What Sets Superteams Apart from the Rest

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0:55I'm Alison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:07All right, Adi, tell me about the best team that you ever worked on. What were the people like? How was the dynamic? What made it great? So it's actually a team that you have been on, and that is Harvard Business Review's virtual events team. And it sort of started, probably during COVID, we started doing virtual events, and this all-volunteer army came together. And the esprit was incredible. It was really, in addition to everybody else's normal job, but it came together, our focus was clear, and it was so much fun. there were glitches but it worked and the team spirit was the best I've ever experienced.

1:41That is giving me chills because I actually think the same thing. My favorite team is our events team here at HBR. I feel like we're all united toward a goal. We're trying new things. We're working to get better and we all really really trust each other. So our guest today might call the team that we're talking about a super team. These are groups that don't just perform well together, but they also enjoy themselves while doing it. He studied a bunch of them and identified the traits they have in common, as well as the leadership behaviors that allow them to become as good as they are. Essentially, the ingredients to create and maintain a super team at your own organization.

2:18So it reminds me a little bit of Jack Welch's comment that, you know, wherever you are in a company, whatever team you're on, make it the best it can possibly be, which I always thought was great. I mean, I'm guessing super teams are not a bunch of superstars. Exactly. I mean, it is important to get the right people on the bus and you want to create a culture where everyone is engaged in continuous learning. But he argues that it's about things like managing time and focus, the right way to give and get feedback, and how to enable continuous learning. So Ron Friedman is a social psychologist and author of the HBR article, How to Build a Super team that keeps getting better, as well as the book Super Teams, The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams.

3:02Here's our conversation. Ron, welcome to the show.

3:07Ron Friedman:Thanks for having me. So let's start with how you identified super teams to study. Is that measured by performance or engagement or something else? Over the last few years, my team, we surveyed thousands of workers in a variety of industries and asked them two key questions about their teams. The first was, how effective is your team at reaching its goals? And the second was compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? And then we took the teams with the perfect score, a group called super teams, and it's about 8 % of the population. And we analyzed what they do differently.

3:41Ron Friedman:And the patterns were striking. The same habits turned up again and again. Super teams share three key strengths. They get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. They don't just collaborate well, they actively make one another better. and they're not satisfied producing great work. They're constantly building their skills and improving over time. And the great news is every single one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance. And is that really the case that any team can be a super team?

4:13Because I would imagine that a lot of people would say, well, you need to have eight players or at least pretty strong talent first.

4:20Ron Friedman:Yeah, it's a great question. And I think a lot of the conversation around teams is centered around getting the right people on the bus. I'm not going to deny that's important. But most leaders aren't building a team from scratch. They're working with people they already have. And so instead of focusing on individual talent, we looked at how successful teams actually get work done. We looked at things like how they spend their time at the office, how they structure their meetings, and how they collaborate, and even how they recharge outside of work. And that allowed us to identify the precise habits that drive performance and make them actionable for any team that wants to improve.

4:56Okay, so why don't we dig into some of the ways that leaders turn average or even underperforming teams into super teams? How do they experiment beyond what one might normally see, you know, in any team or organization?

5:12Ron Friedman:One of the key differences we found in our research is that super teams, they run nearly 48 % more experiments than the average teams. Now, those experiments can be as small as A-B testing a landing page, or they can be much bigger, like launching a new product line. When you look at the most innovative companies in the world, companies like Amazon and Netflix and Meta, they're experimenting all the time. On Amazon, they're experimenting with the price of a particular product, the page layout as well. Anytime you go on the app, you're seeing one version of Amazon. Other people are seeing a different version.

5:43Ron Friedman:Same goes for Netflix, where they experiment with the different thumbnails associated with a show to see if it gets you to watch. They're experimenting with the types of shows they're producing and the movies as well. And at Meta, they're constantly experimenting with the order of your newsfeed and the ads that they're showing you. The key is to always be working on something that you're not 100 % sure is going to work out and to share those findings with your team. Because even if you occasionally fail and the experiment doesn't work, chances are you're going to learn something that makes you and your team better.

6:13And so leaders who maybe aren't in organizations that are inherently experimental, like Amazon or Google or Meta, they can do this too, just sort of within the confines of their own group?

6:25Ron Friedman:Absolutely. And I think the key is normalizing mistakes, is just making people understand that mistakes are part of learning. One of my favorite examples is taken from Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn. One of the things that he would tell his team is, I don't expect you to be perfect. In fact, I want you to fail 15 % of the time. And his thinking on this was that if people are getting everything right, it doesn't mean they're doing a perfect job. What it means is they're likely moving too slowly. That sentiment is also reflected by something that Reed Hastings at Netflix would say back when he was with that organization.

