ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: All 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?
ADI IGNATIUS: So, it’s actually 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.
ALISON BEARD: That is giving me chills because I actually think the same thing. My favorite team is our events team here at HBR. 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, it reminds me a little bit of Jack Welch’s comment that 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’m guessing super teams are not a bunch of superstars.
ALISON BEARD: Exactly. 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. Here’s our conversation. Ron, welcome to the show.
RON FRIEDMAN: Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: So, let’s start with how you identified super teams to study. Is that measured by performance, or engagement, or something else?
RON FRIEDMAN: 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 a perfect score, a group called super teams, and it’s about 8 percent of the population. And we analyzed what they do differently, 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.
ALISON BEARD: And is that really the case that any team can be a super team? Because I would imagine that a lot of people would say, “Well, you need to have A players or at least pretty strong talent first.”
RON 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.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. 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 in any team or organization?
RON FRIEDMAN: Well, 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 AB 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: And so, leaders who maybe aren’t in organizations that are inherently experimental like Amazon, or Google, or Meta, they can do this too just within the confines of their own group?
RON 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 percent 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: What about showing curiosity and asking questions? 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?
RON 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.
ALISON BEARD: And are there particular questions that you encourage leaders to ask?
RON FRIEDMAN: There’s a question that jumped out in the research, which is something that the best leaders ask at meetings. 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 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 and helping people solve the problems that they’re facing. And so, it does a few things that are very important for moving the team forward.
ALISON BEARD: And that’s usually a question that people avoid because they want to show that they’re making progress and that they’re able to handle problems themselves.
RON 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 are you stuck on, instead of suggesting that they’re getting everything right, what it really suggests is they’re not tackling the right challenges.
ALISON BEARD: So, you also talk about the importance of well-delivered feedback. What’s new here?
RON FRIEDMAN: What’s interesting, I think, is that on super teams, they’re just receiving way more feedback than on average teams. 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: So, I have a few follow-up questions on that. First, how frequent is frequent?
RON FRIEDMAN: 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. So, it’s not something that comes with set points. It’s an ongoing conversation.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. And then, you said that they make feedback motivating, not critical. How specifically do they do that?
RON FRIEDMAN: 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.
ALISON BEARD: On 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?
RON 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 meeting. 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. 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you talked about 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. So, at the end of the day, you do need to focus on the purpose behind what you’re doing, but then also, delivering on the performance. So, how do leaders of super teams balance those two things?
RON 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: What behaviors do leaders exhibit to create that sense of belonging?
RON 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. They invest in the day-to-day operation. 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.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. That tracks with that conversation that we previously had on the IdeaCast with Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, about the fact that leaders need to be in the trenches to understand. And 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?
RON 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. 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.
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 ceiling in the long term. And that’s exactly what super teams do when they’re looking for better ways of learning.
ALISON BEARD: 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 of 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?
RON 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.
ALISON BEARD: So, you need people who buy into the idea that we’re all here for continuous improvement. We’re all here to deliver on our purpose as well as our performance. You need those types of A players.
RON FRIEDMAN: Improvement doesn’t work when it is owned by one person. It works when it’s part of how the team operates. And part of the leader’s responsibility is making learning feel safe. We can talk all day about the importance of learning, but the reality is that in most businesses, getting better is actually quite hard. And it’s because improvement requires two things that most companies aren’t particularly comfortable with. It requires risk-taking, and it requires failure. And unless a team feels comfortable making those mistakes, learning becomes impossible.
ALISON BEARD: I would say that I feel like in today’s current climate, a real challenge to this idea or obstacle to this idea is time and resources. So, we’re all needing to do our jobs, our existing jobs, as well as we possibly can. Often multiple jobs, people are having to do at once and making space for the kind of experimentation you’re talking about, the kind of failure you’re talking about, the kind of ongoing feedback, learning, self-improvement, it doesn’t feel like we have time for it. So, how do you address that problem?
