Yes, You Should Get Paid to Watch Basketball at Work

Why your manager should embrace March Madness.

What’s your company doing this year for March Madness?  If your workplace is like most, the answer is a big fat nothing.

Instead of leveraging the NCAA’s annual tournament and turning it into a genuine bonding experience between colleagues, most organizations pretend it isn’t happening.

On the surface, ignoring a sporting event that takes place during regular work hours might appear like sound business practice. After all, companies need to generate profit, and it’s hard to generate profit when your employees are huddled around a television, right?

Wrong.

What this perspective overlooks is that productivity isn’t simply a function of how many hours we spend at the office. It also depends on the quality of our workplace experience. And one critical feature of that experience is how closely connected we feel to our colleagues.

Research has consistently demonstrated that we are more effective at our jobs when we feel attached to the people around us. How do strong colleague relationships elevate our performance?

For one thing, they make us more motivated. When you and your colleagues are close, failing to perform your duties generates more than a dissatisfied customer or an unhappy manager—it means letting down your friends. The social pressure to achieve results can serve as a stronger motivator than anything a boss can say.

Closer connections also foster a sense of trust and more candid dialogue. Studies comparing the collaboration patterns of friends to mere acquaintances indicate that friends are more willing to ask for help, and more comfortable speaking up when a colleague is off on the wrong track.

Performance aside, workplace friendships benefit organizations for another reason: Employees with richer friendships tend to stay on with their company for longer periods of time.

Despite these considerable benefits, at most companies, friendships are an afterthought. To motivate employees, managers tend to rely on bonuses, promotions, and salary increases, ignoring the fact that as humans, we all have a basic psychological need for meaningful relationships. Yet the research is clear: When we feel valued and respected by those around us, we’re not only more motivated—we’re also happier, healthier, and more productive.

For too many organizations, investing in quality employee relationships means one thing: team-building exercises. Think ice breakers, trust falls, and scavenger hunts. Every year, corporations spend millions on off-site retreats and weekend getaways packed with cringe-worthy activities that purportedly foster better communication.

But here’s the truth: While awkward collaborations may spark brief experiences of closeness, they rarely translate into lasting friendships.

So what does?

Studies suggest three factors are essential to the development of authentic, meaningful friendships: familiarity (being around the same colleague often), similarity (finding commonalities in your background), and self-disclosure (revealing personal information about yourself every now and then, and having your coworker do the same).

Few activities include all three of these elements. This explains why close relationships usually take years to develop.

But interestingly, office game-viewing parties come close. They present opportunities for colleagues to mingle with those from other departments and connect over shared interests. For many, the NCAA basketball tournament is associated with their experience at college, which leads them to share stories about their past, prompting coworkers to do the same.

Unlike team-building experiences that compel employees to engage with one another, game-viewing parties position people to connect voluntarily. And that feature can make all the difference.

In recent years, a number of forward-thinking workplaces have begun leveraging March Madness in intelligent ways.

Ogilvy & Mather, for example, a marketing agency in New York, invites employees to watch tournament games on projection screens in conference rooms and the office cafeteria. To address the fact that not everyone has the time to follow college basketball, a Virginia financial services firm called The Motley Fool offers a free “Bracketology” class, where non-enthusiasts can get caught up on this year’s favorites and collect advice before filling out their brackets. A number of organizations—including office furniture manufacturer Turnstone—serve game-day snacks, such as pizza, popcorn, and chicken wings, to simulate the viewing experience of a sports bar—minus the alcohol.

In addition to organizing a vibrant workplace gathering, there are also opportunities for making better use of the office tournament pool. Here’s one idea: Instead of having employees pay an entry fee (which discourages non-fans from joining in) sponsor prizes so that everyone participates. Then, go beyond recognizing individual contestants and reward the team or department with the highest average score. This way, employees have reason to root for one another, fostering a sense of collaboration.

Another approach worth considering: using the office pool as a motivational tool. Some years ago, NetTel Partners, a sales organization in Philadelphia, launched a competition among its salespeople in the weeks before the NCAA tournament. The more appointments a salesperson secured with potential clients, the sooner he or she could select a team in the office draft.

The results were astonishing. Total cost to NetTel for furnishing prizes: $300, plus the price of a personalized basketball jersey. Total impact on the business: a 35% jump in appointments, not to mention a boost in office morale.

