Ron Friedman reveals the science behind unlocking extraordinary team performance.
You’ll Learn
- The three strengths that separate superteams from average teams
- Why managing energy and attention matters more than working harder
- The feedback approach that encourages lasting behavior change
About Ron
Ron Friedman, PhD, is an award-winning psychologist and the founder of ignite80, a learning and development company that teaches leaders science-based strategies for building high-performing teams. His research has been featured on NPR, Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Fast Company, Psychology Today, and Harvard Business Review.
He is the author of The Best Place to Work, an Inc. Magazine Best Business Book of the Year, and Decoding Greatness. He lives in Pittsford, New York.
- Book: Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams
- Masterclass: SuperteamsMasterclass.com
- Website: SuperteamsInc
Resources Mentioned
- Book: The Award: A Novel by Matthew Pearl
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Ron Friedman Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Ron, welcome back!
Ron Friedman
Thanks for having me, Pete.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Superteams, and I’d love it if you could maybe kick us off with a particularly fascinating and exciting discovery you’ve made while putting this together.
Ron Friedman
Well, let me tell you how I did this research. So I polled thousands of workers and 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, a very tiny group, we call them superteams, about 8%, and we looked to see, “What are the superteams doing differently?” And we looked at everything, from the way that they structure their day, to how they run their meetings, to the basic ways in which they recover after work hours.
And what we discovered is that superteams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. 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 building new skills and improving over time.
Now the great news is every single one of those strengths is learnable, which means, by building the right habit, any team can dramatically improve its performance. So you asked, “What are some surprising insights?” There are a ton.
And, honestly, like this book features so many surprising insights. It would take us a long time to get through them all, but let me just give you one. And this might be very counterintuitive to your listeners in particular.
Productivity tips, the ones we hear about all the time online, you know, maybe even on this show, about things like, “Okay, turn off your notifications if you want to get stuff done,” or, “Only check your email three times a day,” or, you know, “Put your phone in the other room.”
Those types of productivity hacks might be great for the individual, but they slow the team down. And it’s because one person’s deep work becomes another person’s bottleneck. And so when you’re looking at the team level, how do the best teams get stuff done? It’s by coordinating when they’re going to be on and when they’re going to be off.
They set dedicated focus blocks so that people can get work done during the day with nobody has to monitor their emails. And so I think productivity experts are solving the wrong problem. And the problem they’re trying to solve is, “How do we allow people to do real work during regular work hours?”
That’s a very noble pursuit. But when you tell people to unilaterally disconnect from their team, you actually make the workday longer both for the individual and for everyone else in the group.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing insofar as what I’m not hearing you say is, “Forget deep work. Everyone should be always on and available to be notified and summoned instantly, constantly.” But rather, “Yes, preserve deep work, but, ideally, do that with the whole team’s unanimous consent, coordination, and understanding.”
As opposed to just like, “Oh, where’s Pete?” “We don’t know.” “We’d love that answer.” “Well, I guess he’s somewhere unavailable for a couple hours.”
Ron Friedman
A hundred percent. And I love what you just said, “Where is Pete?” That’s exactly what happens. I call it a focus free-for-all. Everybody comes up with their own rules for themselves, and the team, as a whole, ends up lengthening the workday and making work harder for everyone.
And so let me take a step back and give you some statistics. These are some jarring statistics, I think. The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week, digging themselves out of messages. That’s three quarters of their week gone before they’ve accomplished a single task.
And so, you know, we often wonder, “Why is everyone getting burnt out?” This is the question, like, we’ve been trying to solve for the last five years, “Why is everybody getting burnt out?” A better question is, “How do they manage to get any work done in the first place?”
And so what you find on superteams, the best teams in the world, what they do is they have dedicated focus blocks, they carve out meeting-free days where no one has to attend meetings, except they don’t call them meeting-free days. They call them get-stuff-done days because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiative.
