The Most Collaborative Teams Aren't the Best, with Ron Friedman 700

There we are recording again. All right, listen, we're talking about what makes for super teams, what makes for the best teams. Our guest today surveyed 6,000 teams and he found out the ones that collaborate the most aren't the best. That just like is off. Hopefully that's intriguing and interesting to you. It was to me. I think, oh, collaboration must be the ideal. But we're gonna get into all that. What makes for the best teams? What is the best team?

Why?

What are the implications for your team? I don't know. But listen in, you'll find out. Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up Business Podcast show. Comes to you every week. And you'll find 700 of these plus wherever you get this right now. So all the platforms. A lot of viewers on LinkedIn, a lot of listeners on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, that kind of place. So wherever you get it, like, subscribe, notifications, that kind of thing. The coolest, newest thing in my world is my book is out and available now for presale. And Busy Is Broken. It's about how some of the hardest working leaders actually don't just sacrifice something in their personal lives, they actually mess their companies up. In it, among many things, a story of how one leader trying to be Superman erased $1.8 billion in value in a very short period of time. So, busyisbroken.com. You know in your bones that busy only takes you so far. Busy got us to where we are, but there's a time to retire it, time to shift to something new. That's all in the book, busyisbroken.com. busyisbroken.com. Get it Amazon, wherever you get your books. It's available for sale everywhere. All right, all right. Welcoming to the show, Ron Friedman. So Ron is a PhD social psychologist, University of Rochester. He's the bestselling author of a bunch of books. We're talking today about Super Teams, but Best Place to Work, Decoding Greatness, all that and more. He's the founder of this company, Super Teams. He's on the COVID of Harvard Business Review, May 2026. He's a regular contributor to HBO. New York Times, Financial Times, Forbes, Fast Company, etc. So, Ron, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

I, uh, so I haven't read the book, and I have some notes and that kind of thing, and I'm really, really intrigued by this. Um, and I think, like, right off the bat, I want to know, you studied 6,000 teams expecting to see collaboration is important, and in Instead, you find some things that are opposite. So what actually is, I don't know, maybe the moment when you're looking at the data and when you saw the surprising thing? And then tell us, what, like, what is the definition of a superteam?

Yeah, there's a, there's a lot to cover there. So let me start off by telling you how we did the research. We surveyed thousands of workers, 6,000 different teams, and we asked them to rate how their team operates. We asked people 2 simple questions about their team. Number one, how effective is your team at achieving its goals? And number 2, compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? And then we took the teams with a perfect score, a very tiny group. We call them superteams. And we look to see how do superteams operate differently? How do they structure their day? How do they run their meetings? Even how they recover on evenings and weekends. And what we found is that there are some striking differences. And the first one is that superteams are far better at getting stuff done. And it's because they manage their time, energy, and attention more effectively. The average team wastes 18 hours a week in meetings, and then they lose another 11 hours a week on emails and messages. That's 3 quarters of their week gone before they've achieved a single task. Super teams are much more deliberate with how they spend their time. They are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings, 54% better at scheduling recurring meetings. And recurring meetings are very difficult to remove from your calendar. once they're on because you have to have an awkward conversation with someone letting them know you don't find your time together valuable anymore. So they avoid recurring meetings. The other thing they do, they don't just play defense, they play offense. They guard focus time during the day where people can get their work done without having to monitor their messages. So they take dedicated focus blocks. They do things like meeting-free days that free— excuse me— that free up people's time from having to constantly be disrupted. And so what it ultimately comes down to is minimizing distractions and maximizing focus, enabling people to do real work during regular work hours.

OK, before we go into some of the questions there, the superteam definition— so it's their self-assessment of their effectiveness at hitting their goals and their competitiveness to others in their industry?

That's right. It's self-assessment. And we have previous research showing that self-assessment of a team's performance— not like self-assessment of my performance; it's a self-assessment of the team's performance— and that turns out to be the best predictor So it's not delusional.

They're not—

That's right.

This is—

there's decades of research showing that this is actually a great predictor. And in fact, what we found— this was really interesting— in our data, not all of it was very, um, flattering. We asked people— we thought maybe, okay, what if maybe their nutritional habits are better, so they're not, you know, eating processed foods, so they're sharper during the day? Not the case. We thought maybe they sleep better. Not the case. We even asked people, Do you check your phone before brushing your teeth in the morning? And in fact, there was no difference— average teams, super teams. So it's not like they're just saying great things about themselves. It's very specific to the way that they work as a unit.

