The Real Challenge of Managing Freelancers

In the early 2000s, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London — one of the world's leading centres for children's heart surgery — had a problem that had nothing to do with surgery. It was in the handover that followed, when a child was moved from the operating theatre to intensive care. A human-factors researcher observing those transfers counted an average of about five technical errors and two missing pieces of information per child. Everyone involved was an expert at their own part. The handover between them belonged to no one — the same gap that quietly undermines cross-functional teams in every industry. The fix started on a Sunday, when surgeon Martin Elliott and intensive care consultant Allan Goldman, exhausted after a night of operating, watched a Formula One pit stop on television and recognized their own handover, done far better. Ferrari stepped in — hosting the team at Silverstone and Maranello, and helping the hospital win the grant that restarted the work. What came out of it was a seven-page protocol. A transfer form goes to intensive care thirty minutes before the child arrives. The handover then runs in three phases that never overlap: equipment first, then information delivered without interruption, then a discussion led by the receiving doctor. And it ends with a formal moment when ownership passes from the anaesthetist to the intensivist. Technical errors fell by 42 percent and missing information by about half, with no added time. This video unpacks why that gap existed in the first place, what the protocol actually changed, and three ways to redesign the handoffs on your own team. // CHAPTERS 0:00 Great Ormond Street Hospital 2:10 The most dangerous ten minutes in the hospital 4:08 The trouble with handoffs 5:54 The seven page protocol 9:05 The project that almost stalled 14:30 Making Better Handoffs Happen// LEADERSHIP LESSONS - Every part performed by an expert doesn't add up to a handoff performed well — the seam between teams needs an owner of its own - Watch the small slips, not just the big failures — nobody recovers from an error they never saw - Sequence beats speed: move the assets, then transfer the context, then plan, instead of collapsing all three into one meeting - Good design doesn't make your stars better, it makes the outcome less dependent on them having a good day// NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world's leading business thinkers, David's forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist who serves on the faculty at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the best-selling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world's top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning. David works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David's keynotes aren't just entertaining and enlightening, they're evidence based and immensely practical—offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. // CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

In 2017, Tesla set out to build a car factory so automated that people would barely be needed. The target was five thousand Model 3s a week. Across the entire third quarter, the line produced 260 cars. It remains the best-documented attempt we have at replacing people with machines at scale, which makes it the right place to start if you're worried about AI replacing jobs. The popular version of this story is a redemption arc. Musk owns the mistake, tears out the machines, puts people back on the line, and production recovers. All of that happened. It's also the least transferable lesson in the story, because the fix only worked for a reason most organizations won't have next time: the skill was still in the building. What I study is where teams actually build judgment, and the answer is almost never the training program. It's the routine, repetitive work — exactly the work that's easiest to automate. A five-page paper from 1983 explained why that's a trap, and Ford recently ran into it with AI, after years of quietly losing veteran engineers to ordinary attrition. This video covers what broke at Tesla, the research that explains it, what Ford faced next, and two questions to ask before you automate anything on your team. // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // CHAPTERS 0:00 Everyone's worried about the wrong AI risk 2:44 Tesla & The Alien Dreadnought 6:57 The Ironies Of Automation 11:19 Automate Last 17:05 Ford & When The Bill Comes Due // LEADERSHIP LESSONS - Automation doesn't shrink the human role — it concentrates it into the exceptions nobody designed for - The danger of AI isn't losing the job, it's losing the place people learned to do it - Ask what someone learns from a task before asking whether a tool can do it - Treat routine work as tuition, not overhead — it's where pattern recognition gets built - A process can be un-automated in a season; a talent pipeline has to be rebuilt one person at a time - Expertise rarely leaves by decision. It leaves at a normal rate, and no dashboard reports it. If you're rolling out AI on your team, planning around retirements, or wondering where your next experts will come from, this isn't a car story. It's a warning with a checklist attached. Comment below: what routine work taught you the most early in your career? // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

