Why do some teams consistently outperform while others—with equally talented people—struggle with endless meetings, constant interruptions, and burnout?

In this episode of Career Sessions, JR Lowry sits down with organizational psychologist and bestselling author Ron Friedman to explore what separates exceptional teams from average ones. Drawing on research involving more than 6,000 workers for his new book, Super Teams, Ron reveals that only about 8% of teams qualified as “super teams”—and that what distinguishes them often runs counter to conventional wisdom about productivity, collaboration, and where work should happen.

Their conversation covers:

Why how a team works matters more than where it works—and what that means for the ongoing debate over remote, hybrid, and in-office work

How excessive meetings and always-on communication undermine productivity—and why great teams establish clear meeting guidelines

Why individual productivity hacks can actually create bottlenecks for the rest of the team

The importance of protecting focused work and why “brainwriting” can produce better ideas than traditional brainstorming

How active recovery outside of work can improve performance—and why leaders’ recovery habits can affect their teams

The three ingredients of workplace trust: competence, caring, and consistency

Why shared goals, role clarity, and interdependence are essential for creating a true team mentality

Practical ways to take control of your workday by looking forward, looking backward, and staying present

Why working longer hours eventually produces diminishing—and even negative—returns

How high-performing teams are approaching AI differently, including openly sharing prompts and learning from one another rather than hiding their AI use

The central message is simple: great teams aren’t built by assembling the smartest people or forcing more collaboration. They’re built intentionally, by creating the conditions that allow talented people to do their best work—both individually and together.

Whether you lead a team or work as part of one, this conversation offers practical, research-backed ideas for reducing friction, building trust, protecting people’s time, and creating a team that performs at a higher level.

Subscribe to Career Sessions on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts for weekly conversations on careers, leadership, and the changing world of work.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/ron-friedman/.

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Why Great Teams Work Differently, With Ron Friedman

Think about the best team that you have ever been part of. Odds are you didn’t just accomplish more. You looked forward to going to work. You trusted the people around you. Meetings felt productive instead of draining. You challenge one another and you learn from one another. The whole truly became greater than the sum of the parts. Now, think about the worst team you’ve ever worked on. Probably the same level of talent, if we’re honest. The same good intentions. Yet, somehow, everything felt harder.

Communication was difficult. Meetings multiplied. Progress slowed. Often, by the end of the day, you and probably everyone else went home exhausted. What separates great teams from the average ones? Is it the leader? Is it the culture? Is it the talent? Are we asking the wrong questions altogether? Our guest Ron Friedman, believes we have misunderstood teamwork for years. He is an organizational Psychologist, Bestselling Author, and one of the leading experts on human performance at work. His new book, Superteams draws on years of research into what the highest performing teams do differently.

Many of the findings are surprisingly counterintuitive. In our conversation, we’re going to explore why most teams never reach their potential, the hidden habits that separate exceptional teams from everyone else, why so many modern workplaces make collaboration harder rather than the easier and how AI is posed to reshape teamwork in the years ahead. Whether you lead a team or work on one, this episode will change the way you think about what it means to perform at your best. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Ron, thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Let’s dive right in. You have spent years studying high-performance teams across a broad range of industries. Before we talk about what the best teams do. What strikes you most about what the average or less than average teams do?

Eliminating The Time Drain Of Meetings And Messages

The tragic thing when you study average teams is how much of their time is wasted. According to our data, the average worker spends eighteen hours a week in meetings. They then lose another eleven hours a week digging themselves out of messages. The question is, what does that leave for actual real work? It’s about a day.

What happens when you have to do a week’s worth of work in a single day? You find ways of creating more time. You come in early. You stay late. You work weekends. That approach is what is contributing to burnout. We spend so much time wringing our hands saying, “Why are people getting burnt out?” A better question is, how do they manage to get any work done in the first place?

I know you talked about a lot of things that go on, not just meetings but other things that we do at work. They’re well-intended, but they end up working against our individual and collective productivity. Talk about some of those.

Why Individual Productivity Hacks Fail Teams

When you look online, you see a lot of productivity hacks. You see things like, “If you want to get work done, put your phone in the other room, or turn off your notifications, or only check your email a few times a day.” That approach might work for the individual. When you’re working on a team, one person’s deep work becomes another person’s bottleneck. When we studied what high-performing teams do differently, we discovered that the productivity tips that you would assume would lead to individual productivity. Therefore, team productivity ends up not working that way.