As the NCAA tournament tips off later this month, organizational leaders would be wise to reexamine their approach to March Madness. Instead of treating the tournament as a nuisance that prevents employees from working, perhaps it’s time we considered embracing it for what it is: an inexpensive opportunity for bringing our work teams closer together. Without the trust falls.

How to Stop Working All The Time

3 tips for training yourself to disconnect after hours.

In 2007, the same day Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith published a book called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

In it, Goldsmith makes the case that many of the behaviors that initially propel high-achievers up the corporate ladder are paradoxically the same ones preventing them from reaching the very top. Habits like winning too much (the need to win every workplace disagreement, even when it doesn’t matter), adding too much value (adding your two cents to every discussion), and goal obsession (becoming so wrapped up in achieving short-term goals that you forget the larger mission).

Early in your career, these behaviors demonstrate that you are driven. But the moment you step into a position of leadership, they become counterproductive.

Since Goldsmith’s book first appeared in print, another double-edged workplace habit has cropped up—one that would have been difficult to spot when he first conceived of his book.

Failing to disconnect.

Like many of the practices Goldsmith identifies in his book, it is surprisingly hard to recognize the damage working excessive hours inflicts both on leaders and their teams.

In part, it’s because when you’re first starting out, working evenings and weekends gets you noticed. It is what differentiates you from less motivated colleagues, yielding early recognition and promotions. In this way, hard work becomes ingrained as part of your identify.

While working long hours is often beneficial to early career advancement, as you rise to a position of leadership, maintaining this practice can damage your career prospects.

For one thing, it’s because of shifting job responsibilities.

Early in your career, the primary measure of your performance is how well you manage yourself. But the higher up you go, the more likely you are to have a job that involves managing others. No longer are technical abilities quite as important. Now, success hinges on interpersonal skill.

What happens to our interpersonal skills when we work ourselves to exhaustion? Studies indicate that when we’re low on energy, we tend to misread those around us, typically in a more negative fashion. Happy faces appear more neutral. Neutral face start to look like frowns. What’s more, when we’re fatigued we find it harder to resist lashing out at perceived slights. Not only to do we incorrectly perceive the world around us more negativity, we’re also more likely to act upon that information.

Weaker communication isn’t the only danger of failing to disconnect. So is impaired judgment.

The more senior you are in an organization, the more frequently you’re called upon to make complex decisions. And when it comes to navigating uncertainty and negotiating risk, the research is clear: Decision quality plummets when we’re tired. The more choices you face, the more critical it is for you to restock your energy. Overwork and the sleep deprivation it fosters prevent you from seeing problems clearly and identifying creative solutions.

But perhaps the biggest hazard of failing disconnect once you arrive in a senior position is that your actions make it harder for your team to stay engaged. Why? Because suddenly, your workplace habits are no longer a personal matter. As a leader, your behaviors communicate expectations.

A 2010 study looked at what happens when employees are unable to psychologically detach from work during off-hours. Hundreds of employees at a variety of organizations were surveyed twice—once at the beginning of the study and then again a year later.

The findings were unambiguous. Not only were employees lacking work-free time off less invested in their job a year later, they were more likely to report emotional exhaustion and physical symptoms, like headaches and stomach tenseness.

To be sure, working long hours isn’t always a path to disengagement. As anyone who has experienced sitting in an empty office on a Saturday morning can attest, freely choosing to work on the weekend is a completely different psychological experience than being expected to do so.

Which underscores yet another reason disconnecting from work is vital to leaders’ performance: when laboring non-stop becomes standard operating procedure, it’s difficult for employees to feel like working hard is their choice.

What can we all do to make disconnecting easier? Here, a recommendation Goldsmith noted in his book nearly a decade ago continues to have value: think small.

Find one thing you can change about your behavior and start there. Most attempts at behavior change—from trying to eat healthy to adopting a grueling new exercise regimen—fail for the same reason: they’re too ambitious.

Rather than attempting to modify all of your work habits, find one modest change that you feel comfortable implementing. For example, try leaving your smartphone in another room when you get home in the evening, so that you’re not tempted to check your work email every time your smartphone appears in your peripheral vision.

Or, spend a few minutes learning how to program the emails you send in the evening to arrive first thing in the morning, so that you’re not sucked into a back and forth with colleagues at all hours.