I do notice quite a few teams that overindex on alignment or even consensus. And we think of this, like, historically with, like, Japanese companies, if you have worked with that, where they're like, we got to get 75 people to all agree to a thing. Um, and, and the amount of extra effort that that takes to do is pretty extraordinary. And I see in some of our teams where we have some companies where like, there's just too many people in all the meetings. Like really, there's 3 people that need to talk about this. The rest of the people are looking at their watch and tapping their fingers. They're like, how can I get out of here? Right. Yeah, I appreciate that. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up because there's a lot of differences in how they structure their meetings. And one of the keys is to limit invitations. You know, I think it's obvious to everyone that inviting people who can't contribute to the meeting is a waste of their time, right? Having them in the room is not a good use of their time. But here's what people don't realize is just having additional people in the room makes the meeting worse for the people who actually need to be there. And it's because the longer the— the more people you invite, the longer the conversation, the longer conversation, the more likely you are to go off on track. And the worse the decision-making. There's actually research showing that past 7 people in a discussion, the group's decision-making plummets 10%, and it gets worse the more people you add. And so, making sure that you only invite the people who actually need to be there is key. And one of the things I talk about in the book is a strategy called meeting guidelines. This is the quickest path to fewer meetings. So, meeting guidelines is simply getting clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what doesn't. So, for example, in my My team, we have a rule, and that is no decision, no meeting. If you have a question, pick up the phone. If you have an update, that's an email. We have very clear rules and we free up people's time. We're not going to pull people away from their work unless there's a decision to be made. Another example in the book is from a company called Percolate. And what they— their decision— their meeting guideline is no spectators. So if you're not contributing, you don't need to be there. It's not a criticism. It's respect for your time. And so what all of these strategies do is they protect people's time during the day so that they can get real work, work done without having to work late into the evenings.

That's really interesting. And it 100% matches my experience. I, I notice that 6 or 7 people is a fantastically productive meeting, 5 to 7, maybe even better. If I meet with 3 people, like we do, we're so fast at getting things done. And then when I have a team that goes to 8, it's survivable, but there's attacks. When I get a team that's 9, 10, 11, 12, it really slows to a crawl. Sometimes there's like a support person who's coordinating some things, but they know they're not simply an observer and they're not a commenter or anything even like that. They're there like to take notes or do things like that. And that we wouldn't count in. But I— look, one of the hardest companies that I coached some years ago actually sold in 2020 for $1 billion, which was a decent sale, not maybe the most. And 2020 was an interesting, challenging year in a lot of regards. But my work took easily 4 times as long because instead of having the typical 7 people in our meetings, we had 27. And so we had 27 people in the meetings and the CEO Struggled to say no to founders who wanted to be in the room, who wanted to hear, who had an equity position. Like, yeah, you're a founder. Yes, you have some stock. You, you don't need to be in this. You're not driving this decision. And, and it would go around and be like, well, we're gonna sit in pods and only this person is going to comment. But somebody else would be like, well, it's been said, but I just want to reinforce, or like, shut up.

Well, you know, this is, this is the challenge. Everyone needs to have Their say. But even worse, when you get to that level, here's what happens is people recognize instinctively that their time is being wasted. They want to be in the room because they want access to information. But they know that this is not a good use of their time. So, they fight to take that time back by multitasking.

Right.

And so, the dynamic you create is that no one is listening except for the person who's speaking. And everyone's just waiting their turn to feel like they've contributed. And that's not a productive use of time. And so, the key is to recognize, as I started off, I said, 29 hours a week are gone to meetings and messages. If we're operating in a world where people are starting off where they have to cram a week's worth of work into a single day, that's the recipe for burnout. And it's why people have so much resentment for their work, where they feel like they just want to get the job done, but they can't because of the way the team operates. And so, a lot of productivity gurus will tell you, you fight that time to get that time back. And here's how you do it. You batch your email. You turn off your notifications. Or you, you know, you monitor emails only multiple times a day. And here's what happens in reality is those types of behaviors may work for the individual, but they end up slowing down the team. And it's because one person's deep work is another person's bottleneck. So productivity gurus are solving the wrong problem. They're trying to fight for individual time. But the reality is the problem is at the team level.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, how the team works. So talk for a minute more. What is good collaboration or bad collaboration? You said the collaborative teams, or the most collaborative teams, did worse. What's that all about? Is there any kind of good collaboration?

Yeah, there is. Absolutely. And in fact, the best usage of our time is for us to, to have as much respect for solo individual work as we do for collaborative work. So when we think about collaboration, I think a lot of organizations say they want collaboration. What they get instead is constant togetherness. So, if everybody's working with their email on every day, everyone can ping one another, everyone's in meetings all day long, no actual work gets done. And the quintessential example of this is brainstorming. So, brainstorming is everybody get into the conference room, we're all going to come up with ideas. And we think we're being productive. But in fact, what the research shows is if you want high-quality ideas, if you want high-quantity ideas, both of those benefit from something called brainwriting instead of brainstorming. Brainwriting involves Every individual working on their own to come up with 5 or 6 ideas and then take those ideas into the conference room where now we refine them. Because what happens in a brainstorm is one person speaks at the beginning, and now instead of all coming up with new ideas, what we're ending— what we end up doing is we end up, excuse me, anchoring to that first idea and then evaluating whether or not it's a useful suggestion, as opposed to coming up with our own ideas. Then it Beyond that, we're sitting around and more ideas are being thrown around. So we feel productive, even though we haven't contributed. And so that's a good example of how the ideal solution is to both respect solo work, solo individual work, and collaborative work. That's the, that's the ideal solution— not being together all day long.