They end up having no effect on a team’s productivity. Again, it’s because it slows down the team as a whole. The better solution and this is what we find on high performing teams. They coordinate together to say, “We’re going to take 90 minutes on a Tuesday. Nobody has to check their email. Instead, everybody can get their deep work done.” Once that’s over, we’re all going to check our email together. That enables teams to get more done by coordinating their efforts. Instead of relying on people just coming up with their own rules for themselves.

This is one of the interesting things that you bring to bear. There’s this assumption, as you said a minute ago, that individual productivity translates into team productivity. I was in a meeting where we were incredibly still talking about returning to office and how many days people need to be in the office. We’re having this debate about individual productivity versus what an end up meaning for the team. This is a counterintuitive thing that comes out of your research that individual productivity does not necessarily translate into team productivity. It certainly ought to be driving people to rethink some of the things that hacks or not, they’ve been told.

To your point about a team’s location. That’s another counterintuitive finding that we uncovered in the research. This might be a good opportunity to take a step back and just explain how this research works. My team and I interviewed over 6,000 workers in a wide variety of industries and we asked them two simple questions about their teams. 1) How effective is your team at achieving its goals? 2) Compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance?

We took the teams with a perfect score. It was a very small group. About 8% of teams qualify. We call them superteams. We look to see what the super teams do differently. We looked at everything from how they structured their day to how they run their meetings. To even how they recover during their off hours. What we discovered is that superteams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention.

They don’t get stuck losing half their week to meetings. They are much more deliberate with their time, and we can talk more about how they go about doing that. The second strength is, they don’t just collaborate well. They actively make one another better. The third is, even when things are going well, they’re not satisfied. They’re constantly looking to build their skills and improve over time. The encouraging piece. Is every one of those strengths learnable? Which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance.

Focusing On How Teams Work Over Where They Work

Now, within that research, we looked at what locations are high-performing teams, most likely to form it. Are they most likely to form in remote teams? Are they most likely to form in office teams? You might assume, because they’re more collaborative. When you’re in person, maybe that’s the key or maybe it’s the best of both worlds. You want hybrid teams to improve the chance of having a high performing team. What we discovered is that location doesn’t matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is because how a team works is vastly more important than where a team works.

You can have everyone at the office but if all they’re doing is getting on a Zoom, which they could have attended two hours ago. That’s not bringing out the best in people. The same issue arises and slightly different flavor in remote teams. What happens with remote teams? They over compensate for not being in the same room. They’re sending more emails and spending more time in meetings. The bottom line is, taking advantage of how a team works is critical and you have to plan around what the team is trying to achieve. Not simply bringing it down to where we are going to work because that oversimplifies the problem.

That short statement that you made in the book, how a team works is more important than where a team works. It has been in my head since I heard it as I was listening to the audiobook. It’s something that probably flies in the face of what a lot of people think, and certainly forms the basis of all of these debates that are happening about how many days people should be in the office. The other thing that you’re bringing up that’s important, and I don’t want to go buy it. It’s this idea that these teams talked about how they want to work together and how they want to use their time. I can’t think of any team that I’ve been on in recent memory that has gone through that stuff.

That’s unfortunate. What it comes down to is being aware of some of this research. Once you have that awareness, that how a team works is more important than where a team works. You can start asking some important questions like, what constitutes a good meeting? The easiest way of eliminating these unnecessary meetings is getting clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what does. I call these meeting guidelines.

Implementing Decision-Driven Meeting Guidelines

One of the most interesting things I covered while doing the research on high-performing teams. When you look at superteams, they’re much more deliberate with their hours in meetings. Within my team, we have a very simple meeting guideline. No decision, no meeting. If you have a question, pick up the phone or send an email. If you have an update, send a video capture or share a spreadsheet. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not going to pull people away from doing their jobs.

Another example of a meeting guideline that I came across while doing the research for Superteams is no spectators. This is a meeting guideline by the company called Percolate in New York City. They have a meeting guide line. No specters. If you’re not contributing, you don’t need to be in the meeting. What all of these meeting guidelines do is ensure that people’s time in the office is well spent instead of having it just completely monopolized by things that feel like they’re setting people back. Which then forces them to make up for lost hours by multitasking or coming in after hours.

