The Science Behind High-Performing Teams (with Ron Friedman)

0:00Ron Friedman: And so what's interesting about the characteristics of the best teammates is what's not on that list. So again, it's knowledgeable, dependable, and good communicator. What's not on the list is funny. What's not on the list is good listener, right? Those are very positive characteristics, but they don't make the top three. And the question is why? And the answer is it's because the characteristics of the best teammates are the ones that don't just feel good. They move the team forward. So being funny, being a good listener, that's great, but you're not making everybody better. And what we find again and again is that the best teammates find a way to make the team better.

0:42Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott, and while the rest of the Radical Caner podcast team is on sabbatical, I am talking to the authors of some books that I have read and loved, and I'm thrilled today to have with me Ron Friedman. Ron, PhD, is an award-winning psychologist who helps leaders build high-performing teams. He is the best-selling author of The Best Place to Work and Decoding Greatness. His new book, Super Teams, The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, reveals what the very best teams do differently. And that is what we're gonna talk about today.

1:23Ron, welcome.

1:24Ron Friedman: Thank you, Ken. I love your book and I love the structure of it. It leaves me feeling calm. One of the first frameworks that you suggest is how the creative process works. So can you describe how the creative process works and demystify it for folks? Sure. I think the part that most people miss is the incubation period. So you soak in a lot of great information and then you need to go away and do something else. Get yourself out of the mindset of consuming information and just letting it kind of sit there while you distract yourself, ideally with physical activity. If you can, for example, go for a walk or go swimming, all of a sudden the best ideas rise to the surface.

2:08Ron Friedman: And so if you're looking to be creative, not just productive, but also creative in the solutions you come up with, You need to build that into both your day at home and at the office, either by scheduling some brief breaks or by at the end of the day, like I do, try to go to the gym and ideally kind of have top of mind the problems you're looking to solve and then let the solution come to you. I love this so much because I always describe when I was writing Radical Candor, I said the second hardest part of Radical Candor was getting inside my own head. and for that I needed long expansive stretches of time alone where sometimes I was writing but more often I was walking as you say I was taking long walks in in my neighborhood and walking alone and feeling like oh I'm not doing anything I'm just taking these long walks but it was very productive time and then the hardest part of course was getting back out of my head and that's sort of your, I think, verification phase where you need other people.

3:16Ron Friedman: Yes. You actually want feedback from your people on your solution because if you just try to come up with it on your own, invariably you kind of go in a circle. And so there is a point where you want to test your ideas. And I think a lot of this kind of flies in the face of how we think about productivity at work. When we think about productivity at work, a lot of times we think about it's about grinding. It's about the more hours you work, the more successful you'll be. And if you look at the cognitive science about how great ideas come about, actually what's really vital is that people have that restoration phase.

3:47Ron Friedman: And so how you spend your off hours is just as crucial to your productivity as how you spend your nine to five. And no one is that more important for than the leader. In fact, one of the studies that I talk about in the book is research showing that when a leader has a restorative evening, their team performs better the next day. Now that sounds crazy. Why would him taking a night off help her team be more effective? And it's because a well-rested leader shows up in a better mood. And when people feel like the leader's in a good mood, they enjoy their work more and they try harder. And so there's a whole reframing I try to do in the get more done section of the book that helps people understand that it's not just about hours spent, it's the quality of the hours and what you do after work as well.

4:35Yeah, so you break the book down into three sections and the first is get more done. So let's double click there. And I love reminding people, when I started writing Radical Candor, there's this you, your relationships, and then your responsibilities. I had a coach who got up in front of a whiteboard and he drew a wheel. And he said, what happens when the center of the wheel is out of alignment? Can it go faster? And the answer is no, it's going to slow everything down. And the same day that this coach was telling me that, I had an employee come to me and say to me, and this was like very painful feedback.

5:15He said, I know what kind of day I'm going to have, Kim, based on what mood you're in when you walk in. And I was like, oh, no. But I can imagine that there's a lot of truth to that. So how does your research square with that?

5:32Ron Friedman: Yeah, it's funny to hear you say that because I can relate to that having worked in the corporate world. And I think that is in some ways reflective of the fact that, you know, obviously people pay more attention to the leader, but you also have to be a kind of a charismatic leader for people to find you so contagious that that is the impact you're having. So maybe take that in a positive light as well. So, yeah, let me tell you about the research. So here's how we did the research for this book. So my background is I worked in polling for many years, and I also worked in psychology, and I got the experience of being in the corporate world after being a psychology professor.

6:08Ron Friedman: And that opened my eyes to the disconnect between the latest science and the modern workplace. So that led me to my first book. That was the best place to work. And in it, I took over 1 ,000 academic studies and translated them into plain English so that regardless of whether you're just someone starting out or a CEO, you have access to the best research on how to create a great workplace. But there was something missing from that book, and that is what do the best teams do differently? Yes. And because even within the best workplaces, you're going to have a lot of variability. Some teams are going to be great.

6:36Ron Friedman: Some teams not so great. So in this book, in Super Teams, what we tried to do was do a very comprehensive study looking at what the best teams do differently. And the way we did that is by utilizing some of that polling experience where we interviewed over 6 ,000 knowledge workers, and we asked them two simple questions about their teams. The first question was, how effective is your team at achieving its goals? The second question was, 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. It was a very tiny group, about 8 % of teams qualify.

