Jay Papasan:
Hey gang, this week I’m talking to my friend Rod Friedman, an award-winning psychologist and business coach and author about his new book, Superteams. The question we’re trying to answer is, how do we know if we’re part of a superteam or a team that’s actually dysfunctional? And how do we, whether we’re an individual in it or leading it, make a difference in making that team better? You’ll get all the keys in this episode. Please enjoy.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
Ron, welcome to The ONE Thing podcast.
Ron Friedman:
Thanks, Jay. It’s great to be here.
Jay Papasan:
I’m excited to have you on. We’ve known each other for quite some time. And now, I get to talk to you about your brand-new, wonderful book, Superteams. You did all this research to find out the truth of why superteams are superteams, the ones that outperform everyone else. What’s the thing that really surprised you that you didn’t expect to learn?
Ron Friedman:
Man, there are so many counterintuitive insights in this book from where they work, to how they work, to how they structure their day. But let me give your listeners a little background and some context on how we did this research. So, my background is in polling and in psychology. And so, in this book, what I did was my team and I conducted a poll of over 6000 workers, and we asked them two simple questions about their team. The first question is, “How effective is your team at achieving its goals?” And the second question is, “Compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance?” And then, we took the teams with a perfect score. It was a very tiny group, about 8% of people qualify. We call them superteams.
Jay Papasan:
When you say perfect, they literally gave themselves a 10 out of 10?
Ron Friedman:
They gave their team a 10 out of 10, which is an important distinction.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Ron Friedman:
It wasn’t… they weren’t self-rating. They were self-rating the team. They gave their team a perfect score. And we looked to see, what do the super teams do differently? And we looked at everything from how they structure their day, to how they run their meetings, to even how they recover during off-hours. And what it came down to is that superteams share three key strengths, which is what the book is structured around.
The first, which I think would be especially interesting to listeners of this show, 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 one another 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.
And for me, the most inspiring part of all this is that every one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance.
Jay Papasan:
Which was the one that surprised you the most?
Ron Friedman:
We asked in our survey about productivity tips. So, this, I think, gets at the heart of what this show’s about, how do you get more done? So, we assumed – this is me naively assuming, that the more productivity tips these people are incorporating, the more productive their team would become. So, we asked them about things like, do you turn off your email and only check it a few times a day? Do you turn off your notifications? Do you keep your phone in the other room for hours at a time, so that you can just get your most important work done? And as it turns out, those behaviors do not predict a high-performing team. So, for me, that was stunning.
Why is that? Why wouldn’t a group of individuals who are individually more productive than most not yield a most more productive team? And the answer is because when I unilaterally decide that I’m not gonna be available between 10:00 and 12:00, and you unilaterally decide that you’re not available between 12:00 and 2:00, we’ve created bottlenecks for one another. And so, I say in the book, one person’s deep work becomes another person’s bottleneck.
And so what does that tell us? What it tells us is what the best teams do differently is they collaborate as a group and determine for themselves, “Okay, we’re gonna create dedicated focus blocks when everyone can be off email and everyone can stay off out of meetings, and then we’re gonna set different blocks of hours when we’re all going to be in meetings and all going to be available on email.” And that allows people to do their best work without having to be constantly distracted and toggle back and forth.
Jay Papasan:
I think we wrote about that very briefly manager versus maker time in The ONE Thing. So, it’s not like they’re not doing those things, ’cause there’s a lot of research that shows the farther away your phone is from you, the higher your relative IQ is going to be, right? You’re not distracted, all of those things. But they’re not isolating themselves from their team, because the core of a team is we do it together, and it’s hard to do it together if we can’t communicate.
Ron Friedman:
Absolutely.
Jay Papasan:
And I think that what it also speaks to… And by the way, just to give a little bit of color to this. So, on high performing teams, they’re 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They’re 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings. And so, they’re trying to excavate themselves out of these constant meetings. And the average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings and 11 hours digging themselves out of messages. And so, what does that leave for real work? It’s about a day.
What happens when you have to cram a week’s worth of work into a single day? This is when you look to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends, and no wonder people are getting burnt out.
A better question is, how are people getting any work done in the first place when they’re constantly being distracted by meetings and messages?
