Social psychologist: Return to office is ‘lazy leadership.’ Here’s what actually makes high-performing teams

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: How effective is your team at achieving its goals? Compared with other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance? “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. 1. Superteams get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention “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