6:57Ron Friedman:he would often be thrilled when most of their shows were doing well. But if too many of the shows were doing well, he'd take that as a red flag because it would tell him that the team wasn't taking enough risks. And so what both of those examples, I think, really nicely illustrate is that on the best teams, perfection isn't the goal. Progress is the goal. And the only way to achieve some progress is to make some mistakes along the way. What about showing curiosity and asking questions? You know, we've covered that quite a bit in HBR over the past few years. How do leaders of super teams do that in a different way than other managers?

7:34Ron Friedman:I think more than anything, it's not just about asking questions, but it's about being open and receptive to what your team has to say. So one of the findings that we uncovered in our research is that on super teams, leaders are much more receptive to learning from the people they lead. And what that does is it sends a signal that at this organization, learning new things and great ideas can come from anywhere. And it's less about hierarchy than it is about insight. And are there particular questions that you encourage leaders to ask? There's a question that jumped out in the research, which is something that the best leaders ask at meetings.

8:09Ron Friedman:And that question is, what are you stuck on? And it's a deceptively simple question, but it is remarkably effective because what it does is it normalizes challenges. And so at most meetings, what often happens is it's basically an event where people kind of talk about various status updates. And I think a lot of what makes meeting feel like a waste of people's time is that that information can be exchanged over email. On super teams, when a leader asks, what are you stuck on? It raises challenges that people are facing and it turns the room into a collaborative forum because now teammates are jumping in, helping people solve the problems that they're facing.

8:47And so it does a few things that are very important for moving the team forward. And that's usually a question that people avoid, right? Because they want to show that they're making progress and that they're able to handle problems themselves.

9:01Ron Friedman:Yeah, it tells people that when you're doing hard things, experiencing obstacles and setback is a normal part of that experience. And it reframes the experience of feeling stuck as something that is desirable. Because when people have nothing to say to the leader's question of what do you stock on, instead of suggesting that they're getting everything right, what it really suggests is they're not tackling the right challenges. So you also talk about the importance of well-delivered feedback. What's new here? What's interesting, I think, is that on super teams, they're just receiving way more feedback than on average teams.

9:38Ron Friedman:Their leaders deliver feedback more frequently, and they do it in a way that's more than twice as likely to be experienced as motivating rather than critical. But here's what really jumped out at us, is that on super teams, they're not just getting feedback from the top down, which is typically what you see on average teams. They're getting peer-to-peer feedback at a much higher rate. And it's not because teammates are constantly giving each other pointers. it's because they're higher in something called feedback seeking. People on super teams are more likely to proactively go to one another and ask for input.

10:08Ron Friedman:They're sharing their work, they're getting input early, and they're making revisions before the work ever gets to the manager or to the client. And so when you're surrounded with great feedback, it's much easier to get better because you have all the right insights pointing you in the right direction. So I have a few follow-up questions on that. First, how frequent is frequent? On the best teams, feedback isn't something that happens at the end of a project or on a performance review. It's built into how the work gets done. And so super team leaders are in constant conversation with their team about how to improve.

10:42Ron Friedman:So it's not something that comes with set points. It's an ongoing conversation. Okay. And then you said that they make feedback motivating, not critical. How specifically do they do that? What that research suggests is they place much more weight on what needs to change as opposed to what went wrong. And so they don't focus on who's to blame. They focus on lessons learned. And if you can make your feedback future focused, it's much easier to accept because it doesn't involve accepting blame for the thing that went wrong. And it gives people something tangible they can do to improve in the future.

11:19On the topic of motivation, how do you push people who are already performing at a high level to do more and do it faster? Is there a limit to how much you can push people to be super?

11:33Ron Friedman:I don't think that it's about pushing people at all. I actually think it's more about removing many of the barriers that get in the way of work. So let me give you a snapshot of how the average team operates. The average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings. They then lose another 11 hours digging themselves out of email. So what does that leave for real work? It's about a day. What happens when you have to cram a week's worth of work into a single day? You look for ways to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends, and that approach can serve you in the short term, but over the long run, you're going to burn out.

12:08Ron Friedman:Super teams are much more deliberate with their time at work. They are 50 % better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They're 54 % less likely to schedule recurring meetings, which often become a time sink because they're so difficult to remove. The other thing they do is they set aside dedicated focus hours during the day for real work. They do things like meeting-free days where people can focus on moving projects forward instead of having to sacrifice their times for meetings and monitoring messages. But except they don't call them meeting-free days. They call them get-things-done days because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiatives.