And so, I think the key insight for me when I take away how we apply this is that you really can’t be a high performer on an underperforming team. I think for so long, we, as productivity writers, we’ve thought about “How do we create individuals who are more productive?” And I think we’ve been solving for the wrong problem because even if I make you more productive, if your team is constantly pulling into into you into unnecessary meetings, or if you’re constantly having to be on email, or if you’re constantly having to come in early or stay late just to get your work done, I think your team is broken. And it doesn’t matter how productive I make you, you’re simply not gonna be performing at your best.
Jay Papasan:
So, I mean, is the adage, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link”? Is that true, or are you the average of all of the links? You can’t be a superteam, right? You can’t be a top performer on a bad team ’cause the team is going to pull down your performance. But, like, how then do you equate the team? Is that adage true in that case?
Ron Friedman:
It didn’t make the book, but we did look at it. Do people on superteams have a weak link? Do they have a poor teammate? And in fact, the research tells us that they are less likely to have a weak link. But I don’t think it can be reduced to just having a weak individual performer. I think it’s about having the practices that free people up to do their best work. So, it’s a structural issue more than an individual issue.
Jay Papasan:
Whenever I hear of anybody giving themself a perfect score, there’s a part of me that wants to roll my eyes. So, one of my standard coaching or if I’m doing a little mentoring, on a scale of zero to 10, how well are you performing in your current role? And the most common answer I get is gonna be, like, a six or a seven. And maybe it’s in the isolation of talking about the individual versus the team. And it sounds like how people rate their teams and they think about their teams might be different than how critical they are of themselves. Is that true?
Ron Friedman:
It is true. And in fact, we have research, not research conducted by me, but decades of research conducted by psychologists that tell us that how people rate their team is the best predictor of how the team actually performs. And they looked at a whole bunch of variables. This turns out to be very effective and they call it team efficacy.
So, how would you rate your team’s ability to get things done? And to the extent that people measure their team’s performance effectively, the team tends to perform well. And if you look at how most team research has been done prior to this, it typically involves a psychologist or a researcher bringing people into the lab, creating an ad hoc group, and calling them a team, and looking to see how that team performs.
And I think in contrast to how research on teams has been done, this actually is a big step forward because we’re looking at real teams in the real world getting things done over long periods of time.
Jay Papasan:
I had to go there because otherwise I’m like, you just interviewed a bunch of delusional people. It’s like, you’re like, “No way. There’s no way you’re actually a 10.” But in the team context, if you are a top-performing team and you rate yourself in that highest category, that makes sense to me, whereas I just don’t experience it on an individual level. In my experience, the people who are the highest performing tend to be the most critical of their performance.
Ron Friedman:
Interesting.
Jay Papasan:
Is it the-
Ron Friedman:
I think that’s fair for the individual.
Jay Papasan:
… Dunning-Kruger or Kruger-Dunning effect, whichever one. The better you are at something, the more likely you are to see the flaws. And the less experienced you are, the more likely to think you’re good. So, I was looking at the team rating through that lens, and it sounds like it doesn’t apply. That’s an individual kind of phenomenon.
Ron Friedman:
I also want to add that not everything we measured turned out to be positive. For example, we asked these teams about their nutritional habits. We asked them about their sleep habits. None of those things turned out positive in terms of their responses. In fact, we asked people how likely they are to check their phone before brushing their teeth, just as an example of desirable versus undesirable behavior, and there was no significant difference there. And so, it’s not like they’re presenting themselves in this Pollyannish light. This is strictly about behaviors as they relate to the team.
Jay Papasan:
And you’re looking at what actually correlates with performance. So, like on a team. So, it could be that, yeah, checking your phone before you brush your teeth is probably a bad habit, and we don’t want our teenagers to do it, for sure, but it doesn’t correlate positively or negatively to team performance in that sense. Like they’re just as likely as we are to have foibles. I like that ’cause that means if we have an imperfect group of individuals striving to work well together, we can still have a superteam without being perfect individuals.
Ron Friedman:
Absolutely. And it’s strictly about identifying the real levers that lead to higher performance. So, it’s about getting more done and making each other better and improving over time. If you can have those things, chances are you’re going to have a higher performing team, which makes intuitive sense.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. And that’s The ONE Thing in a nutshell, like what actually matters here, and can we focus on the things that matter most? So, I’m gonna go back. You want to get practical, and I want to give everybody practical. There is no one listening to this that wishes they had more meetings. So, when you talk about how they manage their communication and meeting schedule, like no recurring meetings.
