Welcome to The Brainy Business Podcast
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 587 of the Brainy Business: Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Ron Friedman, author of Super Teams. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
What Actually Separates a Great Team From an Exceptional One?
Melina Palmer: Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. What actually separates a great team from a truly exceptional one? And is there a way to get there deliberately or is it just luck? The right people on the right project at the right time. It turns out there’s a real science behind what makes some teams perform at a completely different level than others. And today’s guest has the research to prove it. My guest today is Ron Friedman. Ron is a social psychologist, researcher, and the author of multiple books, including his latest, Super Teams: The Science and Secrets of High Performing Teams, which is based on the most extensive research project on teamwork ever conducted. Thousands of workers across industries rated on what actually differentiates the highest performing teams from everyone else. This book is a goldmine of insights and I’m delighted to let you know that he gives a lot of great tips and tricks in our conversation today. So have your pen and paper ready to take notes. You’ll be glad you did. As you listen today, think about a team you’re currently on or leading, what’s working and what isn’t, and would you consider your team to be bad, good, great or super? Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books and ways to get in touch and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/587.
Translating Science Into Practical Action
Melina Palmer: Now let’s jump right in. Ron Friedman, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
Ron Friedman: Thanks for having me.
Melina Palmer: Yes, I’m super excited for you to be here and talk about some super teams. Before we jump into all the questions that I have—I have so many things I want to talk to you about—can you share a bit about yourself and the work that you do for those who don’t yet know you?
Ron Friedman: Sure. I started out as a professor teaching at colleges and universities and then I went off into the corporate world. So my job was to measure public opinion as a pollster. And when I got there, I was struck by the massive divide between the latest science and the modern workplace. So all the things that we psychologists had uncovered about how to get people engaged and motivated and more creative, all of it was just being ignored by so many organizations. And what I came to realize is it’s not because CEOs don’t care, it’s not because executives don’t care. It’s because they didn’t have access to the latest science. So I turned my attention to writing a book. That book became The Best Place to Work. It was my first book, and in it I took over a thousand studies and translated them into plain English so that regardless of whether you were just someone who was starting out or you were more experienced, you had access to the best research on how to create a great workplace. And so that left me with a very important question that wasn’t answered in that first book. And that question was, what do the best teams do differently? And that was the spark for this new book called Super Teams.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And so, as the audience knows, I’m all about taking behavioral science and other areas of academia into application and translating them so that people can actually go do something with it. Right? It’s so common that even when they do find it, like you see the right academic journal article, it’s like, okay, what am I supposed to go do? Where am I supposed to go with this thing? So that superpower of being able to say, “here’s how you might use that, and this is how that could work,” is really, really helpful for people.
Ron Friedman: Well, I appreciate you saying that. And I have to tell you, a lot of it came for me while being in the corporate world. The job that I had was being a pollster, which is otherwise known as a market researcher. And what I came to realize in the experience of developing decks for executives is they wanted to make sure that the data was there. They wanted to make sure that the questions were asked correctly. But what they really cared about were the last two pages of the deck, where you make it actionable, you provide your strategic recommendations. So I thought, what if I did the same thing for all this great research that people just don’t have access to? And again, the challenge is that it’s just collecting dust in university libraries. And it’s because academics write for other academics. They don’t write for the corporate world. And so it’s almost tragic in a way where you’ve got all this great research and no one’s thinking about, “how do I apply this?” Just being in that unique position of having had access to the research, but also having lived in the actual corporate work environment and understanding what the barriers were, that really put me in a very unique position to provide a service. And it’s been exciting doing it for the last decade.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. As far as how you find sources and things, how do you go about finding those articles? I’m sure you’re still doing lots of research as you have a book that just came out. Do you live on Google Scholar? Do you have some go-to places that you like to go read? Are you in a dusty library? What’s the approach?
