If Your Team Never Fails, It Isn’t Learning

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:39)
I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn.
Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit.

**Ron Friedman** (1:00)
Over the last few years, my team and I have done a deep dive on what high-performing teams do differently. We surveyed thousands of workers and asked them two key questions about their teams. Number one, how effective is your team at meeting its goals? Number 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, a very tiny group we call Superteams, and looked at what are the Superteams doing differently on a day-to-day basis. And we looked at everything from how they structure their day to how they run their meetings, to even how they recover in the evenings and weekends. The patterns were striking.
Superteams share three key strengths. 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 one another better. And the third is that, they're not satisfied doing great work, they're constantly building their skills and improving over time. What we're going to cover is the ladder of the three strengths, how Superteams get better over time. At most companies, getting better is surprisingly difficult. And that's because improvement requires two things that most businesses are not particularly comfortable with, and that is risk taking and failure. Trying something new often involves making mistakes. Unless the team feels comfortable making those mistakes, learning simply becomes impossible. There are a few tactics that I often see on Superteams. The first is that they are constantly experiment. The other thing that they are very high on is they're very high on something called feedback seeking. And the third thing is that they reward innovation. And so we tend to see more people trying new things because there's more of an opportunity for people who come up with new ideas to incorporate what they find into their career path.
An experiment is a low small risk test that allows your team to learn something new before committing to a decision. By definition, if you know it's going to work, it's not an experiment. You're exchanging efficiency for information. So even if it doesn't work out, even if the experiment is a failure, you're going to learn something that helps you improve in the future. I think that there are simple things that any leader can do to incorporate this learning and experimentation mindset. And part of it is having a weekly review of experiments that are ongoing, regardless of whether they were successful or failures. The idea is to socialize some of these findings so that people appreciate that this is something that is a routine way in which this team operates. One of the things we know from the research is that 85% turns out to be a pretty good indicator. You're looking for 85% success. It tells you you're generally successful, but it also tells you you're failing a small portion of the time. And that is suggestive of someone who is stretching while still performing at a high level.
One of the fascinating findings in our research on Superteams is that the quantity of feedback that they receive on a regular basis.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:00)
Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection and apply to find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300,000 membership rewards points. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Welcome offers vary and you may not be eligible for an offer. Learn more at americanexpress.com/business-platinum.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:31)
This episode is brought to you by San Pellegrino Chow, a gift from Italy to your home.
San Pellegrino Chow is a flavored sparkling water made real fruit juice finished with a pinch of Sicilian salt for a perfectly balanced taste. So which flavor will you choose? Peach, lime, blood orange, cherry, or maybe the all-new limoncello, crafted in Italy with zero grams of added sugar. San Pellegrino Chow. Buy it now.