillars is missing, trust tends
to degrade. And so, for example, you can have someone
who's really caring and really consistent. But if they do
a bad job, that trust is going to break down.
(13:52):
And so what it comes down to, I think is
identifying for any relationship where you're trying to build trust,
figure out where the opportunity these are for elevating any
of the pillars that may be weak.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
And how can we turn a colleague into a friend?
So you know, obviously, when you like the members on
your team, this has all sorts of positive benefits, and
friendship is something that has developed. What can we do
to turn a colleague into a friend.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
In the book, I talk about the psychology of friendships,
and there are some recent findings in the science of
friendships that I think are really interesting. One of them
is to assume your colleagues like you. Most of us
dramatically underestimate how well liked we are, and that leads
us to pull away and act in ways that make
us less likable. So, for example, if you're joining a
(14:42):
party and you assume people don't like you, you may
be slightly withdrawn or less likely to smile. But being
more extroverted and smiling more actually gets people to like
you more, and so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
The second tip I discussed in the book is being
really curious. People love to talk about themselves. The more
questions you asked, the more likable you tend to be
(15:02):
be viewed as. So I give the tip of think
less like a ted speaker and more like a podcast host.
Don't worry so much about impressing others, try to be impressed.
And the final thing, and this is taken from the
story of Scalia and Ginsburg, who famously diametrically opposed Supreme
Court judges, who ended up becoming best friends. How do
they become such great friends? It wasn't because they did
(15:23):
trust falls or icebreakers. It was because they found ways
to make each other better. And that's a real key,
is find ways to make other people succeed in their role.
In the case of Scalia, he was a grammatical savant
and he would improve Ginsburg's writing, and Ginsburg, in turn,
was really good at helping Scalia modulate the tone, the
emotional tone of his decisions not to alienate people. And
(15:46):
so in both cases they made each other better.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Love that all right, Well, We're going to take one
more quick ad break and I'll be back with more
from Ron Friedman. Well, I am back talking with Ronen Friedman,
who is the author of the brand new book Super Teams.
So just a little bit more about the teams before
we get to your schedule. Ron, this is sort of
(16:10):
between you know, individual schedules and teams. You found that
members of super teams were more likely to exercise. Now
that seems a little bit unrelated, so maybe you could
explore that for us.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, A lot of times when we think about exercise,
we focus on our health. But one of the more
surprising findings in the last few decades is that exercise
also makes us smarter, and it's for some very concrete reasons.
When we exercise, we get more blood flowing to our brain,
which helps us sustain our attention and makes us less distractable.
It activates the memory reasons of the brain, so we
(16:43):
are able to soak up information more quickly and retrieve
it when we need it. And critically, exercise puts you
in a good mood, and when you're in a good mood,
you do everything better at work, including connecting with colleagues
and winning over new clients. And so exercise isn't some
something that makes us look good or feel good. It
actively makes us better at our jobs. And on super teams,
(17:04):
we find that they exercise more often. Members of super
teams tend to exercise for eighty four more minutes per week.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
That's a lot. That's almost as many minutes as we
need to be exercising. Not quite, but it's getting there.
But is this something that people were I mean, this
was kind of more like people do before or after
work though, right, this doesn't necessarily like you know, they
go and go as a team to the gym over lunch.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
That's right. In fact, one of the one of the
more fascinating findings in the research on super teams is
we looked at what are the amenities they have at
the office, and we look to see Arthur particular amenities
that make a team more effective. And among those amenities
that we tested were office gyms, and super teams were
not any more likely to have an office gym. In fact,
(17:48):
there were all these amenities in our study where you
included everything's like ping pong tables and collaborative spaces, and
the only office amenity that made a difference when it
came to team performance was having a quiet space to
do folks to work, and that says so much about
what people really want from their workplace, and it's why
so many people prefer to work from home. It's because
most offices are have become an attentional war zone. And
(18:11):
so if you're looking to lift up your team's performance,
create a focus based don't worry about the ping pong tables.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, less foosball more. Have people work from home twice
a week, that's probably a better management there. So Ron,
let's pivot to your schedule here. You know, this is
a show called Before Breakfast. Do you have any sort
of morning routine?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I walk my dogs and I listen to podcasts like
this one, and I find that Yeah, I find that
it really helps focus my attention on the big ideas
instead before I get lost in the minutia.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Yeah, is there a what does the rest of your
schedule look like? So you get up, you walk your dogs,
What does the work day tend to look like? From there?
The workday?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Well, here's a tip that I think some people might
benefit from. So I actually uhould to teach productivity courses,
and one of my favorite tips was to always make
up your to do list the day before, but don't
worry about the order and which you're going to do things,
just kind of doing an information dump of all the
things that you are at the top of your on
the top of your mind. And once you've written that list,
(19:10):
I find it's much easier to disconnect. But then the
first thing I do after breakfast is I'll sort the
list in terms of what's most important to least important.