7:11Ron Friedman: We call them super teams, and we look to see what do the super teams do differently. And what we find is that they share some very key strengths that enable them to perform at a higher level. The first strength is super teams get more done by better managing their time, energy and attention. The second is they don't just get things done. They make each other better. And the third is even when things are going well, they're not satisfied. They're constantly looking to build new skills and improve over time. And the inspiring message that I try to relay to leaders is that each one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve his performance.

7:55And have more fun at work.

7:57Ron Friedman: Exactly. The more people enjoy their work, the better they perform. Yeah, yeah. And so you talk a lot in the get more done section of the book, in the first third, about meetings. And meetings might seem to some people like where productivity and collaboration go to die. But meetings are really important. If we go back to that creative process, there's the preparation, like you're gathering all the data. Or in my case, I wasn't gathering the data. I was just living my life. And then incubation was like I was trying to make sense of my life. Illumination, I had some ideas. And then I had to bounce my ideas off.

8:36I had to get out of my own head. And I think that that is true for a lot of people. Meetings are essential for that verification process. But you also need some meeting-free times in order to make sure that you can actually incubate and illuminate your thinking. You had some interesting suggestions about meetings. Yeah.

9:00Ron Friedman: So when we talk about how super teams get more done, one of the things that we need to contrast that with is how the average team operates. And so let me give you a snapshot. The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week digging themselves out of messages. So emails, Slack, text messages. What does that leave for real work? Well, 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 or you multitask. Any one of those combinations ends up contributing to burnout.

9:40Ron Friedman: And so, you know, we wring our hands saying, how come all these people are getting burnt out at work? What better question is, how do they manage to get any work done in the first place? And so if you look at super teams, what you find is that they are much more deliberate with their time at the office. And that starts with being a lot more intentional around meetings. They're 50 percent better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They're 54 percent less likely to schedule recurring meetings. And recurring meetings are particularly insidious because they're so difficult to remove from your calendar.

10:11Ron Friedman: Kim, if you and I have a recurring meeting, in order for me to break that habit, I need to have a very uncomfortable conversation with you. And I need to say, Kim, I don't feel like our time together is valuable anymore. It's a little bit like breaking up with someone professionally. People don't want to have that uncomfortable conversation, so they keep going to this soul-crushing meeting week after week. The other thing that super teams do is that they don't just play defense on meetings. They play offense on focus. They set aside dedicated focus blocks during the day where people can get real work done without having to answer email or attend meetings.

10:47Ron Friedman: They do things like meeting-free days, 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 initiative. And so when we talk about meetings, yes, absolutely, meetings have value. But I think a better phrasing of that statement is well-run meetings have value. And part of having a well-run meeting is being clear on who actually needs to be in the room. And it's also about having leaders who lead those meetings with some uncomfortable questions like, what are you stuck on? That was a question that we encountered in the research again and again is that the leaders of the best teams are asking those uncomfortable questions.

11:22Ron Friedman: What are you stuck on? Because if you think about how most meetings are run, it's basically a parade of achievement. Everyone goes about, here's what I did this week. And yeah, we clap our hands. And here's what I did this week. And that's great. We should have that positivity. We want to build that momentum. But a better use of the time is when a leader says, hey, what are you stuck on? Now everyone has to think about that obstacle that they're procrastinating on. And it completely changes the tenor of the meeting because now it turns the room into a collaborative forum where everyone is trying to help everyone solve their problems.

11:55Ron Friedman: And it becomes a meeting that people actually look forward to attending because they know they're going to get solutions to their real problems. Yeah, it's going to help them get out of their head. And for that, they need other people. So one of the things that you wrote that you suggested that I've been thinking a lot about is that super teams have two days a week to get stuff done. But what if your super team is like salespeople where the work is meeting with? Like, how do you deal with that? Yeah. So first of all, just to be clear, the two days a week comes from a study that was published in the MIT Sloan Journal that showed that that was the optimal time is for a knowledge workers to have two meeting free days a week.

12:36Ron Friedman: Now, that said, I think all of this is directional. You need to customize this to whatever it is you're trying to achieve. I think a question that leaders really need to wrestle with is rather than trying to find wholesale solutions for, quote unquote, the best way of doing things, it's to work backward from what we're really trying to achieve. So in the case of a sales team, obviously availability is crucial. Part of it might be solved by one person being on call while the rest of the team is able to actually get stuff done as opposed to everybody being on call all the time. Or it can just be a dedicated focus block where we don't take calls from 11 to 1.

13:13Ron Friedman: That's another option. But all of it ultimately needs to come from the team collaborating together and developing guidelines where everyone is solving these issues together. You know, along the same lines, one of the key tips in super teams that I think has really resonated with a lot of leaders I speak to is having meeting guidelines. So having a clear set of rules with your team about what constitutes a meeting and what doesn't. A lot of teams don't have any kind of guidelines. Anybody can call a meeting for any reason. It's how all of our calendars get all booked up. So if somebody has a question, meeting.