Like I’ve been– God, I went through a season where we had a leader that I reported to that the only way they wanted to get updates was in a group setting. And I can remember, like adding up, ’cause a lot of them reported to me, I was like, “This meeting with 20 individuals in it is enormously expensive. If we look at the cost per dollar for this organization, for you to talk to one person while nineteen people witness it,” I couldn’t get my head around it.
So, I know there’s time and a place for a team update. So, walk us through what are the best practices, what’s the one thing or two or three priorities that make them perform better in how they manage their group communications?
Ron Friedman:
Yeah. So, great question. And there are so much I can say. In fact, how to run more effective meetings is a chapter in the book. But one of the things that I’ll point to and one of the things that I think has really resonated with leaders as I’ve spoken about the insights from superteams is establishing meeting guidelines. And meeting guidelines are simple rules that help people distinguish between what warrants a meeting and what doesn’t. Most organizations, most teams do not have meeting guidelines.
Jay Papasan:
Just to clarify, this is not like an agenda. This is, It has to meet these criteria for us to call a meeting, period.
Ron Friedman:
Exactly right. So, I think what’s important to note is that most organizations don’t have this. And so, just about anybody can call a meeting for any reason. And so, if you have a question, meeting. You have an update, meeting. And so, you end up sucking up everyone’s time.
I’ll give you an example of a meeting guideline just to make this concrete. On my team, we have a very simple rule: no decisions, no meetings. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not gonna pull people away from their work. So, if you have an update, send an email. If you have a question, pick up the phone.
Jay Papasan:
I like that, by the way. Can I just validate that? If we’re not going to take an action that has future consequences, and that can be a decision, like this is what we’re going to execute, we don’t need to meet together. There are other reasons that people might call a meeting, like we’re collaborating to build something where, like the one I mentioned, we’re just meeting to give updates, which is I would agree that’s not a great use. So, a decision. So, that’s your criteria. You were about to add something else.
Ron Friedman:
Yeah, there’s another example in the book taken from the content marketing company Percolate. They’ve got a meeting guideline that says no spectators. If you’re not contributing to the meeting, you don’t need to be there. And I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve been in, I’m sure you can relate, where people are just observing.
Now, there are certain moments in a person’s career where you want them to observe because there’s educational value to that. But I think the default in a lot of organizations is having this idea of desirable false consensus, which actually isn’t moving people forward with their projects.
And so, that leads us to the second point that I want to share a best practice for having good meetings, is having a leader ask, “What are you stuck on?” Which is the very opposite of a status meeting. A status meeting is like we just go around the room and celebrate one another’s successes. There’s value to that to an extent, but a better way to run these meetings is to ask people what they’re stuck on, because what it does is a few things. One is it normalizes challenges. Any time you’re doing something difficult, you’re gonna encounter obstacles. And when you ask the question, it normalizes it. It takes the stigma out, and it turns the room into a collaborative forum where everyone is trying to contribute to everyone else’s success.
And so, now, instead of feeling like a meeting is just draining my time and preventing me from moving forward, the meeting is something I look forward to. It’s because I’m gonna get answers to the things that are getting in my way.
Jay Papasan:
You might take issue with it, but you’re calling to mind, for a long time, people pointed to a very famous study, I think it was at Google, that the highest performing teams, the thing that they had in common was psychological safety. And that just, to me, I always thought they have permission to fail forward, right? They can talk about the challenges openly without being judged, ’cause that’s how they get through them faster. It makes total sense, but I rarely see it in the real world.
Ron Friedman:
Yes. Well, in fairness, I think that study was enormously valuable. It was very well-written by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times. There is, however, one sneaky flaw, and not to suggest that-
Jay Papasan:
Controversy on the podcast, folks. No. Charles Duhigg, he’s a legend, The Power of Habit.
Ron Friedman:
Oh, it’s not controversy with Charles Duhigg.
Jay Papasan:
I’m joking.