And so if I was to sum up how superteams get more done, it’s by minimizing distraction and maximizing focus, but on the team level.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s very sensible and sounds solid. Well, and I guess what I’m thinking is, with these 18 hours of of meetings and 11 hours of messages, like, ideally, you are getting stuff done in the meetings. Like, the decision, the brainstorming, the insights generated, the solutions, the creativity is happening in the meeting to drive forward the team’s objectives. And, likewise, with what you’re messaging about, but often, the reality is not so rosy.
Ron Friedman
Yeah. And, in fact, you ask people, “What is the number one time sink in your week?” It’s not commuting, it’s not social media, it’s meetings. And most people consider meetings to be the number one drain in their entire week.
One of the things I do in my keynotes is I ask people to stand up when they see the percentage of meetings on the board that feels like a good use of their time. And I start off with 80 to 100. No one stands up.
I just did a keynote where the CEO didn’t stand up until I showed zero to 20. And it’s pretty depressing, frankly, when you think about it. Half our week is gone towards an activity that feels like a bad waste of our time.
And what happens when you’re in a meeting that doesn’t feel like a good use of your time? You fight to reclaim that time, and you do so by multitasking. And that makes the meeting worse and reduces the decision-making quality and feels, frankly, counterproductive.
Like, you know what happens in these large meetings, and we’ve all been part of them, where the only person paying attention is the person speaking, and everyone else is either doing their email or waiting for their turn to speak so that they can feel like they’ve contributed.
What we find on superteams is they are 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.
Pete, if you and I have a recurring meeting every Tuesday, in order for me to cancel that recurring meeting, I need to have a very awkward conversation with you. I need to say, “Pete, I don’t feel like our time together anymore is valuable.”
Pete Mockaitis
It’s like a breakup.
Ron Friedman
And it’s almost like breaking up with someone. And so people prefer to avoid having that conversation. They keep the recurring meeting on the calendar, and it’s completely draining. So let’s get into solutions. So what should you do? What should the team do?
In the book, I talk about meeting guidelines. Meeting guidelines are simple rules where you and your team decide, “This is a good use of our meeting time. This is a bad use of our meeting time.” On most teams, just about anybody can call a meeting for any reason.
And the unfortunate truth is lots of workers use meetings as a crutch. It enables them to look productive to their teammates because they’re getting stuff done, they’re putting meetings on the calendar, but it gives them license to procrastinate because they’re waiting on the meeting. And so meeting guidelines prevent that from happening.
So let me give you some examples. On my team, we have a simple rule: “No decision, no meeting.” If you have an update, that’s an email or it’s a video capture. If you have a question, pick up the phone. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not going to pull people away from getting their stuff done.
Another example, I talk about it in Superteams, it’s a company called Percolate. And at Percolate, they have a simple guideline: “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.
What all these rules enable people to do, again, is to get real work done during regular working hours. Because if they don’t have that opportunity, what happens? They look for ways to create more time. They come in early. They stay late. They work weekends.
I can’t imagine how many of your listeners experience this all the time, where they’re constantly fighting to get their actual job done because the regular work hours prevent them from being able to do it. So setting meeting guidelines both on the team level.
But also it’s something for leaders to lead in terms of of a conversation with the teams, not something that’s supposed to come top down where the leader says, “Okay, we’re having a meeting. We’re having meeting guidelines from now on, and this is what it’s going to be.” It’s something for the team to co-create together because when they do, they set themselves up for way more productivity.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, I’m hungry to dig into many of these subcomponents, but I guess, first, I just want to calm the nagging questions inside me. So these 8%, these superteams, I guess, Ron, how do we know they’re not just delusionally overestimating their greatness if it’s just sort of like, “Yeah, I think we’re pretty great, and I think we rank very highly compared to other teams”? I guess, fundamentally, how do we feel good about that?
Ron Friedman
I love that you’re asking that. I’ve been on a hundred podcasts and nobody has asked me that question, so thank you. We have a lot of great evidence that one of the best predictors of actual team performance is the team’s perception of the team’s performance.