13:50Ron Friedman: If somebody has an update, meeting. And all of a sudden, everyone's week is gone. So meeting guidelines enable a team to have very clear rules about what deserves a meeting and what doesn't. So on my team, we have a very simple rule, and that is no decision, no meeting. If you have an update, send an email. 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 their work. It's that simple. Another example of a meeting guideline is from the content marketing company, Percolate. They have a meeting guideline that says no spectators.

14:23Ron Friedman: If you're not contributing to the meeting, you don't need to be there. And it's not a criticism. It's respect for your time. It's not necessarily about an action item. Some people push back. You know, they say, well, what about junior people? Shouldn't they be in a room to observe? And the answer is maybe. It depends on what you're optimizing for. But what we're trying to protect against is, and I've been in organizations like this, where every meeting has a minimum of 10 people. It's madness. And so what happens? One person is talking, nine other people are checking their email. The only person listening is the one who's talking.

14:56Ron Friedman: That's not a good use of anybody's time. And so it's just more about building in that intentionality so that the team can operate in a way in which is proven to bring success. Yeah, yeah. You also have some really good tips for cutting down interruptive communication, in other words, emails. How do you think about creating communication within workflows rather than in some sort of separate tool? I want to preface this by talking about what I found to be one of the more surprising findings in the book. And really, this is a book with surprising findings almost every page. Because we didn't know what we were going to find.

15:32Ron Friedman: And so we came up with a lot of interesting things. And one of those examples is that productivity tips that are designed to protect people's focus can backfire within a team setting. And so an example of that is if I decide that I'm going to only check my email three times a day because that's what I've read online. That's what the best entrepreneurs do. They only check their email at 9, 1, and 4. Great. If I unilaterally decide that I'm going to do that and I don't communicate that with the team or if you have your own hours when you're checking email. So we become one another's bottleneck. And so as I say in the book, one person's deep work becomes another person's bottleneck when you're in a team.

16:11Ron Friedman: And so we really need to think about these communication patterns as a team so that everyone is on the same page. So one solution is to simply have some very dedicated blocks where we say, okay, between 9-11, we're on email. And between 3 and 5, we're on email. And other times, no one needs to check their email. And if you have an emergency, text. Yeah. Very simple. Very simple. and allows everybody to feel more proactive at work and not feel like they're just being defensive and swatting down distractions. That's the key. If you want people to feel like they're having a good productive day at work, they need to feel like they're in control of where their attention goes.

16:48Yeah. I sort of feel like email is, you shouldn't have a much faster than a 24 hour expectation of response. So if I want to interrupt someone, I need to use some other medium other than email. Is that just about team norms?

17:05Ron Friedman: It can be. And I think it's really crucial that we get those team norms in place explicitly. And here's why I say that is because if I have one person on the team who has a different expectations of email, like you just said, email 24 hours is a reasonable expectation. If you just said that to the rest of your team, now they're on the same page. Otherwise, people have their different backgrounds, different expectations. And so one person likes to email, another person likes to leave comments on their Adobe Acrobat. One person commenting in Canva and a fourth person is texting. Now you're all over the place.

17:37Ron Friedman: And in order to feel like you can calmly attend to your projects, you first have to check four different places. That's a waste of everybody's time. And so, again, what the best teams are doing, and we are seeing that in the data, is they have very clear communication guidelines about how to communicate in emergency and how to communicate in a very standard way. Yeah. Or maybe it's not an emergency, but like sometimes somebody needs an answer from me right away and they need to know what medium is the right one. Exactly. Yeah. The other bit of data from your book that I loved is how important laughter is.

18:13So what can what can we do to laugh more at work?

18:17Ron Friedman: You know, it's not by telling jokes. Make meetings funny. Yeah, it's not by telling jokes. And I agree with you that when you look at the best teams, what we find is that they are laughing a great deal more together. And it's not because they're cracking each other up. It's because they have that level of safety and connection where they have those inside jokes. Inside jokes are a great way of determining whether you really have a team mentality. Because it takes time and it takes safety to develop those relationships. And so I think, actually, it's counterintuitive. You would think that you would need to show people clips of The Office to get them laughing.

18:53Ron Friedman: But no, that's not the most effective way. It's by getting them to open up over some of their personal issues or in terms of like, here are my three favorite things to do on the weekend or here's my favorite album to listen to. Sometimes those icebreakers for an established team are more effective than for complete strangers. It's because now you're getting to know people who work together in a completely different light. But I will say that I don't think, and maybe we can have a, we talked earlier before we got on about, hey, let's try to find points of differences so that maybe we can make this interesting by finding some debates.

19:31Ron Friedman: I'm not sure that icebreakers are the most effective way of getting people to connect on a team. I think a more effective way is to have people work together towards shared goals and find ways to contribute to one another's success and only then layer on the icebreakers. Because what that does, it forms that basis of connection. And even if you completely would disagree with someone, I've got this great story about Scalia and Ginsburg, about Supreme Court justices who had nothing in common and yet ended up becoming best friends. And it's because they found ways to support each other at work first before they looked for commonalities.

20:10And they both loved the opera, right? Wasn't that a big basis of their friendship? So they found something outside of work that they both liked to do and they would go do it together.