Ron Friedman:
It’s a controversy around the Google study, which is that it’s a, just a study of Google teams. And so there are certain criteria that Google’s hiring for. But I do believe that psychological safety is necessary in order for a team to improve, because if you don’t have the safety required to take risks, you can’t move forward in your career.
And I think you’re right. I think that question of, “What are you stuck on?” both helps move a team forward, makes good use of meeting time, and validates the use of psychological safety beyond just the theory and makes it actionable for leaders.
Jay Papasan:
So, we can all ask ourselves, like, what’s the one thing I can do with my team to normalize challenge so that people don’t hide it, right? They don’t have to be proud of it, but they’re comfortable sharing it, so that we can work through the solutions together. So, I love that.
So, guidelines for meetings. In the meetings themselves, we’re gonna normalize challenge. Is there anything else that really stood out to you in the way they conducted or didn’t conduct meetings?
Ron Friedman:
A couple of other things I think are worth highlighting. One is sharing leadership. On average teams, one person dominates the conversation. On superteams, everyone takes a turn leading different pieces of the agenda, and that leads people to take ownership, it leads them to be more engaged, and it creates a team mentality.
Jay Papasan:
I love that because it gives your people who are learning leadership a chance to lead a very small portion. It also stops what I call sniping. On some teams, there is a… we call them black hats in our organization after the Edward de Bono, and they’re very valuable. They see how things can fail. And so, a lot of times, when a plan is being discussed or an action or a decision, they will point out why it might fail or what’s wrong, and that’s a very valuable thing.
Done poorly, though, it can feel like you’re being undermined. And when people share leadership, I feel like that happens less ’cause they also know I’m gonna have a turn in that chair, and I’m gonna treat people the way I want them to treat me when I’m leading that portion of the meeting. So, I could just count off 15 benefits to that alone, and sharing the leadership of the meeting, having different segments led by different people, it’s a little bit… it takes more organization, so it requires a little bit more of the leader to make that happen. But once it happens, it actually allows you to step back and see how your people are communicating, what they’re saying and what they’re not saying. It gives you a much better vantage point as a leader.
Ron Friedman:
Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly right. And one of the things that often gets missed when leaders are heading different pieces of the agenda is that they make it really hard for people to disagree.
Jay Papasan:
Especially with them.
Ron Friedman:
Exactly. Exactly. So, it becomes way easier to just stay quiet and nod along with the boss than to point out why maybe they’re making a mistake. And so, what the best leaders do is they’ll pause, and they’ll ask a question along the lines of, “If this decision were to fail, why might that be?” And then, they’re quiet, and they let people talk, and that makes it safe for people to disagree. And what the research tells us is that it leads to decisions that are on average 30% better than leaders who don’t ask that question.
Jay Papasan:
We have a lot of entrepreneurs, and they tend to be a fairly optimistic bunch. So, inviting the black cats in the room to help us, like, where are the potholes, right? We don’t wanna lose our hubcaps on this journey. This is now a safe place to provide that feedback, and we can counter it, not so you can shut them down, so you can actually acknowledge it. That’s a good point. I think we’ve got it covered here. So, I love that where we might fail because it invites us to look at the downside, not just the upside of what we’re doing.
Ron Friedman:
Exactly right. And it’s crucial because, again, people have these insights that you’re not leveraging if you’re just simply encouraging them to agree with you. And there are times when you don’t want that disagreement, and I can appreciate that. But I think keeping in mind that having that question in your back pocket every once in a while is useful because it’ll increase safety, it makes it safe for people to speak up, and it leads to better decisions.
Jay Papasan:
I’m gonna set you up here. So, there’s one of your team members who’s leading a part of the meeting, and they wanna make a decision. And they say, “I think that we have three choices for going forward, and it’s A, B, or C. What do y’all think?” When does the leader need to opine?
Ron Friedman:
Well, I appreciate the setup. And so, what the research suggests is on the best teams, what the leaders do is they’ll stay quiet-
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Ron Friedman:
… until the end.
Jay Papasan:
I love that.
Ron Friedman:
They’ll stay quiet until the end.
Jay Papasan:
I underlined it, I starred it, because it’s incredibly frustrating when I screw that up myself, right? I tend to be very decisive. That’s why you end up in leadership, you see the truth really quickly, but the moment you speak up, you’ve shut everybody else down. So, if I’m gonna beat myself up for poor leadership in this sense, I violated that rule, so I wanted you to teach me that. We need to go last if at all possible, right?