It’s not the same thing as saying, “How good of a driver are you?” because that’s a self-rating. This is a rating about the group. And people tend to be far more accurate in their performance reviews about the team. So there’s a lot of meta-analyses that have been done over decades showing that this is actually a great predictor.
The other thing I would say is we asked a lot of questions about these teams, or rather about of the individuals who took the survey that were not very positive in terms of the results. So I thought, for example, “Well, maybe their nutritional habits are better.” Because, as we know, if you eat right, you’re going to be sharper at work, and maybe they’re eating better.
No. We found no such evidence. We thought maybe their sleep habits are better. Not the case. We even asked them, “How likely are you to look at your phone before brushing your teeth?” The answers were not good, Pete. And so we know from the research that they’re not just saying great things about themselves, they’re actually saying some things that are not so great.
The other thing, the final thing I would say is that a lot of the insights and the recommendations that came out of Superteams are supported by other evidence. So it’s not like they’re coming out of thin air. Like, there’s a lot of reason to believe why a lot of these recommendations make intuitive sense.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fair enough. And I suppose you had multiple individuals inside a team as well.
Ron Friedman
That’s right. Yeah, so this is six thousand people, over six thousand, rather, with six rounds of research across a wide spectrum of different industries. So we had everything from attorneys, to medical personnel, to salespeople. Like, we just looked at, “What are the findings that are significant across the industry?”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when it comes to these practices, the meeting guidelines, I think, is swell. And it’s kind of intriguing how just the word guideline, it makes me think of budgetary guidelines. And so many times organizations will have very robust and precise and immovable finance processes for which a project gets budgetary approval.
It’s like, “Oh, hey, if it’s more than $2,000, you got to work it through the finance process, and then away you go.” And yet, a meeting very well could cost more than $2,000 of company money when we factor in the cost of all those human hours being expended within that gathering.
Ron Friedman
Yeah, the reason we’re calling them guidelines and not rules is because they’re suggestions and they can be broken. We don’t want to put handcuffs on people in the way they work, they do their work. We’re trusting people to work effectively.
And so even meeting-free days, if you look at the companies that are doing this right, they’re allowing people to break those meeting-free days if they so desire. And so they’re meant as recommendations for, “Here is typically how good work gets done. But it doesn’t work if you limit people’s ability to get their job done.”
I think this is the problem. I think, a lot of times, we look for simple solutions that restrict people’s ability and undermine their autonomy. So a great example of this is return to work. Return to office. Everyone after COVID, “Okay, everybody needs to get back in the office. This is how we could do great work.”
One of the other findings we looked at in our research is, “Where are superteams most likely to occur? Are they more likely to occur in office? Are they more likely to occur remote? Or are they more likely to occur in hybrid teams?”
There’s good reason to imagine that it’s hybrid teams because they get the best of both worlds, right? They get to be around each other, they get more focus time. That one might be best. It turns out it doesn’t matter where the team is located.
High-performing teams are equally likely to occur in office, remote, or hybrid. And it’s because how the team works is way more important than where a team works. You can have wonderful opportunities for gathering together in the office.
But if that also means that your best employees now need to commute for two hours just so that they can get to the office and fire up their Zoom and attend the same meeting they could have attended two hours ago if they were allowed the flexibility to work from home, that doesn’t lead to better performance. It leads to resentment and it leads to overwork and burnout.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, keep laying them on us, Ron. So work from home, work remotely, it doesn’t really matter. What else are some of the other biggest findings?
Ron Friedman
I’ll give you another one that I thought was really surprising. So this actually starts Superteam. So we asked people about the amenities they have at their office. And we presented a very long list of to 20 amenities.
We asked them, “Do you have a ping pong table? Do you have an office gym? Do you have collaborative spaces? Do you have quiet rooms where you can meet and have some privacy?” And there was only one amenity that predicted high-performing teams, and it was this: a quiet space to do focused work.
It was the only amenity that predicted high performance. It was twice as likely to occur in high-performing teams. And that speaks to how most offices are an attentional war zone. This is why so many people want to work from home, is because they can actually focus and get their work done.