Ron Friedman: It’s a great question. Nobody’s asked me that. I actually have a researcher who subscribes to all the journals and gets the alerts on a daily basis and then weeds them out for the things that I might find interesting. Then I go through all of those on a daily basis. Part of it is included in my newsletter, which is called The Best Ideas of the Month, where we take the 10 best research-based articles and translate them. But beyond that, I also conduct original research which was the basis for Super Teams. To give you a sense of how we did the work, the research in Super Teams is based on the most extensive research project on teamwork ever conducted. I’m very proud to say that it’s a series of over eight studies now where we have interviewed thousands of workers who were asked to rate their team on a couple of metrics. The first was, “how effective is your team at achieving its goals?” And the second metric was, “compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance?” Then we took the teams with a perfect score, a very tiny group called super teams, and we compared what super teams do relative to average teams. What differentiates them? How do they structure their day? How do they collaborate? How do they run their meetings? We were able to get very comprehensive data on what really differentiates them. I’ll just summarize at a high level what we found: super teams share three big strengths that average teams lack. Here’s what they are. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. The second is they don’t just collaborate well, they actively make their teammates better. And the third is they’re not satisfied doing good work; they’re constantly building their skills and improving over time. The great news is every single one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance.
Melina Palmer: Awesome. I’m so glad and it’s so clear that you are in this business of translating this stuff to be usable. Everyone listening is like, “yes, I’ve already signed up for that newsletter.” Don’t worry, we’ll have links in the show notes, everybody, to make it easy. But just being able to start to see, “okay, these are some things I can learn; there’s stuff I can do.”
A Tale of Two Team Cultures
Melina Palmer: Before we jump into more detail with some of those really actionable things, I really loved at the very beginning of the book you do the “tale of two teams” that you had worked on. It’s one of those where it always feels like it’s going to be like, “this is clearly the bad, and this is clearly the good,” but it feels like there is a bit of a surprise in there. Can you share a little bit about this story before I give it all away?
Ron Friedman: I appreciate that that resonated with you because I lived through it. My experience after having gotten my PhD in social psychology from the University of Rochester was that I started teaching for a year and realized this really isn’t the path for me. One of the challenges with teaching is you’re basically teaching the same thing over and over again. If you like learning new things, it’s the opposite of that. It’s like being in your favorite class and then being stuck in that class for the rest of your life and never being able to leave. Because I like learning new things, I realized I should really go do polling, because polling involves learning new things constantly and thinking about how to apply it. So I take a job with a political consultancy. It’s a very, very competitive place. It’s very cutthroat. The only way to really stand out is to prove you’re better than other people on your team. That is the type of environment that’s very common in a lot of organizations in the financial world or consulting. One of the quotes I have in the book is that I was told very early on that “you’re either the smartest person in the room or you’re deadwood.” That’s how you’re judged constantly. That environment was the opposite of a team-based environment. Because of all the competition, there was just no real sense of teamwork. I then left and joined a marketing agency that was the cultural opposite. There, collaboration was the single highest priority. Just to prove that point, we were constantly in team building activities. Every meeting involved at least 10 people. You were discouraged from ever closing your door because it sent the signal that you felt your work was more important than being there for your teammates. Objectively, both of those businesses were very successful financially, but they achieved it through very different means. If you looked at each of those as a case study, you would come away with very different conclusions about what works. That’s what led me to wonder, what if we looked at thousands of teams and pinpointed what the best teams do differently? That was the seed for the idea behind Super Teams.
Melina Palmer: So, could we say group one—being very combative and fighting against each other—is bad, and ultra-collaboration all the time is good? Or is there something in the middle that’s actually where we should be?