AI might make management more efficient. But efficiency isn’t the same thing as leadership. In this video, I break down four parts of management I would never delegate to AI and why keeping them human matters more as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the workplace. AI can summarize meetings, organize information, draft emails, analyze data, and take a lot of administrative work off your plate. That’s a good thing. But there are some responsibilities managers shouldn’t automate away. 00:00 AI can do many things...but not everything. 00:10 Meet Dr. David Burkus 01:05 Don’t Let AI Decide “What” 02:28 Don’t Let AI Judge Your Team 04:44 Don’t Let AI Outsource The Conversation 06:11 Don’t Let AI Create Meaning // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/youtube // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

New team collaboration breaks for a reason that looks like something else. You inherited a team, or built one, or a reorg assembled one for you, and on paper it's the kind of group you'd point to in a leadership meeting. Six weeks in, the work is slower than it was when everyone was working alone. I've told myself the same thing you're telling yourself: they just need time. It's a reasonable read, and it's how most of us were taught teams work. It's also the most expensive assumption a leader can make, because time isn't what fixes this — time is just the slowest way to deliver the two things that actually do. Every fast-forming team I've worked with had the same advantage, and it wasn't hours. Their people knew who knew what, and they knew how each other operated. Aviation research from the 1980s stumbled into the first half of this by accident, while studying something else entirely. Research on surgical teams named both halves in the title of the paper. So this is the practical version: why capable teams stall anyway, the two deficits underneath it, and the specific moves that close them in a week instead of six months — the role conversation most leaders think they've already had, the operating manual each person writes for themselves, the shared work that builds more understanding than any dinner will, and the briefing that sets the norms before the first real deadline tests them. // CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:07 New Teams Don't Have A Time Problem 5:00 The Two Conditions for Click 6:16 Get Uncomfortably Specific About Roles 7:43 Hand Out Your Manual Of Me 9:07 Build Empathy Through The Work 11:30 Run The Pre-Flight Briefing // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // LEADERSHIP LESSONS -A new team's problem isn't tenure — it's that nobody yet knows who knows what, or how anyone else operates -Clarity isn't the org chart, it's decision rights: what each person can decide without asking you -Most friction diagnosed as a personality conflict is two people who each believed something was theirs -Empathy on a team isn't friendship — it's knowing enough about how someone works to disagree with them efficiently -Build the relationship through shared work, then reflect on it; the output isn't the point, watching each other think is -Launch the team, not just the project — and write the norms down, because a norm that lives only in a conversation is a memory of a meeting // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus

Making mistakes is part of leadership. Knowing how to own them and apologize for them is a leadership skill most people never learn. In this video, I break down nine (yes, nine!) apologies every leader will eventually have to make. From owning a bad decision or broken promise to apologizing for not listening, waiting too long to act, or handling a difficult situation poorly. We’ll also cover the harder apologies: taking responsibility for your team’s mistakes, addressing painful decisions like layoffs and reorganizations, and even apologizing on behalf of an entire organization. More importantly, I’ll show you what makes an effective apology actually work. Research on leadership, psychological safety, trust, and corporate apologies reveals that the best apologies don’t explain away responsibility. They acknowledge what happened, own what needs to be owned, and make clear what changes next. You’re going to get things wrong. The question is whether your response rebuilds trust...or gives people another reason to lose it. // NEWSLETTER Want to build your best team ever? Join 25,000+ leaders who receive these insights in my free newsletter: https://davidburkus.com/podcast // SPEAKING Like what you heard? Learn more or find out how to bring me to your company or event: https://davidburkus.com/keynote-speaker/ // ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration. An organizational psychologist and professor at Columbia University, Dr. David Burkus is the bestselling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS Mornings. David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening—they’re evidence-based and immensely practical, offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately. //CONNECT LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidburkus/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davidburkus Facebook: http://www.FB.com/DrDavidBurkus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DavidBurkus