The meeting point certainly was a big focus in the first few chapters of your book and the amount of time people spend in meetings, that surrounds the time that they spend in meetings, and that negative effect that has. It leads people to multitask, which as you point out in the book and we know, doesn’t work because of your task switching. It’s got a cognitive drain that comes with it. You get into some of the things that people are doing like trying to get rid of all the recurring meetings. There’s another example you have in the book that talks about that. Maybe you can share that. I thought that was all a good way of very good practical tips for how to think about the scourge of recurring meetings.

Again, when we talk about the strengths of Superteams. What separates them from average teams? The first one is they get more done by better managing their time, energy and attention. That, for better or for worse, starts with getting rid of unnecessary meetings. We talked about meeting guidelines. That’s one pathway. When we look at the data, superteams are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. Their 54% out of voiding recurring meetings. Recurring meetings are particularly problematic because they’re so difficult to get off your calendar once they’re on.

High Performing Teams: Individual productivity hacks don’t equal team success. When one person goes dark without coordination, it creates a bottleneck for everyone else. Learn how super teams align their deep work.

In order to get rid of a recurring meeting, you have to have a very uncomfortable conversation with a colleague and say, “I don’t feel like our time together is as well spent anymore.” It’s almost like breaking up with someone. People refer to a voice in that conversation and so they put it off and they keep going to the same useless meeting week after week. There are a number of ways of limiting those. I also think that a big part of this is having some better hygiene around who needs to be in the room. No spectators. There’s one guideline.

More importantly than that, it’s raising awareness of the fact that the more people you have in the room, the longer the meeting becomes and the worse the decision-making becomes. What happens is, more people in the room mean everyone feels like they need to contribute. The meeting is more likely to go off the rails. We have research showing that in the past seven people, the decision-making quality plummets by 10% and it gets worse the more people you add.

In Superteams I give an example of a sample email that you can send the next time you want to diplomatically uninvite someone from a meeting. What it basically comes down to is saying to them, “I’m having this meeting. I would love to share your point of view. What do you think is important for me to point out? I’m happy to circle back with you and let what was determined and what the next steps are.” A lot of times, people think they want to be in the room. What they want is they want a disability and be able to contribute. When you allow them those two things they no longer feel compelled to be in the meeting.

There’s a lot of great tips in the book about how to deal with meetings. Meetings probably along with managers would be in most people’s top three things and annoy them about work. It’s probably policies, managers, and meetings. Not necessarily in that order. You also talked about the fact that I don’t want to gloss over it that focus work is one of the defining characteristics in terms of the more productive teams.

A lot of times, organizations say they want collaboration but what they get is constant togetherness. I use that term because when we are working with our email on, with our slack on, with our text messaging right next to us, it becomes difficult to get actual work done. When you look at what differentiates superteams, it’s the ability to do real work during regular work hours. This is the big challenge that most people have with work and this is why so many people prefer to work from home. It’s because of the constant disruption.

One of the interesting findings in our research is that we asked people. We gave them a very long list of amenities and we said, “Which of these do you have in your office?” Included things like ping pong table, the office dog, collaborative spaces and then private offices. As it turns out, there’s only one amenity that predicts having a superteam. That amenity is a quiet space to do focused work. Again, it speaks to what matters when it comes to having a high performing team. It’s allowing people to do real work during regular work hours.

You look at a variety of highly creative teams. In the book I talk about the examples of Fleetwood Mac and Abba and a variety of other creative acts. The key to their success often comes down to is the ability to toggle between individual focused work and then coming together as a group to refine those ideas. A great example in the research that is worth considering is, a lot of times in offices, we say, “We’re all going to go into the conference room and we’re going to brainstorm because we want to be creative. We want to pull everyone in and get everyone’s ideas.”

Replacing Brainstorming With Brainwriting

When you look at the research, what you find is, if you want more ideas and higher quality ideas, the solution isn’t to brainstorm. It’s to do something called brain writing. What brain writing involves is having everyone as individuals come up with their own ideas and then take those into the conference room and exchange them with one another so that we can build on people’s individual ideas.

