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High Performing Teams With Ron Friedman – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1058 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with my friend Ron Friedman gets into one of the most misunderstood ideas in modern work: the best teams are not necessarily the ones that collaborate the most, get along the best or work the longest hours. Ron makes a very different case. High-performing teams are much more deliberate about how they manage time, energy and attention. They protect focus. They make one another better. They keep learning even when things are already going well. In other words, great teamwork is not simply a matter of chemistry or culture. It is built through repeatable habits. Ron is an award-winning social psychologist, bestselling author and expert on the science of high performance. His previous books, The Best Place To Work and Decoding Greatness, explored how organizations create better workplaces and how individuals can learn from top performers.

His latest book, Superteams – The Science And Secrets Of High-Performing Teams, turns that lens toward a deceptively simple question: what do the best teams actually do differently?

To answer that, Ron surveyed thousands of people across industries and found that fewer than one in ten teams qualified as superteams. What separated them was not office perks, hustle culture or endless togetherness. In fact, one of the more powerful ideas in this conversation is that collaboration does not mean constant availability. The best teams know when to come together, but they also know when to protect attention so people can do meaningful work without guilt, interruption or the need to make up for lost time at night and on weekends. In this conversation, we talk about meeting-free days, focus blocks, role clarity, shared goals, psychological safety and why “no decision, no meeting” may be one of the simplest ways to improve work. We also get into remote, hybrid and in-office teams, why where people work matters less than how teams work, and how AI is creating both new risks and new opportunities for collaboration. Mostly, this is a conversation about what makes work meaningful. On average teams, people often describe meaning in terms of earning a salary and supporting their family. On superteams, Ron found something different: the team itself becomes a source of meaning. That is a powerful shift. The future of work may not belong to the teams that stay busiest. It may belong to the teams that are most intentional about attention, recovery, learning and helping one another get better.

Listen to my conversation with Ron Friedman here: High Performing Teams With Ron Friedman – TWMJ #1058.

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.