Most people don’t underperform because they’re led by a bad manager or because there’s too much work. It’s because they’re not able to actually get their work done. They just want the peace and quiet to actually get their work done. And if your week is just being cannibalized by meetings and messages, there’s just no opportunity for doing that.
And so I think what that speaks to is how, if you’re looking to design the perfect office, don’t start with, you know, an office slide. Don’t start with the office gym. Start with giving people the opportunity to focus.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, I’m curious, with these superteams, there’s some factors that matter, some factors that don’t. I mean, what about just having really smart, great folks on the team in the first place?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, I think that’s important. I think a lot of the books in my space start with, you know, get the right people on the bus. Like, that’s the message, “Get the right people on the bus.” And that’s great if you’re building a team from scratch, but most leaders are not building a team from scratch. They’re dealing with the people they have on the team.
And so this book is about, “What are the practices that can help you turn any team into a high-performing team?” And it starts with a very simple formula that I think most leaders and most teams overlook. And that is, “How do you turn a group of strangers into an actual team?”
Most people think they work on a team, but they don’t really have a team mindset. They’re just a group of people who happen to be working together. So how do you do it? How do you turn strangers into an actual team? Well, you need three things.
The first thing you need is you need a shared goal. You need one outcome that everyone is working to achieve together. Now that sounds obvious, but in most teams, you don’t have that single outcome. So, for example, Pete, if you’re trying to get promoted and I’m trying to go home at 5:00 o’clock so I can take my kids to soccer, we have different goals. And that leads to tension.
If you’re on a sales team and you have two different people, two people both trying to optimize their sales, they’re competitors, they’re not teammates. They don’t have that single goal because they don’t have a metric that unifies them in terms of a single outcome. So that’s the first thing, shared goal.
The second thing is you need role clarity. I need to know what I’m responsible for, I need to know what you’re responsible for, and I need to know how those two things intersect. If we don’t have clear roles, then balls get dropped or we have turf wars. Either of those is problematic.
The third thing you need is you need something called interdependence. Interdependence is just a fancy psychological term. All it means is we need to believe that we need each other in order to succeed. If we’re independent salespeople, not only do we not need each other to succeed, we’re competitors, “I need you to fail in order for me to look good.”
So if you don’t have those three things, you do not have a team, you have a recipe for dysfunction. And I think this is where most teams struggle, is they’re missing one of those three factors.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, fundamentally, there’s these three components, make a group a team. I guess I’d love to hear back on the individual side, is there any sort of foundational thing that individuals must have or must not have in order for the superteam business to come together?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, I think you need to hire people who are great collaborators, who are actually interested, authentically interested, in helping to make the people around them better. And I’ll give you an example of how you can hire for this.
This is an example from the book about an airline that, during the interview process, has people get up in front of a crowd and talk about their background. They do this for all the recruits together. They hire, you know, groups of people together.
And everyone thinks that what they’re really testing for is how effective people are at speaking. Because, you know, if you’re going to be a stewardess or whatever, you’re going to need to speak to the people on the plane. But actually what they’re looking for is how people react when someone else is speaking.
Do they cheer them on? Or do they stay quiet and hope that they screw up so that they look better and they only hire the people who are supportive of others? And that’s actually what we find in superteams is they don’t just collaborate well, they make each other better. And they make each other better by supporting one another, both in and outside the office, but they also make each other better by raising accountability.
In our study, we asked people a simple question, which is, “When things go wrong on your team, who do you feel worse about letting down? Do you feel worse about letting down your boss or do you feel worse about letting down your teammates?”
And on superteams, not even close. Eighty percent of people say, “I feel worse about letting down my teammates.” And that’s exactly what you’re looking for, is you’re looking for a team that’s accountable to one another, not to the manager.
Because when they feel accountable to one another, they work harder, they take ownership and they look for ways to lift the team by doing tasks that, even if they’re not in their job description, they’re still going to do them because they want the team to succeed.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And also in your book, you make a distinction between effort versus energy and attention. Can you explain what is the distinction and why does it matter?