Avoiding Over-Collaboration and Managing Attention
Ron Friedman: Objectively, when you look at the data—and this is the value of looking at thousands of teams as opposed to just anecdotes and cherry-picking case studies—what we find is that there’s value to collaboration to a point. Most teams over-collaborate. Here’s what I mean by that: organizations say they want collaboration, but what they really get is constant togetherness. When you look at the metrics, the average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings. That number is higher the higher up you go in the organization. Senior executives are at 22 hours. 18 hours a week gone. Another 11 hours are lost to digging yourself out of messages. What does that leave for real work? Well, it’s about a day. How do you squeeze a week’s worth of work into a single day? You look for ways to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends. We’ve been asking for so long, “why are workers getting burnt out?” A better question is, “how do they get any work done in the first place?” That’s a much better question. What we find in our research is that super teams are much more deliberate with their hours. They don’t make meetings the default; they make them a last resort. They’re 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They’re 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings, which are very difficult to get rid of over time. The other thing they do is set aside dedicated focus hours during the day so people can do deep work without having to be responsive to messages. They’ll take an hour-and-a-half block and say, “from 2:30 to 4:00 on Tuesday, no one has to answer their emails. Everybody can just do their work.” The other thing they do is schedule meeting-free days. Meeting-free days are remarkably effective. There’s research showing that they slash stress in half and improve productivity by 71%. Except they don’t call them meeting-free days; they call them “get-stuff-done days” because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiative. If you take a step back and look at how these super teams are getting so much more done than average teams, it simply comes down to minimizing distractions and maximizing focus.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. You have some really good examples, too. I’m a big fan of meeting-free days. I keep them on my calendar as well. As a solopreneur essentially, sometimes those go away, but in general, where you can have that rule of being able to do some focused work and then come back together, everybody can kind of talk about what they did as makes sense, or do it asynchronously. Maybe you’re sharing a video or thoughts or asking questions. There’s a bit of that organizational aspect that goes into this too, right? Because if you can’t find where anything is, you don’t know where I put something, and I don’t know where you put something, then you spend so much time having to talk about stuff. One of the stats I found when I was writing my book What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You that I share with everybody says that 17 hours per person per week is spent clarifying something that was previously said, which is awful. Whenever I share that, people are like, “that seems low.” That seems like my whole life! If you can be a little bit more thoughtful in what you’re communicating, narrowing that down with intent for any conversation, knowing people’s time is valuable, it’s not just about getting it out of my brain so now it’s your problem—which is sort of how everybody seems to work, especially top-down.
Clear Rules for Communication and Operating Procedures
Ron Friedman: Yes, I can definitely add to that. I think what you’re pointing to is the constant togetherness and ongoing distractions. Here are a few strategies that super teams use to minimize those types of distractions. Number one: Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). What I mean by that is a document that says, “here’s how we do this project, follow the following steps,” and you have hyperlinks in the document to all the documents that person might need. Very simple fix. Now, you might say, “well, I don’t have time to create those standard operating procedures.” The truth is, it’s costing you way more time not to have them. If you still don’t want to set time aside to create a standing operating procedure, all you need to do the next time an employee or you are executing a particular task is list the steps as you’re doing it. Then you’ve got a working document that can be revised. Part of the obstacle for people is that they feel like they need to get it perfect, and that leads to procrastination. It doesn’t need to be perfect; just get it 80% of the way there. The next time someone does something using that SOP, they can revise it. Second thing: have very clear rules about how you communicate on the team. If something is medium importance, that’s an email or a Slack message. If something is urgent, that’s a text message or a phone call. The challenge a lot of teams have is that there are no clear lines of communication. If I prefer email, you prefer phone, and a third person prefers text, now we’re being bombarded everywhere. We need to have very clear demarcations about how and when we communicate. That can eliminate many of the impromptu interruptions that prevent us from getting real work done during the day. The last thing I’ll say is that when you look at the types of meetings people have, average teams have more spontaneous meetings. They have meetings that are scheduled within the last 12 hours as opposed to pre-planned ones. Why is that important? It tells us those meetings are usually happening because an emergency has arisen. They’re having more emergencies because they haven’t planned things through ahead of time. If you’re constantly having emergency meetings, that’s a signal that the team really needs to think about how to prevent this from happening. So much of how we work has normalized constant disruption, and we’ve just accepted it as “how work is.” The only time for us to get real work done is to come in when no one else is working. There’s a story in Super Teams of a woman who calls in sick—this is a real story—just so she can get her work done. It’s the only way to avoid disruptions and meetings. When we’ve gotten to a workplace where people need to use their sick days to get work done, we really need to look in the mirror in terms of how we can do it better.
