Stuck in Meetings All Day? Your Team May Be Broken (And How to Fix It)

You can have a team full of talented, hardworking people and still struggle to get anything done. Everyone's busy, calendars are packed, and somehow the important work keeps getting pushed aside. What if the problem isn't the people on your team, but the way you're working together?

Psychologist and bestselling author Ron Friedman spent five years studying what separates high-performing teams from everyone else. After surveying more than 6,000 workers, he discovered that the best teams aren't necessarily made up of more productive individuals. They've learned how to work together differently.

Ron joins Jay Papasan to share insights from his new book, Superteams. They discuss why individual productivity habits can create team-wide bottlenecks, how to make meetings worth attending, and why the best brainstorming starts before anyone enters the room. They also break down the three ingredients of workplace trust and what turns a group of coworkers into an actual team.

In this episode, you'll learn:

- How to tell if you're on a super team or a dysfunctional one

- Why turning off notifications doesn't predict a high-performing team

- The meeting rule that kills any meeting without a decision to make

- One sneaky flaw in Google's famous study of psychological safety

- Why brain writing beats group brainstorming

- Three things that turn a group of people into a real team

Chapters:

(00:00) What 6,000 Workers Said About Their Teams

(02:42) Productivity Can't Save You on a Broken Team

(06:00) The Weak Link Theory of Teams

(10:14) No Decisions? No Meeting.

(21:26) Can You Have TOO MUCH Collaboration?

(34:14) The Recipe for a Dysfunctional Team

Links & Tools from This Episode:

• The ONE Thing Operating System

• Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams by Ron Friedman

• The Best Place to Work by Ron Friedman

• Ron Friedman’s Website

• Free Resources