You know, again, that's 100% consistent with our experience work on, on a small scale. When we're doing brainstorming with teams of any many different kinds, we're, we're using either a survey, some kind of question where people do individual thinking and writing, and then, or even in the room, we'll pose a question. And instead of talk, we have people write down their thoughts generally into sticky notes, and we bring them up and move them, and no verbalization. So we get a lot of a very diverse point of view from people, some of whom are never verbal. And then we start to synthesize those things. So it either comes before or in the meeting, but it's individual thinking written. And then we start to work to surface and work it together. And that's always faster and always better than talking.

Yeah. And it's because if you're not producing anything, you're going to notice that, right? You've got that writing exercise. You've got nothing to show for your time. That's embarrassing. But if you stay quiet in the room and other people are throwing around ideas and you, you know, you toss in 1 or 2 words, you feel like you've contributed. And so you're taking advantage of something that's critical, which is diffusion of responsibility, is what's happening in that brainstorm where everyone feels like, well, somebody else is going to take care of it. I don't need to worry about that. But when you have that individual accountability, everyone feels like they need to contribute something valuable.

I do find some people have immediate ideas. They write things down quickly. And other people really agonize over what to get down. And, and, and some of the people who ultimately don't turn out struggle to write anything at all. They just keep like trying to— they're either trying to get it right, or they're worrying about somebody's gonna notice what they put down, or they literally just don't have any idea.

Yeah. Well, when that happens, I think it's true for all of us. Like, you know, it used to be the case a lot of us would get writer's block. With ChatGPT, there's no excuse for having writer's block anymore. So I don't know if that's an issue anymore. But when that were to happen, when that happened, the advice that I would often give people is to just temporarily lower your standards. In other words, don't aim for perfection, aim for progress. And if you can take that approach, it can really help. An example of this is when you're writing something that's a difficult memo or whatever the case may be, a proposal, don't think of it as the memo or the proposal as being read by the client. Write it as an email to your spouse, and I guarantee it'll get 80% of the way there because now you've lowered the standard for yourself and you realize that actually this is pretty good. I don't have to change anything.

Yeah, or just treat it as notes. I mean, my spouse would probably agonize over a note to me because that's their nature, but whereas I would tend to blurt it out because that's my nature, just like get it out and deal with the mess later. But I think I hear in that a couple things. One, in the first bit of the collaboration, I hear like, I hear Patriots coach Bill Belichick, Right? Do your job. Focus on your thing. You don't need to be in every meeting. You don't need to be part of all the things. And then in this one, I hear, just get something out and have it be a contribution and, and, and less of the comfort front. Let's talk about— is there something to add about that?

No, no, I think that's well said.

So let's talk about moonlighting. What did you find about the value or no value of moonlighting?

Yeah, so let me take a step back before I answer that. I will get to it. I just want to talk about— we talk— when we talk about what super teams do different relative to average teams, we talked about the first bucket, which is they get more done by better managing time, energy, and attention. There's 2 other buckets. The second one is they don't just collaborate well, they make each other better. And the third is, even when things are going well, They're not satisfied. They're constantly building new skills and improving over time. So those are the 3 things. You need a team that is getting things done, a team that's making each other better, and a team that's getting better over time. That's when you know you have a super team. Now, the moonlighting bit falls under the category of getting better all the time. And one of the things we often see on super teams is that the leaders tend to support their employees in a way that feels wholehearted and genuine. And one example of that is that we ask people, does your manager support you taking a side gig or moonlighting? What's their attitude to that? And what we find is on superteams, they're far more likely to say, my manager supports it, than on average teams. And what it demonstrates is that if you want to be an effective leader, you need to support people's growth wherever it happens. And a lot of leaders are afraid of moonlighting. They think, OK, if someone's attention is divided, they're not going to do their best work for me. But what research shows is that People's motivation for having a side gig really matters. If they're doing it because they need money, that's not necessarily beneficial to you. But if they're doing it because they want a sense of mastery, a sense of autonomy, a real challenge that they can use to stretch their skills, that tends to raise their engagement, and that pours over to the way they show up at work. And so far from being a distraction, if people are doing it because they want to grow, that's a good thing and you should support it.

Yeah, it's interesting. So the side gig is personal improvement, continuous improvement, stretching curiosity, endless growth. That's, that is kind of a good thing, right? And we do see people take a side job because they're not making enough money.

That's true too, and that's unfortunate. But what I can tell you is that when people are doing it because they want to learn something new, they tend to accumulate new skills that they then bring back to the office that you didn't even know could benefit you. And so, if you're doing so— and the other thing I would say about this is if you're supporting people's growth, and they feel like it doesn't benefit you, then you're developing a level of loyalty that is incomparable, because now people feel like you really have their back, even when it doesn't support the business.