Melina Palmer: Yes, definitely. That is definitely not ideal. We’ll talk about taking time off and breaks in a minute. As we put some finer points on meetings—because I know that people struggle with this, and there are enough memes to make it to the moon and back—if we say we’re not going to have spontaneous meetings because we’re pre-planning, I think most people would default to recurring meetings. If I know I’m going to meet with you once a week, I save everything for that. That’s how I pre-plan stuff. If we’re saying not to do recurring meetings and not to have everyone in all the meetings… I have so many corporate clients who are quadruple-booked for most of the day all the time, and that’s no good. You can’t be everywhere, you’re jumping between meetings, you’re worried about what you’re missing with FOMO, and you don’t want to let someone down. The stress of all that is terrifying. How do we pre-plan meetings if they’re not recurring? How does that all come together in that super team space?
Guidelines for Effective Meetings
Ron Friedman: I want to clarify: I’m not saying you shouldn’t have spontaneous meetings. I’m just saying that it is a signal that something has gone off the rails. Sometimes those can’t be avoided, and that’s okay. The key is not to evaluate whether we’re in a good place or a bad place, but to constantly be thinking about how we get better. If you can just take that attitude to get a little bit better every week, you’re going to be in a completely different place a year from now. But to answer your question: the quickest path to fewer meetings is to clarify with your team when meetings are truly necessary. At most organizations, just about anyone can call a meeting for any reason. There’s no guidance on what deserves a meeting and what doesn’t. The unfortunate truth is that a lot of people use meetings to procrastinate. When you schedule a meeting, it looks to others like you’re getting work done, and it gives you a license not to do anything because, after all, you’re just waiting for the meeting. There’s a simple solution that I identified while studying super teams: meeting guidelines. Work with your team to get clear on what deserves a meeting and what doesn’t. Let me give you some examples. Within my team, we have one clear rule: no decision, no meeting. If you have a question, that’s a phone call or an email. If you have an update, that’s an email or a video capture. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not going to pull people away from their work. That’s our guideline. Another example is from a content marketing company in New York City called Percolate. Their meeting guideline is “no spectators.” If you’re not contributing to the meeting or you’re not an active participant, you don’t need to be there. It’s not a criticism; it’s respect for your time. Ultimately, when you free up people’s time to do real work during real work hours, that’s how you actually move things forward.
Melina Palmer: I love those rules. Having frameworks like lines we can draw to say yes or no helps, though there’s always a gray area. But essentially being able to say, “is there a decision to be made? Yeah, let’s have a meeting. Who should be there?” avoids the quadruple or double bookings. I like this “no spectators” piece, but how do you determine who should and shouldn’t be spectating? Who needs to be there to be a part of the decision, and who’s going to be offended if they’re not there? Meetings never end because everyone feels like they need to justify being in the room. You had a really great example of the email invite you can send in advance so people feel included without needing everyone physically in the meeting. I’d love if you can share a bit about that.
Ron Friedman: You’re hitting on an important point: the more people you have in the room, the longer the meeting goes and the less effective the decisions are. There’s actually research showing that past seven people in the room, decision-making quality plummets by 10%, and it gets worse the more people you add. Having fewer people in the room is really valuable because not only are you wasting people’s time when you have folks in the room who can’t contribute, but it actually makes the meeting worse for the people who need to be there. A really effective approach to limiting invitations is sending people an email that invites them to share their input in advance and offers to keep them in the loop. This is an idea taken from Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. What he recommends is an email that says, for example: “Melina, I’m going to be meeting with an important vendor in the next three days, and I know you’ve had great experience with this. If you have the ability to squeeze this in, please share some suggestions on what I should ask for. I’m happy to loop you in on anything we decide in the meeting. If you’d really like to attend, you’re welcome to join us.” When you send an email like that, it allows people to share their input and offers to keep them in the loop. A lot of times people think they want to be in your meeting, but what they really want is access to information and input. When you give them those two things, they’re very happy not to join your meeting. It’s not about cutting people off or being disrespectful; it’s about showing respect for their time by providing them with the opportunity to contribute without cannibalizing their workday hours.