What happens when you brainstorm is, the first person who speaks ends up anchoring everyone around the same idea. Now, we’re evaluating whether that idea has merit, instead of coming up with our own ideas. It’s a great example of, if you want people to do their best work. You need to allow them the opportunity to get real focused work during work hours. Otherwise, it’s never going to happen.

That leads naturally into linkage between being on one of these superteams and health and enjoyment as well.

It’s remarkable. Being on a high-performing team isn’t just about being more productive. It’s about being healthier. A big part of it has to do with the fact that the superteams are using their off-hours differently. They’re recovering much more effectively, and part of it is the understanding that when it comes to recovery, simply not working is not enough. A lot of people assume that when they’re not working, they’re automatically recovering.

What the research shows is passive activities. Things like scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix. That can help you unwind, but it doesn’t help you recover your energy quite as effectively as active recovery. Active recovery is doing things like building new skills or challenging yourself in new ways. In the research, they’re called Mastery Experience.

That can mean playing a new song on the piano or trying out a new dish in the kitchen or entering a pickleball tournament. The key is to try something that stretches your skills and brings out challenges in you in a new way. A lot of times, when it comes to recovery, people think it’s time to slow down. It’s time to relax. A better approach is not to slow down, but to accelerate in a different direction.

That distinction between active recovery and other restful activities is an important one because most people lump it all together.

At the end of the day, we’re so exhausted. We just want to just do nothing and zone out. The challenge with the way that we’re zoning out is we’re exposing ourselves to new stimuli. It’s more processing and more thinking. The more scattered your thinking, the more difficult it is for you to feel like you’re restoring your energy. One of the more interesting findings in the research to me is how a leader’s recovery impacts the team’s performance that next day. That’s counterintuitive to me.

High Performing Teams: If there’s no decision to be made, cancel the meeting. Establishing strict team meeting guidelines protects focused work time and accelerates execution.

If you’re leading a team, and you go out with your wife dancing. Your team is more likely to perform better than the following day. Now, what is the way you recover has anything to do with the team? It’s because a well-rested leader is in a good mood. When the leaders are in a good mood, the team is more committed to their work and tends to do a better job. Far from thinking about this as just something extravagant. It’s like, “They recover better and good for them.” No, this is a pathway by which superteams become more effective.

There’s an emotional contagion that exists in any group of people. Workplace teams wouldn’t be an exception to that. If people come in energized and committed, the teams are going to do better work. The manager of that team probably has an outsourced impact on the emotional contagion within the team. My wife and I don’t dance, but if we did go out dancing, I would probably come in the next morning feeling energized and that’s entertaining.

Here’s another counterintuitive finding along the same lines of accelerating in different directions. We found in our data that on superteams, the leaders are more likely to be supportive of the employee moonlighting outside of work. That’s very counterintuitive. A lot of leaders think, “I want my employees to be focused on this job. I don’t want them taking on another job. That’s not good for them.” What we find in the research is that when people moonlight, or they take on a side gig, so long as they’re doing it for reasons of wanting to expand their skills and be good at something. That is energizing and leads them to be more engaged in their day-to-day job.

If they’re doing it because they’re struggling financially and they need to make ends meet. That’s not quite as effective for recovery. If they’re doing it out of passion or interest or curiosity, it’s beneficial. The best leaders are supported because what it goes to show is that the leader is authentically behind you as a person. They want you to succeed in life, grow and be energized. They’re not selfishly thinking about what’s good for them and their department. By contrast, if a leader does say, “You can’t do that. I’m not going to support it. I don’t want to hear about it.” That tells you that the leader is self-interested. It creates friction in the relationship.

Let’s talk also about trust. You have a fair amount of focus in the book about how these superteams build trust and some of the different practices that they use to do. Talk about some of the things that distinguish the way that they go about establishing and maintaining trust and how that differs from what the other 90% odd of teams are doing.

You might remember this. I didn’t write about trust in my first book, The Best Place to Work because I felt like trust was obvious. What I discovered while doing the research for this book is you have a lot of new interesting research about how trust gets built and how to sustain it. To build a trusting relationship is a skill, and anybody can develop that skill. It starts with understanding what the three factors are that contribute to trust in a workplace relationship.