20:22Ron Friedman: That's correct. But the key is they first formed that relationship by supporting each other at work. And so in the case of Ginsburg, he, I mean, in the case of Scalia, he was a grammatical savant and he would find mistakes in Ginsburg's work and pointed out to her privately so she can make corrections before went to the court. And then she, in turn, would help Scalia modulate the emotional tone of his arguments when he went a little bit overboard. And so both, even though they disagreed, they found ways to make each other better. And that's when the relationship really took off. Yeah, yeah. I think there's also something interesting.

21:00You said sort of trying to fit in makes you dumber and looking for culture ads, not culture fits can make a team smarter. And I think the story of Scalia and Ginsburg is an example of that. they were not trying to agree with each other. In fact, they were pretty vehemently disagreeing with each other. And at the same time, they found a way to work well together to help each other get better. Yeah.

21:28Ron Friedman: And I think that that is the lesson here for all of us is when you, even if you completely disagree with somebody, if you find a way to contribute to their success, not only do you make the team better, but you suddenly find ways to form a tighter knit team in ways you might not be expecting. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to ask you a question about how I tried to do this. And I'm soliciting some feedback here. I'm soliciting specifically, I'm soliciting some criticism. Maybe this wasn't the best way. And I'll offer some self-criticism as well. So one of the things I used to do to try to instill laughter on my team is we had a staff meeting every Monday morning.

22:06and I started asking people to share a funny story from the weekend. And that was good. I mean, usually people did have pretty funny stories, but one, this was long ago and far away, one weekend I had watched Saturday Night Live and there was a funny skit about Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin saying, I can see Russia from my house. So I shared that skit and everybody laughed. But then one person from the team pulled me aside and said, look, the clip was funny, but you are all sort of very vocal Democrats and I am not. And I often feel excluded when we turn to talking about. And so that was an important thing for me to be aware of.

22:53So one of the dangers of humor, figuring out how humor can be inclusive and not exclude one person on the team.

23:00Ron Friedman: I think it's a great observation. And I'll tell you, I came across a study recently that found that people on better teams actually communicate about politics more often. Now, that's really counterintuitive. It's really counterintuitive because, to your point, you want to stay away from politics because it's kind of like you're going to anger 50 % of the people most of the time. It's just not worth the investment. So why is it that people who have closer bonds are communicating about politics more often? It's because they first get a sense of the other person and only then self-disclose about politics.

23:36Ron Friedman: And it's because – so you have that tight knit team first and then the political conversation, but you can't do it right off the bat. And so it's not like talking about politics is going to lead to a better team. It's only when you have a sense for the other person's values that they then self-disclose about politics. And so it's associated with a higher performing tighter knit team. Yeah, and not necessarily because they all agree. They may disagree about politics, but they've gotten to a place where they can talk about it. Yep. Absolutely. I love that. I think that the advice, don't talk about race, religion, or politics at work, is really bad advice because basically what you're doing is you're repressing a whole lot of topics that are very close to a whole lot of people's hearts, and then people can't get to know each other if they can't talk about those things.

24:22Ron Friedman: I think that's a really interesting point. Right. My view is I let the other person talk about politics first. And the other thing is I have come to realize that people's political views and who they are as a person are remarkably disconnected sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And so even if somebody completely disagrees with me politically, I generally kind of just let that go because I just feel like there's so much interwoven with people's backgrounds and family histories that has nothing to do with what they actually value. And I don't know how reflective it really is of what people view as really important today.

24:57Yeah, yeah. I think also there's an important – a belief that never gets challenged becomes a prejudice or so says John Stuart Mill. And so I think there's a lot of value to talking with people who do disagree with you about things, even though I may have no intention of changing my mind and the other person also may have no intention of changing their mind. The conversation still can have value. I agree.

25:23Ron Friedman: And I will say, you know, this we're getting a little far afield from super teams, but I will say this is interesting. I've been exposed to just so many people with completely contradictory views to my own. Yeah. Pickleball. Now, do you play pickleball, Kim? You know, I do not. I hike is what I want. And I snorkel. I hike and I snorkel. I live in Rochester, New York. And in Rochester, New York, pickleball is huge. It's huge. I've met hundreds of people from pickleball. And I think it's wonderful because we are so fixated on our tribes. You just very rarely have access to people who have completely different backgrounds and different interests.

26:02Ron Friedman: And if you could find that opportunity to communicate with people, I feel like we need more of that in America where we talk to one another, even if we don't have shared views. And so, again, what you discover is that people – we don't talk about politics generally, but sometimes you'll find out about people's political views. And what you come to realize is you would never have guessed in a million years that that person espouses those views. Yeah. And maybe we should keep it that way. I don't know. I'm a believer. I mean, look, I live in California, but I grew up in Memphis. So I fly back and forth between the two communities and they're, they're in many ways, politically pretty different.

26:39And I find that there's a lot of value to talking about. I love a lot of people who disagree with me pretty vehemently politically. So, all right. So let's get back to super teams. So time, one of the, one of my favorite parts of this book was a question you asked, how wealthy are you? And you reframed it. So talk about this.

27:03Ron Friedman: Yeah. So I start the chapter and I ask people to think about how wealthy they are. And then I, you know, obviously most people are going to go to how much money they have in the bank or what their investment portfolio looks like. But there's another way of looking at time. And that is how much, how time affluent are you? Yes. Right. So it's not just about how much money do you have? How time affluent are you? And what we find is that people on super teams tend to feel like they have plenty of time to do everything that they need to do. And that's a remarkable finding because they're getting more done and yet they feel more time wealthy.