Just as useful: Stop “trying to disconnect” and find an enjoyable activity to fill your time outside the office. Ideally, identify something active you’d like to master: take up biking, join a sports league, sign up for baking lessons. Not only can activities like these refresh your thinking and offer you the perspective that comes with distance, they also enable you to reframe your time away from the office in terms of gain instead of loss.

Rather than chiding yourselves not to work after hours, you are better off proactively engaging in activities you can look forward to doing.

It’s what behavior change experts know: Breaking a bad habit takes more than trying to stop. It requires finding something more appealing you can do instead.

9 Things Productive People Do Differently

They know that “busyness” is very different from progress. 

Technological innovations have led to round-the-clock work schedules. Assignments have grown more collaborative, requiring more coordination, calls, and meetings. And we face a barrage of distractions, from the vibrations and alerts of our smartphones to breaking news stories and viral videos on our desktops.

More than ever, we need strategies for being more productive. But where do we start?

Earlier this year, I invited 26 bestselling science and productivity writers to share their insights for achieving top performance, as part of the free online summit called The Peak Work Performance Summit. Here are 9 overarching themes the experts addressed for navigating the accelerating informational landscape and achieving peak performance:

1. Own your time.

Our most satisfying work occurs when we’re playing offense, working on projects that we ourselves initiate. Many of us know this intuitively, yet we continue to allow ourselves to spend the vast majority of our days playing defense, responding to other people’s requests.

Many of the experts I interviewed believe that top performers take steps to ensure a favorable offense-to-defense ratio. Tom Rath, author of Are You Fully Charged?, recommends blocking out time to work away from email, programming your phone to ring only for select colleagues, and resisting emails in the morning until you’ve achieved at least one important task.

2. View “busyness” as a lack of focus.

There’s a satisfying rush we experience when there’s too much on our plate. We feel needed, challenged, even “productive.” But it’s an illusion that robs us of our focus and prevents us from making progress on the work that matters most.

Sociologist Christine Carter, Ph.D., of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, put it this way: “Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is much more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear.” Instead of viewing busyness as a sign of significance, top performers interpret busyness as an indication of wasted energy.

3. Challenge the myth of the “ideal worker.”

Too many of us continue to believe that an “ideal worker” is one who works constantly, often at great expense to their personal life, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Being productive requires recognizing that you can’t work for extended periods of time and maintain a high level of performance. As humans, we have a limited capacity for focused attention. As Brigid Schulte, journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Overwhelmed, points out, we have been seduced into thinking that if only we try harder and work longer, we can achieve anything.

Top performers take a different approach: They recognize and honor their physical limitations by cycling between 90-minute bursts of focused work and short restorative breaks, getting plenty of exercise and sleep, and taking time to disconnect from email for some portion of their off hours.

4. Intentionally leave important tasks incomplete.

We often race to finish assignments quickly so we can move onto the next item on our list. But Wharton psychologist Adam Grant believes resisting this urge can actually make us more productive.

“I used to sit down to write and not want to get up until I was done with a chapter or an argument,” Grant told me. “Now I will deliberately leave sentences just hanging in the middle and get up and go do something else. What I find when I come back is that I don’t have to do a lot of work to finish the sentence, and now I also have a bunch of new ideas for where the writing should go next.” Hemingway followed the same strategy, and both Grant and the novelist leveraged the human tendency to ruminate over unfinished tasks, otherwise known as the Zeigarnick Effect. Start a project and leave it unfinished, and you’re bound to think about it more frequently than after it’s done. And so, instead of aiming to complete important tasks in one sitting, try leaving them incomplete. It will encourage you to continue thinking about your work in different settings—and position you to uncover creative solutions.

5. Make a habit of stepping back.

In a knowledge economy, productivity requires more than perseverance. It requires insight and problem-solving. Research indicates that we are more likely to find breakthrough ideas when we temporarily remove ourselves from the daily grind. This is why the best solutions reveal themselves when we step into the shower, go for a run, or take a vacation. Top performers view time off not as stalled productivity, but as an investment in future performance.

6. Help others strategically.

High achievers, Grant argued in his 2013 book, Give and Take, tend to be givers—those who enjoy helping others without strings attached. Giving can certainly help you succeed, but Grant’s data also reveals that helping everyone with everything is a recipe for failure. How do you do it right? Top performers, Grant argues, avoid saying “yes” to every helping opportunity. Instead, they specialize in one or two forms of helping that they genuinely enjoy and in which they excel.