Ron Friedman:
Yeah, we absolutely do. And I think this actually leads me to think about a different finding that is related, but I think it’s important for people to recognize it, and that is one of the best indicators of whether you’re on a high-performing team is the way you feel heading into the meeting. And so, I have this section in the book, where I ask people to think about how they feel. Do they feel more influential than their teammates, less influential than their teammates, or about the same?
And as it turns out, on superteams, they don’t feel more or less. They feel about the same. And that’s really critical because if you feel less influential than your teammates, then it means that you feel threatened by them and that you don’t feel safe speaking up. If you feel more influential than your teammates, then that’s not really good either because it might lead you to dominate the conversation. But feeling equally influential to your teammates, that’s a sign you’re on a high-performing team.
Jay Papasan:
That’s cool. I like that, and it’s probably a by-product of how you’re running them, right? Because everybody has a voice, there’s shared leadership, there’s the invitation to dissent or point out flaws. All of that allows everybody to participate and they feel like even if it statistically is they’re saying less, they have influence. They could say one thing that mattered and it would be listened to and heeded.
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Jay Papasan:
How should we brainstorm? ‘Cause we’ve done a lot of that in the companies that I’ve been a part of, creative, content-driven, training, and it’s a question I have a hint at what the right answer is, and I’ve tried to lead my creative teams, but I would love for you to coach me. If we are trying to generate ideas and perfect, make a decision about how we’re moving forward, right, what’s the best way to brainstorm as a super team?
Ron Friedman:
Yeah, I really appreciate you asking this question because it highlights a much bigger point. And the bigger point is that, a lot of times, leaders say they want collaboration. They want a lot of collaboration. They think that’s a good thing. But what they often get instead is constant togetherness. They have workers who are operating with their emails on, where they’re constantly shuttling in and out of meetings when they’re getting text messages all day long, and that leads to a mindset of distraction.
And so, how I illustrate this that, actually, what we really need is we need opportunities for quiet, private, focused work, and then we need opportunities to be in a group of people where we refine our ideas. But when we confuse the two, we often just get constant togetherness, which doesn’t lead to high performance. And so, what the best teams do, as we described earlier in terms of having things like dedicated focus blocks that allow them to do private focused work, they apply that to their creative tasks as well.
And so, in the research, there’s a distinction between something that we know is brainstorming, which is everybody getting into the conference room, we’re all gonna generate ideas now as a brainstorm, versus what psychologists call brain writing. And what brain writing involves is everyone individually, alone, creates five or comes up with five or six ideas, and then we all go into the conference room and share what we’ve come up with.
And that does a few important things. One is it allows people to come up with genuinely original ideas and not be influenced by their colleagues. The other thing it does is it creates a sense of ownership where you have to come up with some ideas. What happens in the brainstorm is we feel like we’re being productive because we’re listening to other people’s ideas, but we’re not really contributing to those ideas, and when we do contribute, our contribution is anchored around what we’ve already heard.
And so, brain writing leads to higher quantity and higher quality solutions, and what it illustrates is the importance of creating a balance between private focused work and then collaborative activities as a group.
Jay Papasan:
So, it’s set up beforehand. If we do our pre-work, then we all walk in with ideas to contribute. I always saw that, and I can’t remember where that is in the book, Ron, but I remember thinking, I used to work with a lot of deep-thinking individuals on our research and course-writing teams. These are people who think very deeply, but in terms of executive communication, they tend to process more slowly And their best ideas would often show up at my door the next day.
And when you allow them to think beforehand, they can do that deep thinking. And those quiet people that don’t often speak up in the traditional brainstorming meeting often have the best ideas, but you have to allow them time to let that percolate so they can articulate it, have confidence in it, and then share it. And, again, these are all lessons I learned atrociously the hard way by doing it wrong until I finally figured it out.
Ron Friedman:
Yeah, I think that’s a great insight. And also, it reminds me of another counterintuitive finding from the book that we haven’t gotten to and I don’t think we’ll get to, so I’m gonna share it here now, which is the book opens with a part of the study where I presented people with over 20 amenities, things that they might have in their office, and we asked them, “Which do you actually have in your office?”