12:43Ron Friedman:So if I were to sum up everything that high-performing teams do to get more done into a simple formula, it would be this. minimize distraction, maximize focus. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you talked about sort of the importance of purpose in motivating people, whether they're A players or D players, and that helps in creating a supercharged team. But metrics also matter too, right? So at the end of the day, you do need to focus on sort of the purpose behind what you're doing, but then also delivering on the performance. So how do leaders of super teams sort of balance those two things?

13:19Ron Friedman:I think it's not one or the other. I think it's providing people with a greater sense of purpose for what it is that they're achieving that goes beyond meeting quarterly profits that makes the work meaningful. Now, I will say that that is not a substitute for a high-performing team. One of the findings that we identified in our research is that the source of people's meaning at work differs depending on whether they're on an average team versus if they're on a super team. On average teams, the number one source of meaning for workers is providing a salary that they can take home to support their family.

13:52Ron Friedman:But on super teams, the number one source of meaning came from being part of a team. We had people rank order what makes their job meaningful, and that's what rose to the top. And so what I think that tells us is that when you work on a team that really clicks, when people around you are making you better, when you feel like you're getting your most important work done. And when you feel like you're constantly growing, the team itself becomes a source of meaning.

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14:56What behaviors do leaders exhibit to create that sense of belonging?

15:02Ron Friedman:There are a couple of things that leaders can do to bring a team closer while making the team more effective. The first is when someone comes to you for feedback, don't just simply offer that feedback, but encourage them to get some feedback from their teammates. And what that does is it normalizes the idea that we make each other better. It's not just the leader who has all the insights. The other thing is, and this is something that we also see in our research, is super team leaders are far more likely to roll up their sleeves and do the actual work. They're not comfortable simply deciding and delegating.

15:35Ron Friedman:they invest in the day-to-day operation and and that does a couple of things one is very clearly it helps people feel a deeper sense of collaboration because when they're working shoulder to shoulder with their leader they can feel like they're all moving in the same direction but it also gives leaders a clearer view of what's actually happening on the ground so they can spot challenges and opportunities way faster than leaders who are managing at a distance yeah that tracks with that conversation that we previously had on the IdeaCast with Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, about the fact that, you know, leaders sort of need to be in the trenches to understand.

16:12And that doesn't mean micromanagement, but it does mean being part of the team, not just the person running it. So do you have examples of bosses who have taken underperforming teams and turned them into super teams?

16:27Ron Friedman:The Oklahoma City Thunder managed to do something pretty incredible, which is they went from near the bottom of the NBA to the very best of the NBA in under three seasons, which is practically unheard of. And the remarkable thing is, this isn't even their first time doing it. They followed a very similar trajectory a little over a decade ago. And how they did it is through a number of different ways. One is they experiment constantly. And a prime example for the Thunder is their starting lineup. Most teams start the same five players in every basketball game. With the Thunder, you have almost no idea who's going to be starting.

17:01Ron Friedman:They're constantly trying new combinations and saving the best ones for the playoffs. So constant experimentation is one feature. Another feature is they make learning feel safe. If you look through the statements of their general manager, Sam Presti, one of the things he's often saying is having a tolerance for the messiness and regression of learning. And what he's really saying here is that anytime you're trying to do something new, you're going to experience some setbacks. And when the leader emphasizes that that's an expectation, it lowers the pressure on others and allows people to take the risks they need to learn new things.

17:36Ron Friedman:And the final thing about the Thunder is that they are always working to get better, even when they're succeeding. Before their current rise, the Thunder had a winning team. They were actually making the playoffs pretty regularly. They were doing well. They just weren't winning championship. But the leadership recognized they didn't have the caliber of talent they needed to really compete. So they did something pretty unusual. They traded away their best players, even though they were winning, for future draft picks because they recognized that doing so would raise the team's ceiling in the long term.

18:08Ron Friedman:And that's exactly what super teams do when they're looking for better ways of learning. So you're hurting my heart a little bit because as frequent listeners will know, I'm a diehard Celtics fan and OKC will be our biggest rival in the West. if we can get through the East with the NBA playoffs starting right now. But I greatly admire what they have done at OKC, absolutely. That point you made about trades, though, brings me to another question. So if you're the leader of a super team and you're doing all these things right, and then you see people who aren't getting better or aren't gelling with the rest of the team, aren't doing all the things that make a super team super, does that mean that you need to get rid of them?

18:47Ron Friedman:I think there are points in time where people do need to let go. I'm not under the naive impression that you can fix everyone. I think a lot of times as leaders, we fall for the belief, very much like many people do when they get married, that I'll change them once they're here. And that's just not realistic. And so I do think that there are certain traits you're looking for when you're trying to build a super team. And given the importance of learning and evolving and adapting in the age of AI, having a willingness and openness to learning new things, taking risks, making mistakes, that's a critical requirement for adapting to the world we now live in.