RON FRIEDMAN: 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? And 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 super teams, and looked at what are the super teams 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. In today's discussion, what we're going to cover is the latter of the three strengths how super teams 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 experimenting. 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 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 is much higher than those on average teams. And part of it is because the leader is delivering feedback more frequently, and they're doing it in a way that is motivating rather than judgmental. But on superteams, people get more feedback from their colleagues. And it's not because their colleagues are pointing out mistakes that they're making. It's because they're sharing their work early, they're getting input from their colleagues, and they're making revisions before the work gets to the boss or to the client. There are a couple of things that leaders can do to get their team higher in feedback seeking. The first thing is, focus on the future, not the past. The second thing is, don't provide a laundry list of all the things they need to change. Focus on one small thing they can change to get better in the future. And the third thing is, when possible, try to make it a conversation. Don't just say, here's what I need you to do. Say, here's what I think might help in the future. What do you think? That's the kind of feedback that gets people feeling energized rather than judged.

One of the things that superteams do really well is they reward innovation. And my favorite example of this is GM, the company that is best known for Post-Its and for Scotch Tape. They've been around for over 120 years. The question is, how do you create a company that is so effective for so long? One of their secrets is rewarding innovation. At 3M, they have a policy called the 30% rule. In order for a division to earn its bonus, at least 30% of its revenue must come from a product introduced in the last four years. And I love this approach, because it ensures that even if things are going well, your team will not coast, because they're constantly worried about what's next. One of the keys is rewarding intelligent failure. And what that refers is the idea that when someone takes a real risk and it doesn't work out, they get the same level of reward as someone whose experiment resulted in a giant success. I think unless you're seeing some degree of failure or setbacks, what it suggests is not that everything is going perfectly, but you're not stretching your skills or developing in an ongoing way. Part of what leaders need to let go of is the desire for perfection, and instead embrace the progress mentality-- and that requires portfolio thinking. You're going to have some degree of risk, and that's what's going to lead to ongoing improvement. But if you have no risk and everything is going perfectly, it doesn't mean you're getting everything right. It means you're falling behind. [MUSIC PLAYING]