And the list of amenities was extremely… it was a long list. We had things like ping pong tables and quiet spaces to do your collaborative thinking and having an office gym, and all the things that we often associate with places like Google that are really fancy and lavish workplaces. And as it turns out, the only amenity that mattered for having a high-performing team is having a quiet space to do focus work.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Ron Friedman:
And that illustrates how-
Jay Papasan:
Does anybody like a cubicle? I mean, really?
Ron Friedman:
Well-
Jay Papasan:
I know that they make space sense, but like-
Ron Friedman:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
… unless you can afford noise-canceling headphones and blinders, it can be very distracting environment to do deep work.
Ron Friedman:
Exactly right. And having that quiet space where you can go, maybe it’s like an office library or just a conference room that is cordoned off for private thinking, unless you have that, you’re not gonna have a high-performing team. And I think what often gets missed by leaders is that most offices are an attentional war zone, and it’s why so many people prefer to work from home.
And that turns out not to be the answer either, because when we look to see where are high-performing teams most likely to occur, it wasn’t in the office, it wasn’t at home, and it wasn’t hybrid. It didn’t matter. The location didn’t matter. And it’s because how a team works is vastly more important than where a team works. So, when leaders think, “Okay, we gotta get everybody in the office ’cause that’s where we’re gonna get the best collaboration,” what often happens is you end up having people commute two hours each way just so that they can show up at the office and fire up their Zoom and join the same conference call they could have attended from home, and that contributes to burnout and resentment. It doesn’t lead to high performance.
Jay Papasan:
It also adds performative work, in my opinion. I think a lot of people now feel the burden of the old school people, and I’m gonna call them old school ’cause I’ve worked with a few of them, that wanted everybody in the office. They really resisted the move to virtual for almost anyone, unless they couldn’t keep talent around it. And I’ve worked with them both personally and also in my consulting. They wanted to see that the work was being done, and that’s rarely what you get to witness. Like, how do you witness a thought worker working? You see them at their desk, but you don’t know if they’re actually being productive in that moment.
So yeah, performative work is one of those things where, yes, you were here, yes, you were moving things around, but it’s like the intern that doesn’t have enough work. They just walk around fast and carry papers so that they look like they’re doing something.
Ron Friedman:
Yes. And so, what I think it comes down to is taking advantage of being together requires intention and it requires planning. So, it’s one thing to say everybody’s got to be in the office every day, and it’s another to say, “Look, we’re going to trust you to figure out where you work best. But on Tuesday and Thursday, we’re going to have strategic discussions, so get your pre-reads in on Friday so everyone can show up ready to contribute.” That allows people to work in the way that they work best while ensuring that we get the most out of actually being together as a group.
Jay Papasan:
Okay, you said the magic word. I had about seven topics I was hoping we’d get to, but of course, because I interrupted you every five seconds and I’m so curious about everything, we really stayed in one lane, and that’s fine, and that’ll encourage our listeners to go and pick up the book. I found it, if you’re leading a small or a large team or thinking about building one, I found it something that almost could serve… You can read it, but it also could be a reference.
I’ve got a challenge around this. I can go, how do we make each other better? I’m going to go look at those chapters. How do we get more done? I want to work on productivity. I can go to the different sections. It is organized into discrete topics. But trust was one that stood out for me, and it feels like a default. I want to work with people I trust. But you said earlier, everything here is a skill. So, what are the most important skills around building and retaining trust in a superteam? Because I feel like when trust is gone, it’s really hard to save a team.
Ron Friedman:
Yeah. Look, I have to tell you, I took trust for granted for a really long time. I talk about this in the book. My first book, The Best Place to Work, I didn’t even have a chapter on trust, ’cause I was like, “It’s so obvious how,” like it’s like telling people you need to have running water in an office. It’s so obvious.
But what the research has shown over the last 10 years, that this, in fact, is a skill that you can build, and it’s a skill you can build relatively quickly when you understand what the building blocks of trust come down to. And trust in a workplace is very different than trust outside the workplace. And so, the factors that lead you to trust your best friend aren’t necessarily the factors that lead you to trust a colleague or the factors that contribute to trust in a surgeon.