27:37Ron Friedman: So the question is, how do they achieve that? And what we did was we didn't just look at how they're functioning as a team. We looked at how members of super teams are individually operating on a day-to-day basis. And what we found is that super teams structure their day in a very particular way. And there are three strategies that I talk about. I call them looking forward, looking backward, and then staying present. So looking forward, looking backward, staying present. So how do members of super teams look forward? They look at the week ahead. They look at their calendar in advance and they plug in dedicated focus block for what they're trying to achieve.

28:14Ron Friedman: And so they'll do something called time boxing, which is setting appointments with themselves to complete a particular task at a particular time. So they don't wait for time to free up. They're very intentional with setting on their calendar time blocks for particular tasks they're trying to achieve. That's the looking ahead part. The looking backward part is at the end of the week, they look at where their time went and they think about, was that a good use of my time? Was that a bad use of my time? How can I learn from that to improve the way I spend time in the future? And in the staying present piece is about batching.

28:48Ron Friedman: It's about putting together similar tasks so that there are fewer points of transition because it's in those points of transitions between one task to another that we are at our most distractible. So if you think about when you are most prone to checking social media and text, it's usually at the end of one meeting and before another or when you're transitioning between tasks. So the more similar tasks you can batch back to back, the fewer points of transition and the more you can feel like you're staying on track. And so when you do those three things, you tend to feel like you have more time and it's because you feel more proactive at work instead of just reacting or being distracted all the time.

29:27Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. It's so, so helpful because we I do sometimes get to the end of the day and I feel like I've been eating Doritos all day long. mentally yeah yeah mentally uh and i feel slightly sick like i've been like doing a lot of little things instead of doing something big that i feel wasn't i have to tell you kim you know i'm the guy

29:51Ron Friedman: who wrote the book on super teams i feel the same way sometimes so here's what i've done i feel like there are some um metrics you could look at that are kind of like leading metrics that tell you whether you're gonna have a good day or bad day and i've got a little checklist on my door and so But at the end of the day, I go through the checklist. And so some of the things on the checklist are, did I check email more than three times a day? So again, we have dedicated focus blocks on my team. So we know when we're all going to be on email. If it's more than that, I know my day is probably off on the wrong path.

30:24Ron Friedman: Another one is, did I check Reddit before lunch? If I checked Reddit before lunch, it's probably not a good day. Probably not a good day. And it's just those little things. Every one of us is going to have a different trigger that pulls you off track. But if you can identify them and hold yourself accountable on a day-to-day basis, I think you're going to be much more effective at staying on task. Yeah, I love it. You also talk about the importance of vacation and hobbies. And one of the best stories in the book, I think, is about the CEO of Goldman Sachs and his side hustle. So talk about that.

30:58Ron Friedman: Yeah, so this is David Solomon, head of Goldman Sachs. He has a side gig where he's a DJ and he actually released a song during COVID. It was a remix of Whitney Houston. I want to dance with someone. And it went viral. It just blew up on TikTok. It was very successful. And so this goes to the point of how members of super teams tend to have more time devoted after work to hobbies. And so a lot of us think that when we're not working, we're automatically recovering. And that turns out to be false. A more effective way of recovering your energy, the best way, is to actually invest your time in mastery activities and activities that stretch your skills and challenge you in new ways.

31:43Ron Friedman: And it's because the more you feel like you're growing your skill, the more you're going to restock your energy during your off hours, which enables you to be more successful during the workday. And so depending on your interest, that can be entering a pickleball tournament like me or playing a song on the piano or just trying out a new dish in the kitchen. And the key is to always be learning something new with your off hours. So the takeaway here for everyone listening is when it comes to your downtime, don't look to slow down. Look to accelerate in a different direction. Yeah, yeah. One of the things I love to do in my downtime is to weed.

32:19And I don't know why most people don't love to weed, but I love to be out in the yard. And recently I put a wildlife camera in my – I live in kind of a rural area. and a mountain lion came through. So now I'm out there looking for mountain lions.

32:35Ron Friedman: Wow. Very exciting. You know, gardening has so many benefits. Yeah, it's great. Both physiological and psychological. Yeah. And there's also some research showing that because you're exposing yourself to dirt, you're actually making yourself healthier. Yes, I believe it's true. I mean, I'm older than I ever was before and healthier. So I attribute it to gardening. All right. So let's shift to the middle third of the book where super teams make each other better. You have three attributes of a good teammate and they were surprising. So what are the three most important attributes of a good teammate?

33:15Ron Friedman: Yeah. So this is a completely different research question. Before we talked about what do the best teams do differently? Here, we ask people to think about the best teammate they've ever had and the worst teammate they've ever had and to describe them to us. And then through statistical methodologies, we were able to distill down the most popular characteristics, the ones that are most common for – regardless of what kind of team you were, here are the most common characteristics of the best teammates. Number one, the best teammates are knowledgeable. This is the person whose insights can help move the team forward.

33:51Ron Friedman: It's the kind of person who sees problems before they arise. Yeah, you learn from them. You learn from them, and they make the team better. The second thing is they tend to be dependable. They do what they say they're going to do. And the third is they're good communicators. It's the kind of person who says exactly what they mean and make you feel good about hearing it. And so those are the characteristics of the best teammates. The characteristics of the worst teammates are in some cases the inverse, but in other cases completely different. The first characteristic of the toxic teammate is they're unreliable.