I use a question that helps orient me to what's
most important to me. So, for example, over the last
few months, I've been really focused on super teams, and
so the question I might ask is how important is
(19:30):
this item to helping me get this book out in
front of the most number of people? And so I'll
sort it that way. And that orienting question will be
different for every person, but it's really valuable to identify
what that question is for you.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah, and whether what you're doing that day is helping
advance you towards your goals. Do you structure certain sort
of works at different different times of day or anything
like that.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Well, one of the things we know from the researchers,
we're better at doing creative work when we're tired, better
at doing focus work when we're sharp, and so I'll
often think of that. I'll keep a list of ideas
to think about that I will examine before I go swimming,
for example, because I find that the mind wandering that
happens when I'm swimming is very conducive to having great
(20:15):
creative ideas.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Now, swimming is not an exercise form that I hear
all that often from people, because the logistics are a
lot harder to exercise. I mean unless you have like
a very conveniently pool right outside your door or something,
which maybe you do, but you how do you make
that work?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I appreciate your curiosity for this. Yeah, I would be
the same way. I'd be asking the same kind of
questions I go to I got collect gym memberships. Just
the way I put it, I think there are worse
things to collect in the world. I have about four
or five gym memberships, and I go to one for
because it has a pool. I go to a different
one because it has great exercise equipment without a television.
I find the televis really distracting at the end of
(20:51):
the day when I'm tired. Another one has a great
basketball court or a pickleball. Community exercise is definitely a
big part of my life. And it became that way
once I started seeing some of the research on exercise.
And I think a big breakthrough for me was recognizing
that exercise wasn't something I selfishly do for myself. It's
literally part of my job. If I want to have
(21:13):
great ideas, I need to exercise. If I want to
have sustainable energy, I need to exercise. And so I
think viewing it that way as an investment in my
future performance has been incredibly valuable.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Do you get good ideas while you're swimming laps?
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Definitely? And I keep a notepad it's time. Yeah, I
keep I keep a water proof notepad. They sell them
on Amazon, and it comes with a pencil and you
drop down your ideas and just keep it right by
my lane, right next to my water bottle. I love it.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
I love it. It's like the ideas from the shower.
You get them, very hard to capture them. But if
you can figure out the water proof idea, it'll be
it'll be great. So ron I always ask my guests,
what is something you've done recently to take a day
from great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, this happened yesterday. So I recently got my copy
of Big Time by Laura Vanderkam. I'm not sure if
you're familiar with her.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
I've heard of her, but yes, okay, she.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Does great work. And in the book, Laura, I'll just
refer to her as you just for the sake of conversation.
You talk about being very deliberate with thirty minutes a day,
particularly at the end of the day, and just if
you can take advantage of thirty good minutes at the
end of the day, your entire day will be improved.
And I did just that. I went for a walk
(22:22):
with my wife. It was a very long walk. It's
like that kind of the first really warm day of
the year here in Rochester, New York, and it was
just like so refreshing. We talked about everything, and we
went kind of went down memory lane. We have an
elementary school very close to our home, and my son
is no longer there. He's now in middle school. So
we went walking by the elementary school and just talked
about all the great memories we had of him growing up.
(22:44):
And I have you to thank for that.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Oh wonderful. Well, I'm so glad you guys got this
nice walk in the evening. I think a family walk
is one of the best ideas out there, and I
love when people do that with their golden hours. What's
something you're looking forward to right now.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I'm looking forward having these book launch done.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
I understand. I understand for sure, but it'll be fun
to see it out there. So where can people find you?
I understand you have some resources that might be helpful
for people.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, we've built a lot of resources to go with
the book so that people can really implement the ideas.
I know. It's just one of the challenges with reading
a book is you have all these great ideas and
you never really put them to use. And so I
wanted to really make this actionable for people, even if
they're not leading a team, just to incorporate some of
these great strategies that we uncovered by studying super Teams.
So we created a website it's Superteamsmasterclass dot com and
(23:35):
if you go there, you'll be able to download a
free masterclass as an action plan with all the best
practical strategies, and it even comes with a discussion guide
that you can use to share the best insights with
your team. So that Superteam's Masterclass dot com.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And even if you aren't leading a team. I mean,
are these strategies that you can use, Like I mean,
you're an individual contributor, you've got a manager. Are these
things you can put into practice?
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Absolutely, And just to give you a flavor of some
of this, one of the things that I find is
really effective is to talk to your team about creating
an experiment. When you position an idea as an experiment,
like let's say you want to try a meeting free afternoon,
and it's really tough to sell that to your boss.
If you go to your boss and you say, hey,
how about for the rest of our lives, Tuesday afternoon,
we just don't do any meetings, that might be the
(24:18):
thing you want to say. But the strategy that will
probably be way more effective is to say, Hey, I've
noticed we've been doing a lot of meetings, and I
wonder if we might be able to try this idea
I read about in this book Super Teams of trying
out Tuesday afternoon for an hour and a half, no meetings.
Let's just see how it goes, and we'll see how
the team feels, and if we all feel a lot
(24:38):
more productive, maybe we can try it again. If you
position as an experiment, it's way easier for people to
accept and to try, because it's really hard to tell
your team no, I'm not willing to try an experiment.
And so that's just one new example exactly. So just
this one example of one way you could apply it.
And also we didn't get to talk about this, but
in addition to looking at what the best teams do differently,
(24:59):
we looked at what the mem of those teams do differently,
and so we found a lot of the tips that
work for individuals also work in the team level. So
things like planning your week in advance, reflecting on what
went well, what didn't well, time boxing, all of those
strategies applied to individuals no matter what team they work on.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Absolutely well. You'll have to read Super Teams to learn
more about all those So Ron, thank you so much
for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(25:43):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(26:07):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
Show Links
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