So, for example, with a surgeon, I don’t necessarily need them to be my best friend. I want to know that they’ve got the expertise-
Jay Papasan:
Competence.
Ron Friedman:
… and know-how to do a good job.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Ron Friedman:
Competence, that’s right. So, anyway. So, in the book I talk about what are the three factors that are crucial for trust both in a leader and in a colleague, and it comes down to three things. The first is competence. If you have a teammate and you don’t trust that teammate to do their job well, you’re not gonna trust them. Obvious. The second is caring. You need to believe that person cares about you and your career outcomes. If you have a very competent colleague, but you don’t think that they really care about you, you’re not gonna trust them. And the third thing is consistency. You can be very competent, you can be very caring, but if you’re inconsistent about either one of those, people are not gonna trust you.
Now, on the surface, those things can feel obvious, but here’s where I think it’s valuable. One is you can very quickly diagnose where a relationship has gone wrong. I can very quickly identify people I don’t trust and why I don’t trust them. And usually, it has to do with caring. It usually has to do with caring, not competence. Because if they’re not competent, the kind of something I’ve learned along the way is if someone’s not competent, you just pretend they’re dead. You just follow, you just work around them because it’s the only way to get things moving. But the other thing is we unknowingly sabotage our trust in us all the time. All the time.
And so, I’ll give you an example. If I am in meetings or I’m in podcasts all day with smart people like Jay, and I don’t communicate to my team in advance that I’m not gonna be available, I become inconsistent. And if I’m inconsistent, people aren’t gonna trust me. So, there are trust traps for each one of these three building blocks I talk about in the book and they’re important to navigate because otherwise trust is gonna break down. And if people don’t trust you, you can’t make them better as a team.
Jay Papasan:
So, it feels like, to me, caring is the most important. If you really care, you’re more motivated to be competent and consistent, right? If there was one to start with, that’s where I would go. And you said that’s the one that if it’s failing, that’s where it goes wrong. But you said something, and I want to just be clear. Is it about me caring about my teammates? Is it about me caring about the work product? Is it about me caring about the customer, or all of the above?
Ron Friedman:
It’s about caring about your teammates.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Ron Friedman:
And it’s about me caring about you and your success even outside the workplace. It’s about genuinely valuing you as an individual. And I will say, though, in my experience, caring is typically the thing that breaks down, only because I really value competence. And so if it’s not there, I move on very quickly. But I don’t necessarily think that caring is more important because I’ve had people who I’ve worked with who really care, but they don’t have the skill, and if they don’t have the skill, the trust isn’t going to be there.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. But caring is trainable?
Ron Friedman:
Absolutely. It’s trainable to the extent that you can avoid the mistakes that are very common. And so, for example, keeping people in the loop is a really crucial skill. It’s not something that is a part of competence. It doesn’t fall under competence. If you and I are on a team and a client communicates an update to me, that is important for you to know, but I don’t take the time or make the effort to clue you in because it’s not vital to the project, that doesn’t fall under competence. It falls under overlooking caring.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. That’s a great example, and we’ve all committed it unintentionally, but those people who monopolize information, there are people in big organizations that monopolize it for power, and they use it as a, “I know, therefore I’ll have to be in the meeting,” and they only share it in very controlled situations. And yeah, that creates friction in the relationship.
Ron Friedman:
And it’s typically the people who feel insecure to begin with that hoard information, that make others insecure. And so, you’ve got to… I think this is why these skills are important to train, and I really believe this. I think so much of our focus in the workplace as leaders or as individuals, it’s about competence. We’re like, “How do we do a great job?” But being a good teammate is not obvious. How to make other people better at their job feels like something that doesn’t come naturally to most people. It’s something that is taught on sports teams, but it hasn’t been taught to people in the workplace, and I think it’s a really overlooked component of what leads to a superteam.
Jay Papasan:
That means it’s just an opportunity, right? Because it’s overlooked, if you’re part of a team, it becomes an opportunity for you to immediately level up. I want to open up another can of worms, ’cause I could go, I’m fascinated by this. As someone who did not think of themselves as a natural leader, I’ve tried to be intentional about my pursuit of the skills. And so, when I get confronted with reliable research like you have in your book that points to things that actually correlate with higher performance, all the things that you’re talking about, it becomes like a map for me.