Building Trust Through Competence Caring And Consistency

In Superteams, I talk about what those are. I call the three Cs. Its Competence, Caring and Consistency. The first one is competent. If you don’t feel like your teammate or your manager is competent at their job, you’re not going to trust them. Pretty obvious. That’s how trust is built. Trust is built on competence. The second thing is, it’s not enough to be competent. You also need to feel like they care about you. If that person is super competent but they don’t have your back or they’re selfish, you’re not going to trust them. You need both things.

The third thing is just as crucial and it’s consistency. If that person that you’re dealing with or your colleague or your manager is competent and caring but they’re not consistent. Sometimes they disappear for days at a time. You can’t trust them. The bottom line is, you need to focus on all three in order to build trusting relationships, and the challenges all of us fail at these at one point or another. It’s not because we’re bad people. It’s because we experienced a time crunch that makes it difficult to focus on all three.

The biggest example, and probably the least obvious is consistency. You might be a caring person. You might be a confident person, but if you are slammed, you’re not going to check your email for days. It’s a natural reaction to trying to prioritize and triage. What this research tells us is if you want to be a high-performing leader, it’s crucial that you respond to people consistently or to anticipate that busy period and say, “I’m going to be under the gun for the next few days. I may be slow and responding but you can text me if it’s urgent.” That rebuilds that consistency that might break in advance preventing people from distrusting you in the future.

I like that chapter in particular. What stood with me about it is that it doesn’t deal in the vague ideas of what trust might be. It doesn’t make the assumption that trust is obvious to everybody because to your point, there are specific things that we can do to build or erode trust. It’s important in a team to work at having the balance of those things skew toward the things that build trust. Again thinking from personal experience, a lot of teams put too little focus into thinking about the deliberate ways that they can build trust with each other.

I appreciate your point about not having very much that was abstract that you’re seeing my bias. If a term is like, even remotely abstract, it’s gone. My job is to entertain people and make it accessible. If I’m using an abstract word, then people are tuning out. I try hard to make this stuff relatable and actionable. To your point about trust, I do believe it’s a skill.

Once you understand that caring, competency, consistency are at the core, it becomes easy to build that trust. Especially at the beginning of a relationship, it’s like, “I need to demonstrate that I care about this person. I need to show my competence. I need to be consistent.” If you do that with a new client or a new colleague for a period of a couple of weeks, they’re going to trust you and it’s because you understand the formula and you execute it.

I want to zoom out and talk a little bit more about the macro level. Before we do that, for our audience that’s reading, if you are going to give them one or two key tips to drive near term performance of their team. Where would you tell them to start?

It depends on what the pain point is but let me use this opportunity to talk about where a lot of teams go wrong. That is, a lot of leaders don’t have an understanding of how you build a team mentality. A lot of people work in what are “teams,” but they don’t have that team mentality. It’s because they don’t attend to the three basics of forming that team mentality. Here’s what those basics are, and every team needs these.

You tend to see these more often in sports than you do at work. It’s part of the reason why we have so many dysfunctional teams. The first thing is, you need a shared goal. You need an outcome that everyone is pushing forward together. In sports, the shared goal is obvious. It’s a victory, but it works. It’s often not obvious. If I’m a designer and you are a copywriter. It’s not clear that we have a shared goal sometimes.

A lot of times, you have people who are sitting together next to one another for years and don’t know how their work contributed to one another. People need that shared goal. A lot of times also people have different goals at work. If I want to go home at 5:00 to drive my kids to soccer, and you’re trying to get a promotion. We’re going to have conflicting goals, then that’s going to lead to tension. The second thing you need once you have that shared goal, you need role clarity. I need to know what I’m responsible for. I need to know what you’re responsible for, and I need to know how those two things integrate to one another.

If we don’t have role clarity, we’re going to drop some balls because it’s your responsibility and you think it’s my responsibility or we’re going to have turf wars, because both of us claim the same responsibility. We need to be clear on what our roles are. The third thing you need is interdependence. Interdependence is just a fancy psychological term. All it means is we need to feel like we need each other in order to be successful.

High Performing Teams: Trust isn’t abstract, it’s a skill. By mastering competence, caring, and consistency, leaders build resilient and high-performing workplace relationships.

A lot of teams have competitor teammates. For example, if you have two salespeople and they each have their individual quota. Not only do they not have that shared goal or interdependence. They are now viewing one another as competitors. You need to feel like you need each other in order to be successful. When you have those three things, that shared goal, the role clarity, and interdependence, that’s when you create that team mentality. A lot of teams don’t have that. It’s why their teams are basically a recipe for dysfunction.