7. Have a plan for saying “no.”

The more commitments we agree to take on, the more likely we are to experience what author Rory Vaden calls “priority dilution.” This is when the sheer number of obligations we’ve committed to keep us from the work that matters most. One method of counteracting priority dilution involves having a strategy in place for saying “no” in advance, so that you don’t have to stop and think about how to phrase your response each time you need to turn someone down. Create an email template, or write out a script that you can use when saying no in person.

When dealing with a manager who is asking you to take on more than is reasonable, think outside the yes/no paradigm. Writer Greg McKeown recommends having a conversation with your manager and listing all the projects you’re currently working on. Indicate which items you think are priorities and invite your supervisor to share his or her opinion. It’s a way of illuminating the constraints you’re under without ever saying the word “no.”

8. Make important behaviors measurable.

To make progress toward any goal, it helps to track our behaviors. Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, an expert on happiness and habits, sees monitoring as one of the keys to behavior changes: “If you want to eat more healthily, keep a food journal. If you want to get more exercise, use a step counter. If you want to stick to a budget, track your spending.”

CEO coach Marshall Goldsmith agrees. Every evening, he reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every important behavior he hopes to achieve, including the number of words he wrote; the distance he walked; and the number of nice things he said to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

9. Do things today that make more time tomorrow.

A final theme to emerge was that top performers look for ways to automate or delegate activities that are not a good use of their time. Vaden suggests asking yourself, “How can I use my time today in ways that create more time tomorrow?” Evaluating your to-do list through this lens makes it easier to commit to activities that are not immediately enjoyable—like automating your bill paying, or creating a “how to” guide for other team members to make it easier to delegate repetitive tasks.

All of these suggestions are useful individually, but they also highlight an important trend: In the 1990s, being productive mainly required good time management. Ten years later, the advent of email led to an expanded workday, and productivity required managing your energy, not just your time.

Over the last few years, we have entered a new age in which managing our energy and time is not enough. Today, the magnitude of information rushing toward us from every direction has surpassed our capacity for consumption. No matter how much time and energy we have at our disposal, we cannot be productive without mastering the art of attention management. Resisting the lure of busyness, having a plan for saying “no,” maintaining a relentless focus on self-directed goals that only you can achieve—these are the skills we need to cultivate to succeed both at work and in life.

Get More Done By Scheduling to Your Strengths

When to schedule your most important work

If you work with a team, chances are your inbox is often flooded with invitations. Internal meetings, client conference calls, the occasional lunch request. Assuming you have some control over your calendar, how you respond to these offers generally depends on two factors: the value of attending the meeting and your availability.

Rarely, however, do most consider a third factor in our decision-making criteria: the time of day when you are at your most productive.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that the person you are midway through the afternoon is not the same person who arrived first thing in the morning. Research shows our cognitive functioning fluctuates throughout the day. If you’re like most people, you’ll find that you can get a lot done between 9:00 am and 11:00 am. Not so at 2:30 pm. Later in the day, it often feels like we’re moving at a fraction of our morning pace.

That’s not an illusion.  Recent studies have found that on average, people are considerably worse at absorbing new information, planning ahead and resisting distractions as the day progresses.

The reason this happens is not merely motivational. It’s biological. Our bodies run on a circadian rhythm that affects our hormone production, brain wave activities, and body temperature. Each of these variations tinker with our energy level, impacting our alertness and productivity.

Importantly, we don’t all follow identical patterns. While most people do their best work in the morning (and our preference for mornings tends to increase with age), others are night owls who are more productive later in the day. Research suggests that our fondness for morning or evenings isn’t simply a personal preference—it’s directly tied to the time of day when our physical and cognitive abilities peak. And one new study has even found that morning people are more ethical in the morning – and night owls, more ethical later in the day.

To get the most out of every day, you need to guard the hours when you are at your most productive. Think back to yesterday and the day before. At which points of your day did you feel at your most energetic? (If you’re not sure, tools like RescueTime can help.)  Chances are, these are times with the highest productivity potential.

Once you’ve identified high-potential hours, consider treating them differently—for example, by blocking them off on your calendar. This discourages colleagues with access to your availabilities from suggesting these times for meetings. An additional advantage of having high-potential hours blocked off is that it prompts you to think twice before suggesting your own non-essential meetings at that time.

Proactively setting aside your best hours to get work done saves you from having to scramble later on to compensate. Use these hours for working on high-priority projects, making decisions you’ve been avoiding, or initiating a difficult conversation.

