Ron Friedman is an award-winning psychologist who helps leaders build high-performing teams. He has joined us previously for a great session (look in the content library). Ron is the bestselling author of The Best Place to Work and Decoding Greatness, and his new book, Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, reveals what the best teams do differently. He is the founder of Superteams, Inc., where he and his team deliver keynotes, workshops, and executive advisory to senior leaders around the world.
An expert on human motivation, Friedman has served on the faculties of the University of Rochester, Nazareth College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, FOX, NBC, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Inc.
Ron Friedman surveyed more than 6,000 knowledge workers to find what separates the best teams from the rest. The patterns were consistent, and most of them were not about talent. They came down to things a leader does on purpose, and several run against what a CEO's instinct says to do as the company scales.
One example: Meetings.
Two-thirds of workers say meetings stop them finishing their actual work, and the cost isn't only the hour in the room. Ron's research shows a meeting damages your focus before it starts and leaves a fog afterwards that can last 45 minutes. Superteams run far fewer meetings than average teams. The interesting part is the rule they use to decide which meetings never get booked, and it isn't the cost calculator most companies reach for.
Second example: Trust.
Ron makes the case that trust isn't a mood that develops over time but something predictable, with three specific components a leader can build deliberately. One of them is the reason that checking up on a colleague's work erodes their trust in you even when they've never let you down. For a CEO scaling from fifteen people to eighty, that line between staying close and taking over is the whole game, and most get it wrong in a way the data can measure.
Third example: Certainty.
The instinct in front of a board, and more so when you're venture funded, is to project confidence. Superteam leaders do the opposite: they're 33% more likely to admit when they're missing information, and it makes them more trusted, not less. There's a specific way they say it that turns "I don't know" into a signal of strength rather than a gap.
In this session Ron will share pain points that he has seen in venture-funded companies that CEOs must deal with and practices that have CEOs build Super-teams.
There are some great resources on his website. superteamsinc.com.