I'm always curious if people have a significant hobby or volunteer gig. I want to know about that because it reveals something about their character, their values, their humanity. Like, I go work with this because I care about this issue or these people, or I'm a musician and here's what I get out of it and here's how it nurtures me, or I play this sport, or like, They all kind of reveal something about somebody's character. And sometimes there's a trait or something there that you're not taking advantage of that would be useful in the business. And if you were aware of it, curious about it, you might actually tap into it.

Well, yeah, there's 2 things there. One is to understand people's motivation and what really— what their passions lie, because if you get people— if you get to know people on that level, they'll work a lot harder for you. So there's benefit there, clearly. But beyond that, what you're tapping into is how people recover after work hours.

Mm-hmm.

Now, a lot of people think that when you're not working, you're automatically recovering, and that's not the case. So binging Netflix, uh, scrolling Instagram, those things can help us unwind, but they don't help us recover our energy. So what does? It's mastery experiences. They're activities that stretch our skills and challenge us in new ways. So depending on your interests, that can be video games, that could be learning a new song on the piano, it could be learning a new dish in the kitchen. When we are stretching our skills and acquiring new skills, we tend to be healthier, happier, more productive, even when we get back into the office. And so the lesson is you don't want to slow down with your downtime. You want to accelerate in a completely different direction. That's going to help you show up far more engaged and just help you feel way more energized.

Yeah, it's interesting. I noticed— well, so I, you know, I love sometimes to binge-watch TV and throw in an episode or two a night on something when I can. And it's like Okay, I was efforting mentally all day, and this is really pretty passive most of the time. Sometimes I— there's a show I've been watching lately, it's in a foreign language. I speak a couple other languages. I am like, listening to it in the original language is really helpful to me. My wife reads the subtitles. I'm like, oh, I understand it, right? That— so that's helpful, and that is actually kind of a more engaging piece of it. But it's different than say when I go out surfing or I do something like that, because now I've got— there's like effort involved. There's physical effort, there's movement, there's outdoor stuff, there's changing perspective. Sometimes I can't think at all. Other times thoughts come and go. So there's— that's a very different kind of recovery thing. And somehow it's recovery even though I'm physically exhausted when I'm done with it, right?

I'm not going to tell you not to watch television. I, I think there's a time and a place. I, I think That is an old study. This was back like 20 years ago, so it may have changed in terms of the metrics. But what they found was the first 30 minutes of watching TV is fantastic. It's completely immersive. It's relaxing. But then after 30 minutes, you start to get a little annoyed. And if you are there for 2 hours, you get to— you're really annoyed. 4 hours, you're really groggy and you don't know why. You've been relaxing the whole time.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's like there's a bell curve. I think it varies for different people. I think 30 minutes is probably a little light for me. 45 is probably accurate. Um, but if all you're doing with your downtime is that, it's watching TV and looking at Instagram, and like, you're not gonna feel restored on Monday morning. But if you do a little bit of television in, in the evening and then you go surfing the following morning, and maybe you tried a new dish at night, I guarantee you will have had a more restorative weekend.

Yeah, it's funny, sometimes when I'm done, uh, I'll either go surfing and/or I will, um, cook. And I, and I know a lot of entrepreneurs who cook, and I especially cook a big meal for Friday nights. And, um, and I think like it's super, super like restorative. My wife's like, oh, that sounds exhausting to me to think about it. I'm like, it's a different kind of creative challenge. I'm like, I, I need to make a lot of salads most Friday nights, and then, you know, we're gonna have family over and that kind of thing. So I tend to get very involved in the whole thing, and then, and then I want the food to last all the way through Saturday. And, um, it's a different kind of challenge, and yet it's super— like, I feel really good, you know, about it.

That's an example of your, your choosing activity that absorbs your mental focus, and it requires you to have your full attention and to be present to execute it well. And that's part of the trick, is to find a hobby that really engages you in a sense of flow because you're going to feel more refreshed and you'll show up more effective at work. And what we find in our research on superteams is that they tend to do those hobbies for about an hour or more a week, which is very counterintuitive if you think about it. We asked them, what makes you more successful in your job? And they're telling us it's by restocking my energy in a certain way that replenishes me, helps me show up more effective. And so that's kind of the trick of this is like you I think that you talked about this in the opening, in the pitch for your book, which is working all the time is effective earlier in your career. But typically after 50 hours, you tend to actually make more mistakes, which lengthens your workday. It's not effective. So I don't have to tell you.

Yeah, quite a bit of research around the 55-hour mark. And my research is actually focused on, is it as true for CEOs? And is there a decline in the leadership? I think it probably is somewhere around there. That you keep filling in more, and that actually inhibits the team in some way, and your own, like, strategic perspective declines as you get more obsessed within the company. Let's talk about vulnerability. So a couple things just to tease out here. Lots of people love Brené Brown, and they, they're like, oh, vulnerability is really great, except generally speaking, nobody wants to sound like they don't have a plan or look weak. Or be emotional in a work setting. And yet I know from experience, personal and client experience, it can be exceptionally powerful if you know how to tap into it. And people have read or heard all the Brené Brown things and yet fail to do it again and again. So talk to me about what your research showed around vulnerability.