Melina Palmer: What I love about that is the framing in the email. You can really see that the default becomes not going to the meeting. For a lot of people, because of FOMO, we want to be included. If you say, “here’s a way to give any thoughts that you have,” there’s a little bit of reciprocity in the praise of showing “I appreciate you and I know you have this expertise. You are valued and important, and I’m going to keep you in the loop.” It sets the default to not attending. If people choose to go for some reason, they can, but hopefully, people learn not to. You don’t get to complain about all the meetings and then force yourself into every meeting.
Ron Friedman: To summarize what we just discussed in the last five minutes: we’ve eliminated status meetings, we’ve eliminated question meetings, and we’ve eliminated people needing to be there just so they can contribute something they could have emailed in two sentences. If you do those three things alone, you’re going to save a lot of hours during the week.
Melina Palmer: With that, make sure that if you say you’re going to do the thing, do the thing. Take on the responsibility: if you tell someone you’re going to send them the summary of what was discussed or bring their points up, do those things in a reasonable period of time to keep that snowball rolling.
Ron Friedman: That reminds me of the research we did in chapter five on what the best teammates do differently. We asked 2,000 people to think about the worst teammate they’ve ever had and to describe that person. Then we asked another thousand people to rate a set of characteristics that we got from the first thousand people to identify the most common characteristics of the worst teammates. The number one factor that predicted a bad teammate was being “not reliable.” What you’re describing here is doing the thing you said you were going to do. The person who follows up and does what they said they were going to do eliminates the biggest factor that makes someone a bad teammate. In fact, reliability was number two on the top three characteristics of the best teammates. People often think that being a good teammate is just putting your head down and doing your job well. But actually, if you can find ways of making other people better at their jobs, that’s the true definition of a great teammate.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. We don’t have to over-promise on things. If you know you can’t do the thing until the end of the week, say, “I’ll have it by the end of the week.” I tell people to say, “I’ll have it for you by the time you get in Monday morning.” That is so much better than the end of the week because if you need the buffer, you have it. Most people aren’t going to want to check over the weekend anyway. Don’t say, “I’ll have it for you in an hour,” and have it take two.
Ron Friedman: It sounds like you’re describing a particular person in your life right now!
Melina Palmer: Maybe an amalgamation of people!
Ron Friedman: That’s what’s valuable about having the research. Once you recognize other people’s pet peeves, you can start eliminating them.
Melina Palmer: By nature, I am a people pleaser. The person being described here was a previous version of myself! I wanted to say I’m going to do the thing and be that superhuman person for the super team, so I would end up over-committing. I’ve had to teach myself these same things, which is where I can be good at providing advice for others.
What Actually Matters: Focus Spaces and Work Location
Melina Palmer: As we transition off of meetings, what are some of these counterintuitive or surprising findings? Do super teams need a fully stocked lunchroom, or is there other stuff that people actually need?
Ron Friedman: There is so much that’s surprising. Pretty much every page is going to have another surprise for you, but I’ll give you a handful. What impact do office amenities actually have on us? If you hear about popular workplaces in Silicon Valley, they have unlimited meals or volleyball courts. I remember articles being written about Google having heated toilet seats, which is wonderful, though I’m not sure how that contributes to workplace success. In our research, we asked people to describe their workplace, gave them a choice of various amenities, and asked them to identify the ones they have at their organization. We were looking to see which ones actually predict being on a super team. Out of all the amenities we tested—including ping pong tables, office gyms, and quiet workspaces—only one predicted being on a super team: having a quiet space to do focused work. That finding says so much about why people prefer to work from home. It’s because they can actually get work done at home. Most offices are just really difficult to focus in when you have constant disruptions, whether it be phones, people popping into your office for a quick chat, or constant emails. At home, you can actually get your work done, which is why the best teams are more likely to have a quiet space to do focus work.