One thing you didn’t mention in that list was processes. I think about the grippy framework of why we have conflicts. Conflicts run goals, roles, processes or interpersonal relationships. You’ve covered goals and roles. Give everything you said about the importance of teams talking about how they work. Processes to come into the picture at some point, too.

I would subsume that under role clarity because the process is part of it. What I will say is, we’re not talking about creating a high-performing team yet. We’re just talking about how you create a team mentality. I need to know what my role is. Ideally, it’s part of a dial in process. In order to feel like a team, you can apply this framework quite easily. If you think about people entering an elevator, they’re strangers. They don’t know each other. They’re not a team.

The moment the elevator stops working, now they’re a team. What happened? They have that shared goal. That’s the key. It’s all about creating that team mentality. A lot of organizations don’t have that because it’s everyone out for themselves. We could talk about building trust until the cows come home but unless people have that team mentality, there’s no value to establishing trust. You need to start with the team mentality.

Come back to the tips that you give to people one or two things where to start.

For individuals, one of the things we looked at within our research on how high performing teams are managing to be so much more effective in terms of productivity was how they structure their hours at work. This is something that anybody can do as individuals, regardless of how your team is performing. It’s just getting more done and feeling more proactive with your day. By the way, that’s the key to having a successful day. It’s to feel like you played offense. You weren’t just playing defense reacting to people’s emails, phone calls and meeting requests. You got done what you intended to get done.

Part of how they managed to do that so effectively is they used some advanced planning. They time box. I talked about this as a framework of looking forward, looking backward and staying present. The looking forward part starts with Friday afternoon or Sunday morning. Look at your schedule for the following week and then take some empty time slots and indicate on your calendar. Set an appointment with yourself about what you’re planning to do during that time slot so it doesn’t end up being eaten up by someone else.

Set an appointment with yourself. Some people call this time boxing. That’s one of the keys to how high performing teams get more done. The second part is looking backwards. That means reflecting on how your time was spent. Part of this is people in high-performing teams tend to time track where the time went during the day to reflect on, was that a good usage? Was it a bad usage of time? What am I going to do differently next time?

Another part of it is, when you have a good day, here’s a simple way of doing it. If you’re not time tracking, when you have a good day, think to yourself, “That was a good day. How do I have more days like that? What can I learn from this?” Conversely, if you had a bad day at the office, think about, “That did not go. How do I avoid days like that in the future?” When you have that ongoing reflection, you’re going to get better with using your time more effectively.

The final point of staying present. When we are transitioning between tasks, that’s when we’re at our most distractible. If you think about when you check your phone, it’s when you’ve completed one task and you’re about to start another. The fewer transition points, the less distractible you become. If you’re able to, try to batch similar tasks together so that you have fewer transition points. You now have the formula, look forward, look backwards, and stay present. That’s how members of super teams get more done.

We’ve talked a lot about what individuals can do and also what a team should do collectively. At the organizational level, what would you recommend ahead of HR or people in culture or a CEO about how to apply what you’ve covered in super teams to their organization? What would you tell them to stop doing?

Selfishly, what I would like to suggest is that everyone get the free discussion guide for Superteams because it comes with the book. I’m going to do a little plug. At SuperteamsMasterclass.com, if you get the book, you get this discussion guide. What’s beautiful about the discussion guide is that it takes teams through each chapter and asks prompts for the discussion to happen so that you’re implementing the insights from the book as a team. Again, it’s completely free.

That’s a great place to start. A lot of the challenge for people on teams is that they’re not the ones in charge. It’s difficult for them to offer these changes. Even if they feel like they would work. If they were to say, “Why don’t we take a meeting free afternoon on Tuesdays?” It’s hard to suggest that sometimes because you feel like implicit criticism. What I often recommend people do is that they suggest the team run an experiment.

The reason I suggest framing it as an experiment is because it’s difficult for people to say, “We should not do that experiment.” The experiment tends to be more welcome because people understand that it’s not a lasting change forever. It’s a great way of introducing new ideas because even if they do reject the experiment, it still makes you look like you’re proactively trying to suggest an idea that could be helpful.

