High Performing Teams With Ron Friedman - TWMJ #1058

Mitch Joel (0:00)

Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 1058 of Thinking With Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, October the 18th, 2026 Let's get on with the conversation.

Do you think it's possible that the secret to high-performing teams is actually less teamwork?

There's an assumption that we have that the best teams collaborate more, that they meet more often, or they communicate more frequently, or maybe they even just spend more time together. But what if all of that togetherness is actually making it harder for people to do great work? So that's an interesting thought and it comes directly from my good friend Ron Friedman. Ron is a social psychologist who has spent his career studying the science of these high performers. His book Superteams looks specifically at what separates exceptional teams from the average ones. Rather than studying famous companies and reverse engineering their success, which Ron is great at, him and his team surveyed thousands of people across industries and identified a surprisingly small group of teams consistently operating at the highest level. Now, what emerged was three patterns. One, they manage their time, energy, and attention better. Two, is they actively make one another better. Three, they keep improving even when things are already going well.

Ron shares some really fascinating research into how these high-performing teams are already using AI differently. They're not hiding it, they're not keeping their best prompts or agents to themselves. They're openly sharing what they're learning so that the entire team gets better. So there's a big idea here. A great team isn't simply a collection of very talented, highly skilled people. It's a group of people who are deliberate about creating the conditions for everyone around them to become better. Take a listen to this one and enjoy the conversation.

So who are you and what do you do?

Ron Friedman (2:05)

My name is Ron Friedman. I'm a social psychologist. I focus on helping leaders build high-performing teams.

Mitch Joel (2:11)

You've got a new book.

Ron Friedman (2:13)

I do. You want to hear about it?

Mitch Joel (2:16)

That's your cue. Yeah, that's your cue to say the title and be all pumped up about it. Go for it.

Ron Friedman (2:21)

The new book is called Superteams, and let me give you a little background. I'm a, as I mentioned, social psychologist. I started off as a psychology professor, teaching at colleges and universities. I then went off into the corporate world. When I got there, I discovered there was a massive divide between latest science and the modern workplace. Everything from how companies hire to the way managers motivate, to the basic layout of the modern office, all of it just appeared blind to a wealth of research. That led me to write my first book. That book became The Best Place to Work. In it, I turned over a thousand academic studies into plain English, so that regardless if you're just someone starting out or you're a CEO, you have access to the best research on how to create a great workplace, there was something missing from that book. That is, what do the best teams do differently?

Even within the best organizations, you have a lot of variability across teams. Some teams are great, some teams are not so great. I was interested in this book in looking at what the best teams do differently. That's why it's called Superteams. It's about the highest-performing teams and what separates them on a day-to-day level from average teams.

Mitch Joel (3:22)

Ron, start with how you figured out the filter of what you would define as a superteam. I'm asking this specifically because I'm curious, is this the type of thing where you go, oh, Patagonia is a successful brand, ergo, they must have a great team. Or was it, there's this great team and you may not know the brand, but it's a great team. How did you figure out what the filter would be?

Ron Friedman (3:45)

Yeah, great question. I approached this as a researcher would. What we did was we polled over 6,000 individuals, and we looked at individuals from across a wide range of industries. Some are salespeople, some are in legal, some are in the medical profession, and we asked them two simple questions about their teams.

Now, those questions were number one, on a scale of one to 10, how effective is your team at achieving its goals?

Two, is compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? Then we took the teams with a perfect score, very small group, about 8% of teams qualify as superteams. And we looked at what do the superteams 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 their off hours and weekends. And if I may, the patterns here were striking. We see the same patterns again and again, regardless of industry, and those patterns are the highest-performing teams get more done by better managing their time, energy and attention. That's the first strength. The second strength is they are not just collaborating well, they actively make one another better. And the third strength is even when things are going well, they're not satisfied. They're constantly building new skills and improving over time. And the encouraging thing is each of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance. Now, you asked about Patagonia, and I want to say we very deliberately did not look at case studies. And the reason we did not look at case studies, and I start the book by talking about my personal experience going into the corporate world, I started off working at a very competitive political consultancy, where everyone was basically taught the only way to succeed in this organization is to be the smartest person in the room. So there was a lot of competition. There was no team mentality. People were constantly elbowing one another to try and stand out.