Ron Friedman
I think, a lot of times, people assume that if they just work hard enough then they’ll, you know, get everything done. And the truth is that how you recover is just as important to how you well you do your job. And if you look at the best athletes, they take their recovery just as seriously as they do the actual task at hand.
And what we find on superteams is a lot of people, you know, assume that if they’re not working, that they’re automatically recovering, but that’s not the case. Just because you’re not working doesn’t mean you’re recovering your energy automatically.
So scanning Instagram or bingeing Netflix, that can help you wind down at the end of the day. It doesn’t help you recover your energy. What does? Well, it’s mastery experiences. They’re activities that you do outside of work that stretch your skills and challenge you in new ways.
So depending on your interests, that can mean playing a new song on the piano. It can mean playing pickleball. It can mean trying out a new dish. The key takeaway here, and this by the way, is what you see on superteams, is they’re far more likely to invest their off hours in hobbies. And those hobbies refuel them and recharge them and enable them to show up more effective at work, which then enables them to sustain their attention more effectively.
And so the key takeaway here is, when it comes to your downtime, don’t try a slow down if you really want to recover. Try to accelerate in a completely different direction.
Pete Mockaitis
Can you give some more examples of these winning recovery hobbies or master activities?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, it really depends on your interest. I don’t know, Pete, can I interview you? What do you like to do for fun on vacation?
Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, swimming is fun.
Ron Friedman
Okay.
Pete Mockaitis
I’d say eating food and laughing are among the top things. Well, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Slay the Spire 2, the game, since it was released. It feels like some mastery is happening there, just like these decision-making.
Ron Friedman
Is that a video game?
Pete Mockaitis
It is. It’s kind of strategic decision-making kind of stuff.
Ron Friedman
Okay. You gave me three things that I think are key to those recovery experiences that we know from the research are effective. So you mentioned swimming. Swimming is exercise. Exercise restocks your mental injury and makes you smarter at work.
And it’s because when you exercise on a regular basis, you get more blood flowing to the brain, enables you to sustain your attention, makes you less distractable. It also activates the memory regions of the brain. So now you’re soaking up information more quickly. We find on superteams, they exercise 84 more minutes per week. So exercise is one element.
The other element you talked about was laughing and being with others. Social experiences are vital to to recovering our energy. You go out for a nice time with people you love and people who support you and like you, they don’t have to be your family, that will restock your energy.
The third thing you mentioned was video games. They get a bad rap. Truth is, video games can not only help us restock our energy. They also make us smarter because, as you mentioned, they require sustained attention.
And so a lot of people think that that recovery is like exercise, where if I’ve just spent all day exercising my muscles, I’m going to be tired. And so I should just slow down, let my muscles recover. It doesn’t work that way for recovery. You actually will recharge faster by doing something different that energizes you.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, that 84 minutes more per week of exercise is startling. I love these numbers. So 84 minutes, so what does that leave the exercising or the superteam group in exercise minutes versus the non-superteam group in exercise minutes?
Ron Friedman
That’s a great question. I don’t have it in front of me. But what I can tell you is that it’s a social norm on these teams. In other words, they tend to do it. They not only view themselves as exercising more often, they say their teammates exercise more often. And a big part of it is the leader.
The leader talks about how, when they exercise, they kind of socialize. They talk about the benefits and how they do it, and they take more walking meetings. And walking meetings are not just an effective way of getting exercise during the day, they make you more creative because now you’re taking your ideas and putting it in a different environment.
That leads to more stimulation, more idea generation than it would be if you were stuck in a windowless conference room. And this is another thing. I think you’ll appreciate this, Pete, is walking meetings make you more attractive.
And it’s because, when you take a walking meeting in the presence of another colleague, you get elevated heart rate. And elevated heart rate tends to be confused for attraction. And so this is something I say in my keynote. If you take nothing else away from this, at the very least I’ve given you a secret weapon for making yourself irresistible, is take walking meetings. People will find you more attractive.
