Ron Friedman

Thanks for having me, Laura.

Yeah.

So I started off as a professor teaching psychology at colleges and universities.

And then I went off into the corporate world.

And my job was to be a pollster.

My role was to figure out what it is that people believe and then advise organizations using psychological principles.

And what I discovered being in the corporate world was that there was a massive divide between the latest science and the modern workplace.

And it was everything from the way that companies hire to the way that managers motivate to the basic layout of the 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 1,000 academic studies into plain English so 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.

Yeah, so we ran surveys.

We polled thousands of workers across a wide range of industries, and we asked them two key questions 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 very tiny group, about 8%.

We call them super teams, and we look to see what are the super teams doing differently compared to the average team.

Yeah, I think that a lot of times organizations say they want collaboration, but what they get instead is constant communication.