Over the past few years, the social psychologist Ron Friedman has been studying what makes teams successful—really successful—and what high-performing teams do differently.
In his new book, Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, Friedman has written the ultimate playbook for how to build exceptional teams. He and his team asked 6,000 knowledge workers across a number of industries—including tech, legal, marketing, and sales—two simple questions:
“Then we took teams that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 on both items and we looked at what those teams did differently,” Friedman tells Fast Company. “We looked at everything from how they run meetings, to how they recover on weekends and vacations, [how they] structure teams, and we discovered the same patterns across the companies over and over.”
Friedman says so-called “superteams” have three key strengths that make them stand out. Here’s what they are.
“Over the last few years, people have asked, why are employees so burned out?” Friedman says. “The better question is, how do they manage to get anything done in the first place?”
The average worker loses 18 hours to meetings, and another 11 hours to email, text messages, and Slack. So, while workers are constantly communicating, they’ve lost 29 hours a week before accomplishing a single task, he says.
Superteams are 50% better than average at avoiding unnecessary meetings and 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings. But they don’t just play defense—they schedule dedicated focus blocks where people can do deep work without being expected to respond to messages during the day. Superteams are significantly more likely to hold meeting-free days, but call them “get things done days.”
One company that excels at this is Shopify, which banned recurring meetings in 2023 for two weeks. After this cooling-off period, most of the meetings never returned, and the company ended up ditching 33% of them.
Simply put, superteam leaders encourage team members to protect their time.
High-performing teams make each other better by sharing credit, holding one another accountable, and raising one another’s confidence. Knowing that a team has your back gives workers the courage to confront bigger challenges and take more intelligent risks.
“Even when things are going well, superteams are constantly looking for ways to build new skills and improve over time,” Friedman explains. “Average teams get complacent after success and simply repeat what has worked in the past; that leads them to fall behind.”
Superteams, however, continue to try new things and experiment 48% more often than average teams, which is a major reason why they continue to improve.
According to Friedman, LinkedIn’s cofounder Reid Hoffman is a good example of a leader who does this. He is better at making employees feel safe to make mistakes, because that’s what helps them learn.
“Back when he was running LinkedIn, Hoffman would tell his team he didn’t want perfection. He wanted them to fail 15% of the time,” Friedman says. “In his view, if the team was getting everything right, it didn’t mean they were perfect. It meant they were moving too slowly.”
Netflix is another example of a company that encourages its employees to take more risks, says Friedman.
“When a leader says everyone needs to get back into the office, that is lazy leadership,” Friedman says. “We looked at where superteams are most likely to form: working in the office, hybrid, or remotely, and the answer is none of the above. How a team works is more important than where a team works.”
“I have seen so many smart, ambitious professionals have to commute two hours to join a Zoom call. That doesn’t contributive to higher productivity, that contrubutes to burnout and resentment,” he adds.
Making the most out of being in the same location requires intention and planning. Leaders are better off having team members meet less, but use that time for strategic discussions, where workers have already read a memo or project proposal ahead of time and are ready to contribute.