Pete Mockaitis
Attractive in every sense or just romantically, Ron?
Ron Friedman
Man, you have a researcher’s mind. I love that. The attraction comes from the confusion around the elevated heart rate in the presence of another person. And so if you get elevated heart rate while looking at another person, this is why people look more attractive at the gym, because you have the elevated heart rate.
You look around, and you’re just more likely to interpret that as attraction. And it’s because of the elevated heart rate. It’s not because of how they actually look.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we also could be attracted to someone in the sense of they are a rock star at a concert and they are attractive as opposed to, “I want to take this person on a date.”
Ron Friedman
That’s right, yes. And it’s more of a positive experience. And so if you tend to have a more positive experience around other people, a particular person, you’re going to interpret that person as more attractive.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ron, this 84 minutes is startling. Give me some more eye-popping numbers you’ve discovered.
Ron Friedman
Eye-popping numbers. Meeting-free days. Let’s talk about the impact of a meeting-free day. And so this is research out of MIT Sloan. After a meeting-free day, people report 71% higher productivity and half the stress as a regular day. I mean, that’s remarkable.
If you ever come in on a Sunday morning without having people email you and just being able to like, for three hours, just do your work, you know how unbelievable of an experience that is, how restorative that is, how energizing, because you were able to just identify what you need to do and then you’re able to do it.
Now imagine if you had days like that during the week. How often do many of us go into the office or fire up our computer from home, and then eight hours later, stand up and be like, “What the hell just happened? What happened to my time? I don’t even…”
You go home, you have dinner with your kids, they’re like, “What did you do today?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I did today. I had meetings all day. I didn’t do any goddamn thing.” And so this is all about allowing people to just do their job effectively, and it’s got to start at the team level or it’s never going to be solved.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with regard to this energy and attention stuff, are there some top strategies beyond the energizing hobbies and exercising and collectively discussing and agreeing upon when we are not meeting? Are there any other top strategies that go miles in helping us manage distraction and stress?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, so this book looked at both the habits of the teams but also the habits of the individuals on the team. And so one of the things we looked at is, “How do people on superteams structure their day?” And if I were to summarize a few of the habits that I think are worth noting, there’s three of them.
One of them is looking forward, the second is looking backward, and the third is staying present. Okay, so I’m going to go through each of those buckets. And this, by the way, is how people on superteams are experiencing work as more proactive than reactive.
And we find that on superteams, people say they’re twice as likely to feel more proactive during work. So if you want to stay proactive, these strategies will help, almost regardless of the team you’re on. And so the first strategy…excuse me. Okay, we’ll edit that out. The first strategy is looking forward. What does that mean?
It means, at the end of the week or on Sunday morning, looking ahead to your calendar and identifying blocks of time that you can utilize to get actual work done, and then time blocking. Setting an appointment with yourself, where you will achieve a particular task during a particular time slot. Time boxing by looking ahead.
The second strategy is looking backwards. What does that mean? It means, after a good day, people on superteams are more likely to say to themselves, “Okay, that was a good day. How do I have more days like that?”
And after a bad day, they’re more likely to say, “That wasn’t a great day. How do I avoid having days like that in the future?” So there’s this ongoing reflection and refinement and improvement in terms of how they’re structuring their day.
And the third thing is staying present. And if you think about when we’re most distractable, it’s typically between tasks. When we switch from one task to another, we become more distractable. So after exiting a meeting, what’s the first thing we do? We look at our phones. After finishing a memo, you go on your email.
And so if you can reduce the amount of transitions between tasks, you can make yourself less distractable. And so superteams tend to do that by batching similar tasks and by writing out concrete SOPs, standing operating procedures, that help them stay on task without being distractable.
And so those are the three strategies that will help you improve your performance regardless of what team you’re on – look forward, look backward, stay present.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also claim there’s a magical question that makes team decisions smarter by up to 30%. Tell us, what is this question? How do we even measure that?