Ron Friedman: Another finding is where super teams are more likely to form. A lot of CEOs want their organizations back at the office, so we were curious about whether that actually contributes to having a high-performing team. We tested to see where high-performing teams are more likely: in the office, working remotely, or working hybrid. What we found is it makes zero difference. It makes zero difference! It doesn’t matter whether you’re working at home or working at the office; what really matters is how your team works, not where it works. I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of organizational leaders, and the number of smart, ambitious people who lose hours of their day commuting just so they can get to the office, fire up their laptop, and attend the same Zoom meeting they could have attended from home is heartbreaking. Making the most of our time together requires intention and planning. It’s one thing to say everybody needs to be in the office five days a week, and it’s another to say, “we’re going to trust you to figure out where you work best, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we’re going to all meet regularly so that we can do some strategic meetings. Get your pre-reads in the day before so that everyone can show up ready to contribute.” The latter takes advantage of what togetherness has to offer while empowering people to do their best work.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. I know people where coming back meant there wasn’t enough space for everyone, so only a third of the team is there on certain days to share desk space. Like you said, attending the same Zoom meeting you could have done from home is terrible.
Ron Friedman: My sister works in a research company and they rotate who is in the office that day. They’re just taking turns babysitting the office at this point.
Melina Palmer: Is there any purpose, or just to let it continue to exist?
Ron Friedman: They all have different days when they’re required to be at the office. It makes so little sense. They’re just taking turns on who’s going to waste time commuting.
Melina Palmer: Well, at least if there’s a solo ping pong table or a personal trainer there on those days, you get something out of coming in!
Exercise, Rest, and True Vacation Disconnection
Melina Palmer: Speaking of which, how about health and exercise? Is that an important thing for people on super teams?
Ron Friedman: That’s right. We found research showing that on super teams, people are more likely to exercise on a regular basis. You might be wondering, what does exercise have to do with teamwork? When you exercise, you not only make yourself healthier and improve the way you look, but one of the biggest benefits of exercise is it makes you smarter at your job. Exercise changes the way we think. When we exercise on a regular basis, we get more blood flowing to the brain, which enables us to sustain our focus for longer. It activates the memory regions, enabling us to soak up information more quickly and retrieve it when we need it. Critically, exercise puts you in a good mood. Being in a good mood is crucial for anything we do at work. It enables you to collaborate more effectively, connects you with new clients better, and puts customers in a good mood through emotional contagion. The value of exercise is enormous. We also see that on super teams, leaders are more likely to encourage people to disconnect from work after work hours. How you recover from work determines how you show up the following day. If you have the ability to disconnect from work and invest more of that time in exercise, you’re going to show up as a better teammate.
Melina Palmer: Love that. The science behind all of it is so great. Before we close up, we were talking about disconnecting when you’re done for the day—not using sick days to do actual work, taking real vacations, and things like that. How important are weekends and vacations for teams to be super teams and for individuals to be super contributors?
Ron Friedman: I’ll touch on vacations real quick because this finding was one of the more surprising ones. Super teams are 39% more likely to take work-free vacations, meaning that they don’t check their emails and are present for their vacation. But here’s what really caught our attention: the reason people work on vacations in the first place. On average teams, most people say they work on vacation because they feel pressured to keep up. They don’t want to come back to an inbox flooded with emails. But on super teams, it’s more often by choice. They’re doing it because they want to stay helpful and be proactive. That difference really matters. If you’re working because you have to, it feels draining. But if you’re working because you want to, it’s energizing. This is why the standard advice of unplugging on vacation doesn’t resonate with a lot of ambitious professionals. Not only do they not find it relaxing, it actually makes them more anxious. The takeaway here is not everybody needs to fully unplug to recover. What matters more is why you’re choosing to engage in the first place. If it’s something that energizes you, that’s not a problem. If anything, it might be an indicator that you’re on a high-performing team.