Well, what our research shows, again, you want people to get better over time, because that's one of the key features of having a superteam. And the only way for people to get better is to be willing to take some risks. And unless people feel like it's OK for them to make some mistakes, they're not going to take those risks, which means— makes learning impossible. And so the best leaders help pave the way for people to feel safe taking some of those risks and occasionally failing, so long as those failures are intelligent. And they do it in a few different ways. One is they talk about mistakes they've made in the past. And that sends a signal that mistakes aren't something to hide. There's something to learn from. The other thing they do is when they don't know something, they admit it. So they'll say, I'm not sure, but I know who to ask. And that tells people that no one in the room is expected to have the right answers. I mean, all the answers, rather. And finally, they tell people that unless you're making mistakes, you're not learning.

Mm-hmm.

And I have some examples in the book. One of these is LinkedIn's founder, Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman would tell his team he doesn't expect perfection. In fact, he wants them to make mistakes 15% of the time because his view is unless you're making some mistakes, you're not Never doing everything perfectly, it means you're moving too slowly. The other example is Reed Hoffman, the other Reed, uh, from Netflix. And back when he was at the helm of Netflix, when all of their shows were successful, he'd be a little upset about that because it meant they weren't taking big enough swings. And so what both of those examples demonstrate is unless people are making some level of mistakes, uh, in their work, they're simply not stretching far enough to grow. You don't want perfection. You want people to make some mistakes some of the time because it demonstrates that they're taking an appropriate level of risk?

You know, it's an interesting thing. When I'm coaching teams, if a team strives to always be green on everything, like all their goals are good or ahead of pace, then I know they're not stretching enough. But another team who tends to be mostly red on everything, failing across the board, I know they're, they're stretching, they're delusional about what they're capable of. They're taking on too much. And then What they actually succeed at is kind of accidental. And it's kind of accidental rather than intentional. And then, and the overall experience is we're losers. So you got the experience that we're losers, and what they're winning at is accidental. Whereas a team that thoughtfully chooses a few things, wins at the most important things, stretches a little bit beyond, and fails in a couple places, that's the best kind of The right balance.

I really like the 85% number. And in fact, there's research showing that that is optimal challenge, is when you're succeeding most of the time, but every once in a while you fail. Because again, if you're succeeding all the time, not taking big enough risks; if you're failing all the time, that's going to be demotivating. It's freeing, because what it tells you is, it's OK not to get everything right. And I think a lot of ambitious leaders strive for perfection, and it prevents them from achieving their True potential. And so I really like that perspective. I think it's valuable.

You know, the single most powerful moment in my life, the best single moment of leadership that I could say that I'm proud of, where I, wow, I did something good and surprising there. I had a company that was on the ropes and on the verge of failure. It was going to cost me my, my personal net worth and house. And, and I was, I was really scared. And I had no idea. And I stressed about it for a long time privately until my wife encouraged me to take a different approach. And my approach was I went to the team and I said, guys, we're in trouble. We are at risk of failing and I don't have the answers. And it was really emotional. Like, I, you know, I was holding back tears and that kind of thing as I talked about that we might fail. And then I— and I felt so bad, like I should have the answer. I'm the CEO. I own part of the company. I, like, I should know what to do and I don't know what to do. And then I said, I understand if you, all of you need to go now because you have to look out for your families. You might need to find another job because there's no certainty here. But I could use your help because I'm not going to quit. And if you'll stick around, I promise to be honest with you, to work collaboratively with you, Not collaboratively to a fault, but look, that we'll work together. And I'll be honest with you, and I promise you, I won't quit until, you know, the sheriff comes and locks the door and they take my house and all that kind of thing. And that turned out to be like kind of a Braveheart moment. And over the next year, not a one of them quit. And we doubled the revenue, profit, and cash over the next year and solved the bank crisis. Right? Like, unbelievable thing. But I had to, like, you know, cry in front of the team. Crying didn't turn out to be weak. I had to cry and admit I didn't have a clue. Those actually turned out to be strong, right? Really counterintuitive from a traditional leadership standpoint of, like, I'm going to stand square-jawed and say, go this way, I have the answer, you know.

I really appreciate that story. And thank you for sharing. In our research, there's a chapter in the book, Superteams, on trust. And What I talk about in the book is that there are 3 factors that contribute to trust at work. Trust in different domains varies. So what you expect from a neighbor is different than what you expect from a surgeon. It's different from what you expect from a teammate. And what you expect from a teammate are 3 things. These are the 3 drivers of trust. The first is caring. You need to feel like the person cares about you. The second is competence. You need to feel like the person is doing a good job. And the third is consistency, meaning that the person is dependable and predictable. If any one of those is missing, trust falls apart. And in your situation, situation, the one you're describing, where the business was kind of going off the rails, you doubled down on the caring. You were transparent with people. And you said, this is what's going on. I care about you. So I'm gonna— I'm telling you this because I want you to be— do what's right for your family. And I think that's a big part of why it was so effective. Because I think a lot of leaders in your situation would have tried to hide it. And that lack of transparency ends up undermining trust and And hurting performance. And so, I don't know if it was intentional or not on your part, but you did something where you doubled down on trust. And it doesn't surprise me that people didn't leave, because who wouldn't want to back a leader like that?