And, if you’re the owner of a dull, 10 a.m. staff meeting, do your team a favor and reschedule it for after lunch. The afternoon is when most people’s energy levels naturally dip. Lower energy levels can be disastrous for work that requires deep focus, but is considerably less detrimental in the context of other people. Having others around also naturally increases our alertness levels, helping counteract the slump in energy.

Fatigue, it’s worth noting, is not all bad. In fact, the findings of a 2011 study suggest that when our minds are tired, we are more distractible and less adept at filtering out seemingly irrelevant ideas. The free association that ensues makes “off-peak” hours an ideal time for finding novel solutions.

Ultimately, the best way to schedule is to take our natural energy fluctuations into account. You can maximize your productivity by calibrating activities to the right time of day. If a task requires willpower and complex thinking, plan to do it when you are at your most alert. In contrast, if what you’re after is a fresh perspective, use fatigue to your advantage by looking for solutions when your energy drops.

In either case, protect your best hours. If you don’t do it, who will?

High-Performing Teams Don’t Leave Relationships to Chance

At first glance, workplace friendships can seem trivial — a nice to have that’s distinct from traditional organizational objectives like productivity, efficiency, and profitability.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A wealth of studies reveal that by fueling our basic human psychological need for belonging, meaningful workplace connections drive many of the outcomes central to high-performing teams.

For starters, employees with close connections at work are more productive, creative, and collaborative. They also report being more satisfied with their job, are less susceptible to burnout, and are less likely to leave their organization to pursue another role. In other words, not only are they better contributors, they provide more stability to a team.

In contrast, when employees feel disconnected from their team or lonely at work, their performance craters. Their ability to focus deteriorates and their willingness to collaborate plummets. Worse, they devote valuable cognitive resources attempting to hide their loneliness from others, leaving less mental firepower for completing projects. In short, they become less capable of doing their jobs.

Now, it’s one thing to logically appreciate the value of close connections, and another to know what to do about it. After all, what can a single leader possibly do to get coworkers to bond?

The short answer is plenty.

Research suggests that workplace friendships don’t just happen by chance. They blossom under certain conditions, many of which leaders can strategically engineer, even in a remote or hybrid environment. Here are three evidence-based strategies that leaders can use to leverage insights from the science of close connections.

1. Use commonalities to spark friendships.

Studies indicate that one of the strongest drivers of friendships is similarity. The more workers have in common with one another, whether it’s a favorite TV show, weekend hobby, or even the same birthday, the more likely they are to click. In a fascinating study of best friends who remained close for nearly 20 years, researchers found that the strongest predictor of long-term bonding is the level of similarity when friends first meet.

Managers can leverage this insight by making it easier for employees to identify commonalities. Onboarding offers the perfect opportunity. Instead of simply introducing new hires by their professional experience, consider interviewing them to uncover a few colorful details about their personal interests, and sprinkle these details into your welcome message.

Introducing new team members by their personal interests immediately humanizes them and empowers existing team members to find commonalities over which they can bond. Moreover, inquiring about personal interests demonstrates to new hires that you care about them and value their individuality. It’s also a differentiator. In a world where 88% of employees believe their company’s onboarding process can improve, designing an introduction that sets the stage for friendship not only sets an organization apart, it paves the way for more effective collaboration.

2. Highlight shared goals.

It’s easy to assume that employees reporting to the same manager will naturally view themselves as a team. Yet that’s not always the case. A crucial aspect of leading teams is therefore ensuring that employees view their colleagues not just as coworkers, but as teammates. The question is, how?

Social psychologists have long appreciated that shared goals, or the experience of working together toward a common objective, supports the development of friendships. And indeed, studies show that workers who view their colleagues as essential to their success build closer friendships, have fewer disagreements, and view their work as more meaningful.

The challenge in many organizations is that shared goals are often surprisingly difficult to identify, especially when members of the same team are working on different projects. It’s when we don’t feel like our objectives align with those of our colleagues that we witness the emergence of cliques, silos, and conflicts.

And yet shared goals can still offer leaders a valuable opportunity for building a team mentality, even when collaboration is limited. For example, managers can draw attention to the ways projects require a team effort. Doing so can be as simple as highlighting an important collaboration, or publicly thanking an individual whose contributions are vital to a team’s success but are easy to overlook.