Ron Friedman
The question is, and this is something that the best leaders will ask at their meetings, which is, and this is before making an important decision, “If this decision doesn’t work out, or if this decision backfires, why would that be?”
Simply asking that question empowers the people in the room to tell you you’re making a mistake. And it’s called a pre-mortem. We all know what a post-mortem is. A post-mortem is at the end of a project, we talk about what went well, what didn’t work well, what we’re going to do differently in the future.
This is a pre-mortem, and what the research tells us is that teams that conduct pre-mortems, which is imagining, “In the future that this project does not work out, why would that be?” that opens them up to new ways of thinking that improves the ultimate decision by up to 30%.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. And any thoughts with regard to navigating disagreement, thinking through consensus, arguing, getting to good outcomes with our collective wisdom?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, there’s a lot of research, great research, about how to disagree more effectively. A lot of it’s in this book. I have a chapter on Scalia and Ginsburg, the two Supreme Court justices, that were incredible friends, even though they disagreed about just about everything.
And one of the strategies was, essentially, understanding that you don’t need to agree on everything in order to be a good teammate. In fact, the best teammates tend to view disagreements as a tool for making better decisions.
The worst teammates tend to view disagreements as a judgment on how people evaluate their competence. This is the problem that people have, is they tend to confuse people’s agreement for liking. And so it becomes, “If you don’t agree with me, then you don’t like me or you don’t respect me.”
And so the disagreement gets off course because now we’re fighting about whether I’m a worthy person as opposed to what the right course of action is. And so the best teammates disentangle this emotional component from the actual logical argument.
I talk about ways of doing that, but one of the critical pieces is recognizing that people, generally, don’t change their mind in the conversation. They change their mind after the conversation is over when they’ve had a chance to reflect.
And I think, in the movies, we’ve been taught to just kind of bash people up with arguments and they’re going to change their mind, and agree with you eventually. But, in fact, you are far more influential and effective if you lay out your ways of thinking, and then giving people the space to change their mind outside of the meeting.
Pete Mockaitis
I think that really rings true in my own experience, in that someone says, I don’t know where I heard this, but that someone said, “The truth will set you free, but, first, it will piss you off.”
And that is my experience in terms of someone says something and I don’t like it in regard to making a change when I was perfectly comfy, cozy, not making that change. And it’s just kind of annoying, like, “Eh, I don’t like it.” It’s just my default reaction, “I don’t like it.”
And then maybe the next morning-ish, it’s like, “But that’s probably the right answer. So we should do it.” Yeah.
Ron Friedman
You know, I often feel the same way, particularly when my editor sends me changes. And I have learned in my advanced age of 49, that often is the best indicator, when it makes you angry, the feedback makes you, it’s often a leading indicator that it’s probably a good idea. And I always wait 24 hours now before responding.
Because once you get past the idea that it doesn’t have to feel good, that you’re optimizing for the best possible outcome, you approach it with a different perspective. And it’s a perspective that is more amenable to making the changes you need to change to achieve your objective.
Pete Mockaitis
This reminds me, I think, Daniel Kahneman was chatting with Adam Grant, and said, “I love being wrong, because it’s the only way I really know that I’ve learned something,” which, I think, is just an amazing reframe.
And it speaks to your experience of the editor. It’s like that commentary, I assume the editor’s good. That commentary that gets onto your skin is all the more powerful and helpful because it’s challenging something fairly deep within you that just ain’t so.
Ron Friedman
Yeah, and, you know, there’s research on feedback. And what the research tells us is that, for people with high self-esteem, they actually prefer negative feedback to positive feedback. And it’s because they know you can’t improve from positive feedback.
Positive feedback just tells you to repeat the thing you didn’t before. Negative feedback offers clues about how you can improve your performance in the future. The challenge is most people aren’t very high on self-esteem, so you can’t give people negative feedback if you want them to improve.
In fact, one of the research articles I cite in Superteams is that 97% of feedback does not improve performance – 97. In fact, 30% of feedback makes people worse at what they were doing. And so the question is, “How do you get it right? How do you model your feedback after the 3% that’s actually effective?”