Yeah, people were really inspired. People— so people get inspired by a mighty challenge, right? Like, there's a reason why Braveheart was such an emotional movie and that kind of thing, because we will go and fight really difficult fights when we have high trust, high connection, And, you know, and the possibility of being extraordinary for a moment. And some of those people who stuck around and helped navigate the crisis also then moved on later. They did their thing and they were happy, and they were mostly there because they loved that challenge of that moment. And so I think, yeah, the trust was, was unexpected. The vulnerability was refreshing. The caring was definitely there. The consideration for them as human beings. And they, and they love the stand, right? Like, I will not quit was like, ooh, that's like, we're gonna really be in an epic battle now, you know. And on some level, that struck a chord with people. And it goes against that, like, I have to have the plan, I have to know the way, I have to do what to do. The leader simply takes a stand in the matter of something and says, you all have a role to play here. And I could use your help, you know.

Yeah, that's very effective. And it reminds me of something I talk about in the introduction, which is how do you take a group of strangers and turn them into a team? Now, most people may, quote unquote, belong to a team at work. But I would, I would venture to guess that they don't feel like a team. And just because people work together doesn't make them a team. So in order for people to feel like they're really part of a team, you need 3 things. One is a shared goal, which is what you just provided in that speech. A shared goal, something everyone is fighting for together. To achieve. Most people don't have that shared goal. So I might, for example, have a goal of getting promoted. You might have a goal of getting home by 5 o'clock. Those are different goals, and they conflict. And so we're not going to necessarily feel like a team together. The second thing you need is role clarity. I need to know what I'm responsible for and what you're responsible for and how those two things intersect. And the third thing— and by the way, if you don't have that, that's where balls get dropped or you get turf wars.

Right.

Either one is not good. And the third thing you need is you need something that psychologists call interdependence, which is just a fancy word that suggests we feel like we need each other in order to succeed. If we're both salespeople, we don't have that interdependence. We have conflict because we're competitors. You need to feel like you're all pushing in the same direction. That's the shared goal. Role clarity— each person knows what they're responsible for. And the third thing, interdependence— everyone feels like they need each other in order to succeed. Most teams don't have at least one of them. And that's where you see the dysfunction come in.

Interesting. Let's talk about recovery. And because I think it's really, really important. And people are like, just give me more and more, you sleep when you die. Talk about recovery.

Yeah.

And all to manage there.

If you are not recovering, you're just simply not showing up at your best. We talked about how people on superteams tend to take more, invest more time in hobbies. The other thing they do is they spend their vacation time a little bit differently. And this, I think, is really interesting. So on superteams, people are 39% more likely to take work-free vacations. But here is what I find to be really interesting is the people who do choose to work on vacation, why do they choose to work? And on average teams, more often than not, you ask people, why do you work when you're on vacation? They say it's because I'm afraid of falling down, falling behind, or I don't want to have to come back to an inbox that requires 3 days to dig myself out of.

Hmm.

of it. And so they continuously work throughout their vacation, and they resent it because the constant reminder of how much work they're coming back to. On Superhumans, it's different. They are more likely to work because they want to be proactive or they want to be helpful to their colleague. And that's a completely different experience. So if you're doing something, if you're working on vacation because you want to be helpful to your colleagues, that's energizing. That's not depleting. And so the takeaway for me is this is why so much of the standard advice for most leaders Doesn't resonate, of completely disconnect on vacation. For people like that, disconnecting, not only is it not restorative, it actually elevates their anxiety. And so what I think the key takeaway is here is to look at the reason for why you're choosing to work. And if you're doing it because it energizes you, that's not a bad thing. If anything, it might be a sign that you're on a super team.

In, in, in my book, I write about the personal transformation that happened for me when I took our family to Italy for a month. And leading up to that, I realized in spite of all of the good habits and the scaling up work I'd done, I couldn't get away without being on phone calls and emails and interventions and things like that. I couldn't untangle at all. And I cared about my business. I was passionate about it, but I was passionate about other things too. And yet I realized with my wife that we were supposed to do that because we'd said that long before we had kids and before we got complicated. We're like, when they get that age between 10 and 14, We need to take that time off. So, as the 13th year for our son approached, he was going to be 13, she was going to be 11, we start planning the year ahead. We have this big family event, this bar mitzvah for my son. And so, we're marching towards that and we're like, this is the year we're supposed to take time off. And it was really, really challenging and I couldn't get away. So, I spent 10 months getting ready for that trip. 10 months asking my team, what will you do when I'm gone? How will you handle this when I'm out of town, when I'm away, when I'm not engaged in things? And I just kept pushing back on things. And over that 10 months, my leadership and their self-reliance, their accountability increased. So accountability increased, my leadership and dominance and micromanagement reduced. And then I went to Italy. And in June of 2010, I went to Italy for about a month and we were disconnected. Now, I did— I didn't have anxiety because I got a daily report. I got a daily report of the daily huddle and a weekly report of the weekly meeting with a picture of the dashboard or some notes. And I knew everything was okay. And I came back a different human being and the team was different after the end of that month.