34:23Ron Friedman: So that's the flip side of dependable. But then the other two characteristics have nothing to do with knowledgeable or good communicator. They're the person who's arrogant or the person who's got the bad attitude. And we've all worked with people like that where they not only do not do what they're supposed to do, they drag everybody down. Yeah, they pan what you're doing. Yeah. And so what's interesting about the characteristics of the best teammates is what's not on that list. So, again, it's knowledgeable, dependable, and good communicator. What's not on the list is funny. What's not on the list is good listener, right?

34:59Ron Friedman: Those are very positive characteristics, but they don't make the top three. And the question is why? And the answer is it's because the characteristics of the best teammates are the ones that don't just feel good. They move the team forward. So being funny, being a good listener, that's great, but you're not making everybody better. And what we find again and again is that the best teammates find a way to make the team better. You know, I love this. I mean, and laughter is important. But so for I was I got married late in life. And I was sort of puzzled, like, why is it so hard for me to find someone who I want to spend my life with?

35:35And I had criteria. And here were my criteria. Funny, number one, smart, number two, indecent. And and somebody challenged me and I realized I needed to I needed to reverse the order. Decent, a good person. and funny came funny was still on the list but it came last and shortly after that i met my and my husband is funny uh uh but but he's really a good guy that's really funny so what i took away from

36:04Ron Friedman: this was like i was going to jump in but say it's because you're talking to everybody about politics but no uh yeah uh this i i got married in 2017 so uh yeah and here you were looking for a comedian the whole time. Sorry, 2007, not 2017. Uh-huh. And you were looking for a comedian the whole time. Yeah, that was a mistake. Notorious for relationship skills. Yeah, exactly. But it's interesting because I think that criteria is actually really valuable. I talk to my kids about this all the time. Yeah. All the time about I don't care who you marry as long as they are smart, want the same things as you, and are kind.

36:45Yes, they're kind.

36:46Ron Friedman: I feel like those criteria, I would love for them to find anyone who meets most of those. And kind comes way before smart. Smart's a distant last, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just after funny. So anyway, the other thing that you learned about super teams is that super teams don't have superstars. There's a feeling that everybody is participating. So say more about that. That squares with everything that I believe. Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of research showing that when you add a superstar to the team, it actually can be very disruptive. And a lot of times the superstars have an ego that comes with them.

37:25Ron Friedman: They have expectations. And it can also lead to a diffusion of responsibility where people feel like the superstar is going to handle everything. And, you know, this is actually a good opportunity to talk about something that's in the introduction to the book, which is how do you create a team mentality? I think most we throw the word team around a lot in the workplace, but most people actually don't have that team mentality. They're just a group of people who happen to be working in the same department. And so how do you turn that group of strangers into a team? Well, you need three things. The first thing you need is shared goals.

38:00Ron Friedman: Everyone needs to be pushing in the same direction. So if I, for example, want to go home at five o 'clock to take my kids to soccer and you're trying to get a promotion, we're going to have very different goals and that's going to link to tension. So you need to have everyone on the same page through shared goals. The second thing you need is you need role clarity. We need to have a shared understanding of what we're each responsible for. If we don't have that role clarity, if I think you're responsible and you think I'm responsible, balls are going to get dropped. or if both of us think we're responsible, now we're going to have turf wars.

38:34Ron Friedman: Either one of those is problematic. So those are the first two things is shared goals and role clarity. The third thing you need is interdependence. And that's just a fancy psychological term that means we need to feel like we need each other in order to be successful. And this is the problem for a lot of sales teams is I have my quota, you have your quota. Not only do I not care if you meet your quota, but you're a threat to me. And so there's no interdependence whatsoever. So unless you have those three very basic things of shared goal, role clarity, interdependence, you don't have a team. You have a recipe for dysfunction.

39:10Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing, in addition to those three things, or I don't know where it fits in with those three things, but you talk a lot about the importance on a team of productive disagreement. That's part of how we make each other better. So you have some really good words of wisdom on how to disagree productively, which I think is so important. I feel like we don't have enough productive disagreement in our world today. We have a lot of unproductive disagreement.

39:40Ron Friedman: Yeah. The first thing I should say is that we asked people on super teams and we asked average teams as well is how do you view disagreements? Do you feel like it's a tool for sharpening decision making or is it something that is to be avoided because it makes the team worse? And on average, teams are far more likely to stay away from disagreements because they're afraid of rocking the boat. Super teams view it very differently. And when you view the disagreement as an opportunity to make better decisions, it's a completely different mindset entering the disagreement. And so that's key. I don't have to tell you.

40:12Ron Friedman: You teach people this all the time. So I'm glad for the opportunity. Tell me. Tell me more, Ron. I just have the anecdotes. You have the data. So in terms of how do you have productive disagreements, there are a lot of different points that I cover in terms of reviewing the research. But I'll share with you my favorite point. and that is don't try to convince the other person during the disagreement you know during in movies the other person always has this moment of revelation you're like oh i never thought about it that way yeah thanks kim yeah in real life that never happens you know what happens is people go home they drive home they sit in their car and then they think about you know maybe she does have a point all right you know what i'm gonna go in tomorrow and i tell kim kim you know i thought about it.