RON FRIEDMAN: I love that question because one of the main arguments I make in my new book, Super Teams, is that the three strengths are interwoven. You can’t expect the team to get better unless you free up their time by freeing them from meetings and email. You can’t expect a team to get better unless they feel supported by their teammates and they’re surrounded by people who make them better. Each strength is a necessary pre-requirement in order for the other strengths to emerge. And what we find on super teams is that it’s not just having one of the strengths. It’s not just better managing your time, energy and attention, or making each other better, or constantly improving. It’s all three at the same time. And unless you address each one of them, you’re simply not going to get results.
ALISON BEARD: So, you think that leaders can do that within their own teams sometimes despite organizational constraints?
RON FRIEDMAN: I think the best leaders are focus amplifiers. And what I mean by that is they weed out the distractions that are eating people’s time and aren’t contributing to their performance. And so, it has to start with freeing up people’s time so that they can focus on what matters. And yes, that’s the responsibility of leaders.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And the crazy thing about your findings on super teams is that these leaders actually create enough time so that their employees can then go do outside gigs. They can sort of grow outside the organization too, and leaders encourage that. So, how does that work? What’s an example?
RON FRIEDMAN: Well, what we see in super teams is that they actually invest over an hour a week more than members of average teams in hobbies. Some of them have side gigs. And we find in our research is that the best leaders are more supportive of moonlighting than our average leaders. And it’s because they are supportive of the employee’s growth and development, and they’re authentic about it. They’re not just doing it because it serves the team.
And what both of those things point to is that how we spend our off hours determines the quality of our performance at work. A lot of people think that when they’re not working, they’re automatically recovering, but that’s not the case. Passive activities like scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix, they can help us unwind, but they rarely help us recover our energy.
What actually helps people recover their energy are mastery experiences. It’s doing activities that stretch your skills and challenge you in new ways. And so, depending on your interests, that can mean learning a new song on the piano, or trying out a new dish, or entering a pickleball tournament, or even yes, taking a side gig. The takeaway here is that recovery doesn’t mean slowing down. It requires accelerating in a different direction.
ALISON BEARD: That sounds like a lot. I’m not going to lie.
RON FRIEDMAN: Hold on. Why does that sound like a lot?
ALISON BEARD: I guess it’s because I have two teenagers at home, and so, that’s my acceleration that I have to deal with.
RON FRIEDMAN: Got it.
ALISON BEARD: Maybe when I’m an empty-nester, I’ll take up knitting or pickleball.
RON FRIEDMAN: Fair enough. I completely appreciate the desire to unwind and to relax. What this research points to is that investing an hour or so a week in something that moves you forward outside of your career will benefit your performance at work.
ALISON BEARD: So, the job of the leader is simply to encourage people when they express interest in outside pursuits.
RON FRIEDMAN: That’s part of it. And another part of it is encouraging people to disconnect in their off hours. We actually have data showing that the best leaders are more than twice as likely to encourage people to disconnect from work in their off hours. And so, part of it is encouragement. Part of it is highlighting and recognizing people when they achieve things outside of work. It’s really about being authentic in developing your employees, whether that benefits your team in the short term or not, because ultimately, it’s going to lead people to be more invested in you as a boss and in your company as a whole.
ALISON BEARD: And then, when you have a super team, when you’ve created one, how do you ensure that no one becomes complacent and you stay super?
RON FRIEDMAN: A defining feature of super teams is the pursuit of continuous improvement. So, it is built into how the team operates. And that’s what we see in the Thunder. It’s what we see in all the examples of the various teams that we’ve discussed, which is that getting better is part of how they operate. And so, it’s not a one-time event. It’s not something they have to talk about in their offsite. It’s an ongoing conversation.
ALISON BEARD: And so, that’s a culture that you create.
RON FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. And it starts with your attitude towards learning things from your employees. It’s about sharing insights that you uncovered. It’s about reacting to things in a way that’s positive when someone presents an alternative viewpoint. It’s all of those features, and it’s having that curiosity mindset and having the intellectual humility that demonstrates that you’re authentically interested in developing the people around you.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, Ron, thank you so much for your time.
RON FRIEDMAN: Glad to be here.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of the HBR article, How to Build a Super Team that Keeps Getting Better, and the book Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams.
Next week, Adi speaks with Charles Duhigg about creating the right habits to move the needle on culture at your organization.
If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
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