Yeah.

And I was truly restored. But we had, all of us, leveled up in different ways. But it took a forcing action like that and some concerted effort for 10 months to get there.

I love that example, because what you're, what you're saying here is, it reminds me of a, of a, of an insight in The Best Place to Work. I talked about how do you deal with a micromanager? Not to say you're a micromanager, but, you know, we all have those tendencies. How you deal with a micromanager is you flood them with information. Because it makes them feel like they're in control. You don't make— you don't wait until they ask. You do it proactively. And so what you did, knowingly or unknowingly, is you forced your team to feed the micromanager so that the micromanager can disconnect and have a good vacation. And that's a great way of doing it. Because now you don't have to constantly be wondering. It reminds me of like David Allen, right? David Allen says, your brain is for, for having thoughts, not to hold them. If you're constantly worried about what's going on with this thing, what's going on with that thing, That open loop is going to lead you to either go on Slack or write emails, and that destroys the vacation. But if everyone is forced to, or, you know, invited to send you an update on a daily basis, that can help calm you and make you feel like everything's under control. You can now enjoy your vacation.

That's really, really great. Yeah, for me, I didn't need a maximum amount of information. I just needed enough, right? So I thoughtfully designed the right numbers for me to have peace of mind on vacation. And I didn't do any calls or emails or anything like that. I saw my Daily Report, I did a little dance, and I'm like, OK, let's go have a cappuccino.

That's great. And it's a good, it's a good tip for anybody to use, because I'm sure that, you know, part of it is having somebody monitor your inbox. And that's another piece of this, which is, you know, you need a, you need a hockey goalie, right? The goalie who determines what's worth connecting with you on and what's not. Because if you're monitoring your inbox, It's really difficult to disconnect because you're— it takes 3 hours of not looking at your inbox to relax, and it takes 3 seconds of looking at your inbox to go back into work mode. And so you've really got to guard that time very carefully. And so assigning someone who's in charge of reading your email while you're gone can be helpful. But I really like your idea too of designing that daily update and then telling people, this is what I need from you on a daily basis. And it's kind of like a fill in the box.

You know, it's interesting. Today I have 2 scheduled tasks with Claude Cowork that go through my inbox. It drafts some replies to certain things, and it archives things I don't need to look at, and it flags other things. Then it creates a summary like, make sure you get, you know, back to this, send this off to Wanda. Like, it gives a list of things for me to do. And it creates drafts of things which I go edit lightly generally and then send them out. And, but it like keeps me on top of that so I don't have to spend that much time worrying about it. Now, I might flick through something as it comes through later, but then I'm like, I'm low, low mental effort on that.

Do you find that useful? I mean, for me, I, I haven't tried it because I feel like having to rewrite the thing, it's just creating more work, just different work. I'm just wondering, do you feel like it saves you time?

Oh, 100%. It saves me time. Now, it's a new practice for me, so it's fairly new. And there are certain categories of things that I don't need to think about. And, you know, it'll throw— like, it'll be like, you really need to get back to Vern Harnish about this thing. I'm like, I talk to Vern all the time. I don't need to do that outreach. Like, so I'll delete that one. Somebody else, it'll say blah, blah, blah. Hey, really like to connect with you. Love what you're doing with your show. Be like, he's a personal friend. So I'll, I'll like completely rewrite that really fast, but it gets it started. And the prompt helps me to be like on task with certain things that I might delay or be like, I'm not sure what to do. And then the sorting, ranking, it's got a better ability to do that than my ADHD brain has to, you know, rip through all that stuff and archive things.

You know what you're making me think about is we just did, we just did research on what high-performing teams do differently when it comes to AI. And Bad teams will use AI to lengthen the workday. And so one of the things we find is that they will— yeah, I mean, because here's what's happening. And I've talked to people ahead of the research. Some people— 2 things are happening that are lengthening the workday. One is the low performers will basically just take a screenshot, put it into ChatGPT and say, how do I respond to this? And then they'll cut and paste what chat said as their response without even having— without even looking at it.

Yeah.

And then that puts the onus on the other person to read through the message and have to do— And then in some organizations, the other person's taking the first person's message, putting it into their ChatGPT. So now we're just like having— we're shepherding conversations between ChatGPTs. The other thing that is happening is that if you're a really high performer, and you're dealing with people on your team who maybe are not great at everything they do, you tend to take on way more work than you otherwise would have in the past. In the past, you would have just talked to them, taught them how to do it, and gotten it off your plate. Today, it's so much easier for you to just put it into your you know, Claude or whatever, and just do it yourself. And so the top performers end up taking way more than they normally would have.