40:55Ron Friedman: I think you made it good. And that's a let them get to your conclusion on their own time, because if they feel like it's their decision, it's their choice, they weren't pressured into it. They enter the agreement much more willingly and everyone feels like they won as opposed to feeling coerced into agreeing with you. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's I think that is such an important point. Like, don't try to win a disagreement. The only winner of a disagreement should be a better decision a better idea. If the goal is to make each other better, we both win, even if I decide that you're right and I'm wrong.

41:36So I think that that's really helpful for folks. All right. So the last third of the book is also great. Read the whole book, is how great teams, super teams improve over time. So the bar is always rising for these super teams. And you talk a lot about how important feedback is for improving over time, a subject near and dear to my heart. So talk a little bit about what you learned about why feedback is so important.

42:07Ron Friedman: Well, one of the things we know from the research, and this is literally decades of research, is that 97 % of feedback fails to improve performance. And that's a striking number, 97%. And in fact, which doesn't mean that feedback is bad. It means that 97 % of that feedback is not well delivered. And a third of the feedback actually makes performance worse. It's so demoralizing. It actually makes people worse. And so the question is, how do you get it right? And in the book, I talk about, you know, some common misconceptions about feedback. And again, I feel like I'm talking to the doctor, giving the doctor tips I heard on Instagram.

42:45Ron Friedman: But But what we know from the research is that one of the things that people are often taught is to say, can I give you some feedback? Yeah. I mean, we've been taught that for generations. Can I give you some feedback? And what does that do? And you've been on the receding end of this, Kim. You know how it makes you feel. Yeah. What most people are thinking is, no, I don't want to hear it. They're thinking that. But they're not allowed to say that. They're not allowed to say it. So now, not only do they think this person is going to tear into me, now they feel coerced into saying, yes, please tell me more.

43:18Ron Friedman: Because what kind of person says, nah, I'm good. Thanks for asking. Nobody says that. Yeah, it's like a manipulative and radical camera. It feels like manipulative insincerity when somebody says, can I give you some feedback? Because you're not allowed to say no. Feels very manipulative. Other times we're taught to do this feedback sandwich where you say something positive, you say what you really think, and then you say something positive again. And that just leaves people confused. And then the other common mistake is that saving the feedback for the performance review. Because if it's the only delivered during the performance review, people already in a rigid kind of defensive mentality, they're just not open to getting the feedback.

43:54Ron Friedman: So one of the things that I talk about in the book is effective feedback not only is delivered more frequently, but it's focused on the future, not the past. if you focus on what the person did wrong and the impact it had on you that's another common mistake is tell the person what they did wrong and what the impact was and were they aware of it were you aware that i had to work for the weekend because you got me that thing late a much better way of delivering that feedback is to say hey the next time we have a report uh that's due together how do you feel about sending it to me on wednesday so i have a couple of days to work on it before the weekend are you open for giving that a shot yeah and now what that does is allows the other person to say, sure, why not?

44:31Ron Friedman: Let's try it. Instead of having to defend why they sent it to you when they did. Yeah, yeah. So can we double click on impact? Because for me, I often advise people to, you know, share the context, share the observation, share the impact, but not the impact on me, the impact on you, you know. So for example, the one story I often, and this goes for praise and criticism. So in the meeting, that's the context. The observation is when you said, um, every third word, the impact was it made you sound stupid. Let's go visit the speech, you know, I'm going to help you go visit the speech coach. So that's the future part, but I need to understand what's in it for me.

45:13And that's, I think the benefit of sharing the impact, not, you know, I feel sad when you say, um, every third word or something like that. What do you think of that?

45:24Ron Friedman: I appreciate you bring this up because I've heard you talk about this during interviews. I've always loved that story. And it's very memorable. And it was very vulnerable of you to share it. Now, I wonder, I'm curious, do you feel like that feedback would have been as helpful to you if she had simply said, I noticed that you said, um, quite a few times. And I think that what you might want to try is slow down a little bit and you will feel less of a temptation to say, um, do you feel like that would have been as helpful or less helpful? So she started out saying, I noticed you said, I'm a lot in that.

46:01And I was like, ah, it's no big deal. So a lot of feedback I think is gauging. And then she tried again, sort of more gently. She said, I know this great speech coach, I can introduce you. And I'm like, I don't have time for a speech coach. So I was not, Sometimes the problem with feedback is that the person isn't hearing it. And it's your job to keep going out on the challenge directly dimension until the person has heard it, I would say. I don't know. What do you think?

46:28Ron Friedman: I think that's right. I forgot that context of she did try to do it in a diplomatic way. It just didn't work. And I think, you know, one of the big problems with communication is the illusion that it has happened. And so one of the things that makes that story work is that she was willing to acknowledge that, like, I tried to say the thing. Kim brushed me off. I tried again. She brushed me off. So I'm going to have to say it a third time, like, in a way that is going to hopefully penetrate Kim's thick skull. Well, credit to her for being willing to have that uncomfortable conversation and credit to you for listening to it.