And one of the most important tips I can offer you is to focus your feedback on what people can do differently in the future. Don’t re-litigate the past. Don’t tell them what they did wrong. Don’t tell them how it made you feel and the impact on you.
Talk about one change that you’d like them to consider the next time they do the task. And that will lead people to be far more receptive to your feedback and is far more likely to improve their performance.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Very good. Well, Ron, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Ron Friedman
Well, one of the things I tried to do with this book is I really wanted people to apply the insights. And so I created a free masterclass. You can find it at SuperteamsMasterclass.com, and it gives you the book’s best insights in under 20 minutes, and – this is key – it gives you a discussion guide for sharing some of these ideas with the people on your team. It’s completely free, SuperteamsMasterclass.com.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ron, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Ron Friedman
So in the book, I talk about this general manager named Sam Presti, he’s the head of the Oklahoma City Thunder. And his office is filled with quotes. And it’s because, apparently, this is what he does, where he reads a book he likes, he highlights the quote, and he prints it out, and he slaps it on the wall so he doesn’t forget it.
So I’ve adapted that same approach. I’ve got quotes all over my office. Okay, I just picked out one that I thought was great. “Eighty percent out the door is better than a hundred percent in the drawer.”
Pete Mockaitis
All right.
Ron Friedman
And the idea is just get stuff out even if it’s not perfect because it’ll allow you to move on to the next thing.
Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Ron Friedman
The study that was the spark for this research on Superteams was a study by Sonja Lyubomirsky where she looked at what happy people do differently. And so the way she did the research was she found people, she had people evaluate their level of happiness.
And then she asked them about their habits. And then she separated out the happy people from the unhappy people, and looked to see, “What are the happy people doing differently that contributes to their happiness?” And it’s a classic study.
And some of the findings were, don’t compare yourself to people who you consider more successful because it’s wasted energy, it’ll make you unhappy. And so that is what led me to the research comparing high-performing teams against average teams.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?
Ron Friedman
So a recent book that I really enjoyed, it’s called The Award. And it’s about a guy who wins a literary award. And I don’t know how to describe this without ruining the book for people, but it’s not what you expect it to be. And it’s all kinds of shenanigans that is very funny to read about.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Ron Friedman
Yeah, waterproof notepads. They enable you to write down your best ideas in the shower, and it’s actually where I write my to-do list for the next day.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?
Ron Friedman
Eat dinner early. It is a complete life hack. It will allow you to fall asleep faster and get a much deeper sleep. And so you aim for finishing your dinner five hours before bed.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?
Ron Friedman
When I do workshops on superteams, I talk about taking what makes your vacation restorative and applying it to your everyday life. And so the mistake that I think a lot of people make is that they wait until vacations in order to recover.
But if you can identify what makes vacations restorative for you and schedule that onto your calendar, you’ll have way more energy. So an example of this might be, Pete, you like to swim. If you can find a way to swim once a week, maybe on weekends, I’m willing to bet you’re going to show up at work with more energy.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Ron Friedman
I would point them to SuperteamsInc. That is the name of my company. We do keynotes, workshops. We love to teach leaders how to apply these insights. And so that’s the best way to find me.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome their jobs?
Ron Friedman
Yes. I would urge you, the next time you want to, if you happen to pick up an idea from this conversation, or if you read Superteams, and you want to apply some of those ideas to your team at work, but you’re not the leader, I would urge you to talk to your leader about running an experiment.
Don’t suggest a complete wholesale change. Say, “Hey, can we try this for one week and see how it goes?” Like, a meeting guideline or a focus block. Try it because, what often happens is when leaders are offered an experiment, they’re far less likely to reject it out of hand because it’s just something they don’t need to commit to forever. They’re just trying it for one week and seeing how it goes.
But then even, if they don’t agree with your experiment, they’ll appreciate the idea that you’re trying to improve the way the team operates and makes you look great.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ron, thank you.
Ron Friedman
My pleasure, Pete. Thanks for having me.