Well, I definitely like— it can spin up more things, and sometimes I'm like, stop already, I just need like one paragraph, or I need the 3 things that pull out of this, you know. So I'll, I'll constrain it, like, wait a minute, that was a whole like dissertation there, give me 2 questions, like. And so I'll, I'll push it a back on it not to expand. So that's one thing. The other thing is, if it's not on my set of priorities or an urgent problem, I'm like, yeah, that's a nice thing. We're not dealing with that right now. So I, I pull back from the tendency to let it spin up more and more projects that I could do. Like, wait a minute, we just want to get some referrals, or I just want to get this out the door. I just want to, you know, so I'll constrain it quite a bit from where it might go. Both in length, scope, and red herring sort of things to chase. But I do, like, you know, I'm from a— like, in my family, in my world, from a historical basis, I'm doing an extraordinary amount, right? So I produce the show, I coach, I'm working on a PhD right now, and I have the book coming out. All of those things are aided by AI, and I get a lot of Surfing, sailing time, family time, that kind of thing in as well. But it's because what maybe took my dad months and months with his lit review, with his PhD, like I can say, go find me all the papers that have to do with this and help me understand them and let me sort which ones I should really look at. And okay, now I've narrowed down to 15 papers and not 500. Yeah.

Well, you know, you're demonstrating what is the kind of the ultimate challenge with all of these tools is that if you're a high performer, you're someone who's smart and ambitious.

Yeah.

All that time you save, you were just replaced with more work. So it's not like we're creating more free time for ourselves. We're just creating more work. It's just different.

You are doing— you're stepping up to more. So there would be like in the past, you wouldn't have done that. You know, the PhD would take you years and years and years, and you wouldn't do anything else. And I'm like, I'm in the middle of getting a book out. And then I'm like, oh, I could start a PhD now too, right? So—

Yeah, I mean, you've got 3 full-time jobs is what you're describing here.

That is what— and look, I'm doing really well on the thing. I'm well ahead of schedule. And we're, we're about to open our, open our survey instrument. As we talk, by this, by the time this is actually out, it's actually open and collecting responses. So You know, that whole world of things that might have taken you a long time and lots of meetings. I gotta wait till I talk to my advisor next week because I don't know how to write the ethics review. Like, I could just ask Claude, how do you write an ethics review? And it can walk me through it. I'm done.

Yeah, yeah, it is definitely a valuable tool. And if anything, I think it demonstrates just how much— how, to what extent we just have got to get away from these meetings taking up half our week, because we could just be all— all be so much more productive by protecting our focus time so we can do all the things you just described.

Yeah. And that is pretty cool, like to go, you know, out there. And one of the things I realized, I had a little health scare a couple of years ago and I was like, oh, one of the things I really want to do is get this book done. And it pushed me to get the book done. And so instead of dragging it out for a couple more years, I like got it done, you know, got it out the door. Let's get it done. Like, that's the thing that matters to me, to my ego, to my, my, you know, my life bucket list, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's great. And I just think that more leaders need to think that way about their teams. Because I think that you got some clarity about how you need to free up time for things that matter. And I think most workers desperately want to do a good job, and they're constrained by the way that their teams function. And so if you're forced to monitor emails all the, all week long, you're forced to be in half your time in meetings, you're just going to be continuously frustrated.

Well, it's on the COVID of the HBR. The topic is, it's sitting down there on my dining room table. I'm looking forward to going to look at it. I'm looking forward to reading the book myself, Super Teams. Go find Super Teams on Amazon. ronfriedmanphd.com is Ron's website as well, but you can find it wherever you want. And there's even the email, ron@ronfriedmanphd.com. Um, Ron, thank you for coming on. This is a great conversation. Lots of brilliant nuggets here. I look forward to this hitting our whole Scaling Up audience. I hope that we see you at one of our Scaling Up events as a speaker soon. And I think there's probably a lot of really good stuff in this book.

Thanks, Bill. I enjoyed it.

All right. And if you want to know my book, Busy Is Broken, go find it on Amazon, Kindle, hardcover, softcover, audiobook, whatever you want. It's all there. Go order it now as you see this. Or if you go to businessisbroken.com, we have some extras for you as well. So you can participate in the survey. You can understand how your leadership works relative to the whole world of leaders, how you stack on the 4 sins of, of weak leaders. Are you a good delegator? Are you a micromanager? Are you perfectionist? Do you fail to look outside the business? How do you do with those things according to your subordinates, to the people who work for you? What do they say about all that? You'll find all that and more at busynessbroken.com. Go find the book. Thanks again for watching, for listening. Wanda, for getting our show ready and out the door. Varun Harnish, my friend and mentor for many years now, the creator of the whole Scaling Up framework that is at the heart of our work. Thank you guys for watching, for listening. Till next time, keep scaling.