47:08Yeah, yeah. I want to ask you about another word that you talk about, because I think we use it a little bit differently and we both might learn something. So you said super teams have a manager who gives feedback that doesn't sound critical. And when I talk about feedback, I talk about, well, first of all, I don't call it feedback in the book. I call it guidance. But the term of art is feedback. So we'll use it. And I talk about praise and criticism. And I struggled with those two words because there's, you know, the Gottman Institute is like criticism is one of the dark horsemen of any relationship.

47:49Criticism is a sharp word and maybe not the right word. So I thought about saying good news and bad news. But the problem with good news and bad news is then it sounds like the objective truth. And what I'm trying to share with you is my opinion about what happened. And I want to know your opinion. And negative feedback sounds like a euphemism. Like what's, if not praising criticism, what words? You know, maybe instead of parsing the words, a different way of looking at it is your relationship

48:21Ron Friedman: with your manager before this even happens. And there's a chapter in the book on the psychology of trust and how trust is established on the best teams. And there are three factors that it comes down to in terms of whether you trust somebody at the office, whether it be your manager or your colleague. And here are the three things you need in order to feel like you trust the other person. The first thing you need is you need to feel like that person is competent, that they are able to do a good job. If you don't feel like the other person can do a good job, you're not going to trust them. The second thing is you need to feel like they care about you.

48:52Ron Friedman: They care about and have your best interests at heart. Because even if the person is competent, if you don't think they care about you, you're not going to trust them. And the third factor is consistency. You need to feel like that person is going to do reliably what they said they were going to do. Because even if they are competent and they're caring, if they disappear for days at a time, you can't trust them. So you need those three things. And so in the case of whether we call it criticism or negative feedback, if you feel like it's coming from somebody who really cares about you, it's going to be very differently received than if you feel like you don't trust that person.

49:25Ron Friedman: So I feel like we can tiptoe around what is the word we're using and how do we phrase it. But ultimately what it comes down to is in your case, you felt like she cared about you. Yeah, she had my back. She had your back. And so you were receptive to it. Now, you never met the person or if you felt like this person's cutthroat and they're very competent, but they're a threat to me. I don't know if they could have said it any other way. And I don't know if it would have really reached you. Yeah. If you wouldn't have that feeling of this person cares about me. Yeah. Although I do think that the seeds of trust are sown in feedback, actually, in radical candor.

50:03That's interesting. So let's imagine that you and I are having lunch for the very first time. And I've got a big hunk of spinach in between my teeth. You know the right thing to do is to tell me rather than let me go off to the podcast recording with a giant hunk of spinach. Because if you don't, then I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to see in the mirror the hunk of spinach. And I'm going to think, gosh, why didn't Ron tell me? And that actually is going to make it like you giving me that feedback will help me trust you more. and you not giving me that feedback will make it harder for me to think that you have my back.

50:39So there's something like the origin story that I tell of radical candor happened with a stranger on a street. I was walking my dog and it was a new dog, a puppy. I loved her. I'd never said a crossword to her. So she's totally out of control. She jumps into the street. I pull her out of the way in the nick of time. and I was standing there with my heart in my throat and this man, a perfect stranger, looks at me and he says, I can tell you really love that dog. That was all he had to do to move up on care personally. But you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach her to sit. And then he pointed at the ground, this kind of harsh, sit.

51:17The dog sat. Had no idea she even, so for me that was like, and then I kind of looked it up at him in amazement and he said, it's not mean, it's clear. And then he walked off, leaving me with words to live by. So I feel like part of the way that we build trust is expressing gratitude and appreciation. Like praise is easier. But sometimes like you're meeting with someone for the very first time and something's going wrong and you got to say something. I don't know. What do you think?

51:47Ron Friedman: I think that's very well said. I think you're – part of being a good manager, and this is part of what we discovered in the research, is that the best leaders know how to deliver feedback that's motivating without sounding critical. And I think in many cases, it is about how it's presented and the consistency with which is presented. And when we look at the data, we find that the best leaders give feedback far more frequently than average leaders. And the part that I think actually is really novel here is that part of how members of super teams keep getting better over time is that they're not just getting more feedback from their leaders.

52:24Ron Friedman: They're also getting more feedback from their colleagues. And it's not because the colleagues are going up to one another and pointing out mistakes. It's because they themselves are going to their colleagues and they're saying, hey, what do you think of this? How can I improve it? What changes could I make before it goes to the manager or to the client? And so they're getting way more feedback. So feedback is a really critical feature of these super teams. And it's coming both top down and peer to peer. Yeah. And they're soliciting feedback from the peers. I think the best way to get along with your peers is to solicit feedback from them frequently.

53:01Ron Friedman: Yes. Yes, because it shows not only are you interested in getting better, but you value their opinion. And people love being asked for their feedback. Yes. Yes. Well, Ron, so much wisdom in this book. I could talk to you all day. Thank you so much for spending some time. Where can folks who want to learn more find you? Where should they look? Kim, I just want to say I feel the same way. We really could make it a marathon series. Maybe we should. Yeah, maybe listeners will come back and demand it. You can find me at ronfriedmanphd.com. I do a lot of keynote speaking and workshops and leadership training for organizations.

53:41Ron Friedman: And my company's name is superteamsinc.com. And you can find some options for bringing us in there as well. All right, Ron. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Same here, Kim. Thank you. Thank you.