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Chapter 1: What inspired Ron Friedman to write 'Superteams'?
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Chapter 2: How does Ron define a 'super team'?
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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeart Radio. Good morning. This is Laura.
Chapter 3: What strategies do super teams use to enhance productivity?
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 advice they have for the rest of us. So today I am delighted to welcome Ron Friedman to Before Breakfast. Ron is the author of the brand new book, Super Teams.
So Ron, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Laura.
I'm excited to have you here. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
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.
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Chapter 4: Why is individual focused time important for collaboration?
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? Like, what are the metrics there?
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, and you found there were all sorts of different things that they did. A lot of people think that 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?
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.
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Chapter 5: How can teams effectively manage their meeting schedules?
And just to take a step back, so what are the super 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 to listeners of the show because you're so good at identifying these great productivity tips. That's what they're doing at the team level. I think at most organizations, people are left to scavenge for focus 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 focused
incorporating these productivity tips like they're 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 90 minutes where everyone can focus together without having to respond to emails.
Or they're doing things like meeting free 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.
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 focused time from the constant communication is about stopping the back and forth. But we want to make sure that we have the opportunity for both. And the problem is, you know, often like the whole 40 hours a week is consumed in the back and forth. So talk about this.
How would you run a schedule, like as a team? Like how would you talk about doing this so that everyone could have that focused time?
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Chapter 6: What role does trust play in team dynamics?
I mean, you set sort of ground rules. Like what do you do?
One of my favorite tips in 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 purposes.
And unfortunately, many people use meetings as a crutch. It 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 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.
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Chapter 7: How can colleagues turn into friends in a work environment?
It's respect for your time. And so what happens is when you have these meeting guidelines, you can literally save people 10 hours a week. And one thing I didn't mention, I think, until now is that most employees end up spending 18 hours a week in meetings and then another 11 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 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 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 can serve you in the short term. But if you keep working like that, invariably you're going to burn out.
Well, let's talk about the other sorts of collaboration that people are trying to claw their time back from when we don't have a healthy work environment. Things like Slack and the frequent long emails, like you mentioned, you have meeting guidelines. I'm curious about things like Slack and email, how people preserve time for focus and yet also make sure that people are responsive.
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, 9 to 11 every morning, we're going to focus on getting our work done.
But between 8 and 9 in the morning and then 11 to 12 in the morning, we're going to check our messages. That's a perfectly reasonable response. Now, of course, there are going to be variations depending on what industry you're in. So an approach that can work for a creative team might not work for a PR team.
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Chapter 8: What actionable resources are available for implementing super team strategies?
But the point is to be deliberate and intentional about how you're carving out time instead of just assuming that focus is something individuals need to find time for.
Is there a way to spend less time on email? I'm curious about that one in particular.
I think there is, but I think that what it ultimately comes down to is, A, carving out time for non-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 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.
Absolutely. Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Ron Friedman.
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