Melina Palmer: I love that. I know there were other interesting aspects where, for some companies, the entire office takes vacation at the same time. That has team building in and of itself because you come back and talk about where you went, nobody missed anything, and people get to be collaborative. I also loved that one company automatically deletes every email sent to someone on vacation so they come back to an empty inbox no matter what. That’s not terrible!
Ron Friedman: It’s great because not only does it allow the person on vacation to really enjoy their break—since even if they check their inbox, nothing is there—but when they come back to work, they aren’t spending three days digging themselves out of email.
Melina Palmer: I know so many people, myself included, who come back and work all day Sunday to get through all the email to make sure they’re at an okay spot when they officially return. That is not fun.
Ron Friedman: The reality is it’s an easy fix. If you work on a team, there’s no reason why only you should be monitoring that inbox. It’s about setting processes. If there are particular people who only you can deal with, you can create a filter where those emails remain in your inbox while everyone else’s goes to a teammate. If we think strategically about freeing up people’s time both at work and on vacation, we’re that much more effective because we’re protecting people’s time, energy, and attention—which is a key super team strength.
Action Steps and Resources
Melina Palmer: As we close out the conversation today, do you have any last thoughts or one top-of-mind thing you want people to know as their first step on their journey to a super team?
Ron Friedman: One thing I hope people take away from this is that the strengths that make super teams more effective are completely replicable and worth applying. To help people apply those ideas, obviously I’d love for everyone to get the book. But more importantly, I’ve created a free program that allows people to take the best ideas and learn them in under 20 minutes. We put together a free course and an action plan with practical strategies. There’s also a discussion guide so you can share the best insights with your team. It’s all included when you buy the book at superteamsmasterclass.com. All you need to do is buy the book, send us the receipt, and we’ll send you all the tools and trainings. Hopefully, people can start not just reading about super teams, but creating super teams on their own. In the program, we try to give you tips to apply whether you’re a leader or a team member asking, “how can I lift my team when I’m not the one in charge?” We tackle that there too.
Melina Palmer: Amazing! We will definitely have that link in the show notes, as well as one for your newsletter and for everyone who wants to follow and connect with you. Is there anywhere else that’s a good place for them to go?
Ron Friedman: superteamsinc.com is the name of my company. We do all sorts of trainings, workshops, and keynotes, and you can always reach me there. If I can be helpful, please let me know.
Melina Palmer: Wonderful. Like I said, we’ll have links in the show notes. Thank you again so much, Ron, for joining me on the show today. It was delightful to chat with and learn from you.
Ron Friedman: A real pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wrap-Up and Episode Conclusion
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Ron Friedman for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, it’s the reminder that things we think make teams great often don’t, and the things that actually do are often simpler than we’d expect. This is great for companies that can’t afford flashy perks or private chefs. You might just need a quiet place for people to do focused work and to have some strong cultural norms around meetings. You can also set clear guidelines for how and when to communicate. Be a business where vacations are expected and celebrated, not just tolerated or shamed. Give people breaks, opportunities to exercise, and autonomy to work alone and with their teams when it matters. Of course, make sure they know who’s actually on their teams. If nothing else, it’s a super easy place to start. There were so many great insights in this conversation today, and believe me when I tell you, they are just the tip of the iceberg from what you’re going to get in the book to understand more about what makes some teams super and how to start building one. Whether you’re the leader or not, make sure to grab your copy of Super Teams and share this episode with a colleague or friend who could benefit from a super team too. If you were to pick one top insight to start with that’s most important for your team, what would it be and why? Whatever it is, come share it with us on social media. You’re going to find me as @TheBrainyBiz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links to my top related past episodes and books, including Super Teams, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/587. Thank you again to Ron Friedman for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun. You don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