So, we’ve got a lot of people listening to this podcast. Some of them have teams, some of them are part of a team, some of them are thinking about building a team. What would be one challenge that we could give them to take action on what we’ve already talked about today?
Ron Friedman:
I think there’s a component of teamwork that leaders and future leaders are never taught that is really important for us to share with them, and that is, how do you create a team mentality? How do you take a group of strangers and turn them into a team? And I think a lot of teams get this wrong, which is why you see so much dysfunction in the workplace.
So, here’s what the three factors are that people need in order to feel like they’re part of a team. The first thing they need is a shared goal. I need to know that you and I are working towards the same outcome. So, if I need to be home by 5:00 to take my kids to soccer, and you’re trying to get a promotion, we do not have a shared goal, and it’s going to lead to conflict.
The second thing you need is you need role clarity. I need to know what I’m responsible for, and I need to know what you’re responsible for, and I need to understand how those two things intersect. If we don’t have role clarity, one of two things is going to happen. We’re going to have dropped balls, because I think it’s your responsibility and you think it’s my responsibility, or we’re going to have turf wars because we both think it’s our responsibility.
Jay Papasan:
Neither of those is good.
Ron Friedman:
Right. And the third thing you need is you need interdependence. Interdependence, just a fancy psychological term that means we need to believe that we need each other in order to be successful. Sales teams have a huge problem with interdependence. If I have a quota and you have a quota, you succeeding at your quota isn’t helping me in any way. In fact, you’re a competitor.
And so, unless you have those three things, unless you have shared goals, role clarity, and interdependence, you don’t have a team, you have a recipe for dysfunction. And this is why so many people struggle and don’t feel like they’re part of a team. We throw that word team around all the time, but most people aren’t part of a team. They’re just a group of people who happen to work together.
And so, if you’re trying to build a real team, you got to start with those three things, because, otherwise, you’re just not going to be operating at a high level.
Jay Papasan:
So, why don’t we turn that into a challenge by asking, “What’s one thing I can do to create a better sense of team mentality on my team, either through clarity of the goal we’re seeking, the roles that we have in hitting that goal, and how we depend on each other?”
That’s a big, long question, but we have a lot of those in the book, too. But that gives people three places through one question that they could explore, maybe, their biggest opportunity to create team mentality. Does that work for you?
Ron Friedman:
I think that’s great. I hope it doesn’t overwhelm people. And I’ll give you a little bit of a shortcut if you are wanting an answer quickly, and that is to find a metric that the team can only succeed at if everyone contributes to it. So, for a lot of teams, it might be something like a net promoter score, because even if I’m really great at this and you’re not great at this, then we’re not going to succeed. And so, what that does is when you have that shared metric that everyone is driving for, it leads people to help one another because they want the team to succeed, and that’s a great shortcut to building a team mentality.
Jay Papasan:
That was a huge component to Keller Williams’ growth. I was there for almost 26 years, got to see it early on. And the fact that they focused on profit share, not profit, not revenue, it united everyone around more things than not. So, if people are focused on profit share, they care about revenue, but they also care about expenses. And so, yeah, that’s the example I’ve lived with for a long time that I’ve seen work in a small business environment where people tend to care about more than just their role. So, that’s a great, like, what’s the one metric we could introduce that unites the team?
Ron Friedman:
Exactly.
Jay Papasan:
Ron, thank you so much for pouring into us, and it’s very clear, if it’s not clear to people listening, that we could talk for 10 hours and still not cover the whole book. There’s a lot in this. So, thank you for creating it. How long did it take y’all to do this research?
Ron Friedman:
Oh, man. It took five years. And the real challenge, and you’ll appreciate this, Jay, as a writer, is turning data into a compelling story. I created a real challenge for myself, and hopefully you experienced it in a positive way and felt like I succeeded.
Jay Papasan:
You launch each chapter with a story to illustrate the points. I think you did the hard work, because people learn through stories, not through stats. But the stats give us something with weight if we’re trying to bring it to our team, and here’s why. They’re 30% more likely. That gives you the evidence to now invest in the story that you provided. So, yes, I give you my salute as five years. Well done, sir.
Ron Friedman:
Thank you.
Jay Papasan:
All right. Thank you again, Ron, and thanks everybody for listening.
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