Now, in terms of leaders, there’s a lot that can be useful for leaders in this book. I would urge everyone to start with meeting guidelines. Have a discussion with your team about what are some of our best meetings. Differentiates those meetings from bad meetings, and then how we create some guidelines that everyone can try out for a week to see and do these to improve the way we work as a team.

Come back to this idea of what you would tell them to stop doing. How are organizations most significantly working against their own interests here?

One of the things that is worth mentioning is there’s a lot of confusion about effort and results. A lot of people think that the harder you work, the more successful you are at work. That turns out to be true to a point, and that point is generally 55 hours a week. The more you work past that, the more mistakes you’re going to make, the more errors and judgment. You’re going to focus on the wrong things. You end up spending more time correcting your mistakes than contributing valuable output.

In the book, I talk about how the best teams work to limit the amount of hours that people can work because they recognize that people are more productive with fewer hours spent past a certain point. I talked about things like how on Superteams, leaders are more than twice as likely to encourage their team to disconnect from work after hours. We talked about what they thought last time you and I spoke about one of the habits that leaders have is often they send emails after hours.

The challenge with that is that people are trained to respond to those emails after hours. It makes it difficult for people to recover their energy and they feel like they’re constantly working even when they’re at home. A good solution to this is not to avoid writing those emails but rather to schedule those emails to arrive at a later point.

You can do this on your email, on Outlook, or in Gmail, which is the to send later function so you can send your email at 11:00 at night and have it arrive at 8:00 in the following morning. You can even do this with your text by clicking the plus button on your iPhone. It allows you to send your text messages later. It’s a great little tip because what it allows leaders to do is to behave in a way that aligns with the culture they’re trying to build.

I’ll put one caveat on that from personal experience. Don’t match them all to go out at 8:00, Monday because nobody wants to get slammed with ten emails from somebody at 8:00 in the morning on a Monday. Last question. How is AI changing the way that superteams will work?

Leveraging Collaborative AI Practices

We just completed a new study on how AI is being used on super teams versus average teams. The results were interesting in terms of how surprising they were to be consistent with everything else we’ve said so far. On average teams, people hide their AI use from one another. They’re ashamed of it. They fear AI is going to take their job because they’re not sharing with one another how they’re using it. On superteams, it’s very different. They’re sharing not only their use of AI but they are more likely to share effective prompts with one another.

What that does is, it enables the entire team to get better as a whole because people are constantly learning from one another including their use of AI. On average teams, you find people are far more about losing their job. On superteams, they’re much less worried because they recognize that it’s helping the team improve together. You’re seeing how their contributions lift the team, and they feel like they’re team is getting better than other teams in their industry.

A good place to stop. There’s lots of practical advice here. Thank you for doing the discussion with me, and I would certainly heartily recommend your book to people that I know, because there is a lot of great practical guidance in it for lots of different aspects of team effectiveness. Thank you for that, and for the discussion, Ron.

Thanks for having me.

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There’s lots of practical takeaways from the discussion with Ron. Let’s highlight just a few of them. First of all, great teams aren’t built by accident. They are built with intention. High performing teams succeed not because they have the smartest people. In fact, having a team of the smartest people generally works against you and the research has shown that for decades. It’s because they create the conditions that allow talented people to do their best work individually and together.

The second point is that more collaboration isn’t always better collaboration. Endless meetings, constant interruptions, brainstorming sessions, always on communication, can undermine performance. The best teams know when to work together and when to protect time for individual focused independent work.

Third, the quality of your team shapes the quality of your work life. This is probably fairly obvious but it’s something that we all ought to be thinking about more. Exceptional teams create better trust. They create stronger relationships. They create higher energy, but they also create an environment where people genuinely look forward to coming to work.

Finally, AI is going to change how teams work, but it’s not necessarily going to change what makes them great. Technology will probably take over more routine tasks, but the human skills that drive exceptional teams things like trust, communication, judgment, creativity, and shared purpose will become even more valuable. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. If you found the discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise or our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

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About Ron Friedman

Ron Friedman, Ph.D., is an award-winning psychologist who helps leaders build high-performing teams. He contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, FOX, NBC, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Inc.

He is the bestselling author of The Best Place to Work and Decoding Greatness, and the founder of Superteams, Inc., where he delivers keynotes, develops leadership training programs, and advises senior executives on building stronger, higher-performing organizations.