Another option is to emphasize team-wide goals (such as objectives and key results, or OKRs) that can only be achieved through working together. Depending on the department, team OKRs may include increasing referrals, improving organic traffic, or optimizing employee engagement scores.

Shared goals can also foster team-building outside the office, during recreational activities. A well-designed social activity can do more than deliver a fun experience, it can present the conditions that empower colleagues to work shoulder-to-shoulder toward a common objective. In other words, skip the office happy hour and invest in a collaborative cooking class.

3. Turn tension into connection.

Research indicates that workplace disagreements often erupt when people experience an absence of relatedness — when they feel undervalued, unappreciated, or perceive a lack of respect. The less connected people feel, the more likely they are to interpret a difference of opinion as a personal slight.

But disagreements can offer a lot of value if you navigate them correctly. Far from signaling office dysfunction, workplace disagreements can yield more creative solutions, better decision-making, and higher performance.

The best leaders do more than defuse conflict — they use relationship-building statements to turn tense moments into opportunities for deeper connections. These can take the form of recommitting to the partnership (“I bet we can figure this out”), acknowledging your partner’s contributions (“You clearly put a lot of work into this”), or valuing their expertise (“I’ve always appreciated your insight into clients like this.”). The trick is to quickly reassure your colleague that your disagreement has nothing to do with your relationship, and everything to do with finding the best solution.

Used correctly, relationship-building statements can do much more than put out relationship fires. They are a vital conversational tool for fostering collaboration, expressing appreciation, and ensuring that contributors feel valued.

For too long, workplace friendships have been left to chance. Yet the research is clear: feeling connected to our colleagues elevates productivity, reduces turnover, and fosters better teamwork. As such, it’s a powerful and underutilized tool for creating high-performing teams.

Fortunately, research indicates that leaders can do a great deal when it comes to nurturing employee friendships. By utilizing insights from the science of close connections to promote bonding, teaming, and productive collaborations, any leader can fuel their team’s need for relatedness and elevate performance.

Ask This Question at Your Next Meeting

When was the last time you left a work meeting feeling inspired, motivated, or energized? If you’re like most people, the answer is seldom.

Team meetings, in particular, suffer a dreadful reputation. They’re considered unproductive, unnecessary, exhausting, disorganized, and stressful. Worse, they eat up valuable time, prevent us from moving the needle on important projects, and leave us wondering why we can’t seem to get anything done during regular work hours.

We all hate meetings. But what if we didn’t? What if meetings accelerated the progress they now stifle?

Not all meetings are universally reviled. Some are highly coveted, like in the world of startups, where “mastermind meetings” are all the rage. Entrepreneurs routinely sign five-figure checks for the privilege of joining other founders and answering a single question before an audience of their peers.

The question: What are you stuck on?

Naming your biggest obstacle in a room full of strangers may not strike you as a particularly enticing proposition. Yet many founders see it differently. They view these so-called “hot seats,” as an opportunity to gain clarity on major barriers and identify solutions they never would have considered working alone.

It’s a question intelligent leaders would do well to consider incorporating into team meetings. Doing so introduces a collaborative forum for creative problem-solving, and provides a wealth of compelling benefits:

Reduced Procrastination

Knowing the question will be posed prompts your team to self-reflect ahead of each meeting. It’s an invitation to step back and think deeply about what they are really trying to achieve, as well as the barriers getting in the way.

That level of clarity is rare, especially when it comes to obstacles. One major reason people procrastinate at work is that they are unclear on how to move a project forward. Lack of clarity makes us uncomfortable, and that discomfort is something we seek to avoid, often by immersing ourselves in distractions. By inviting team members to pinpoint and publicly share an obstacle, leaders snuff out procrastination before it takes hold.

Stronger Resilience

Posing the “stuck” question communicates that feeling challenged is not an experience that needs to be hidden or feared. It’s expected.

That perspective is useful because it fosters resilience. It’s much easier to weather adversity when we anticipate being tested. In contrast, when struggle arrives unexpectedly, it shakes our confidence and leads us to question our abilities.

Greater Trust

After each teammate responds to the “stuck” question, there’s an opportunity for their colleagues to provide input — allowing teammates to mentor each other, harness one another’s strengths, and discover untapped expertise. It’s a practice that organically nurtures greater collaboration.

Being honest and forthright about our challenges also fosters more open dialogue between colleagues, facilitating the experience of psychological safety. In other words, it doesn’t just yield more progress on key projects, it also creates tighter-knit teams.

Exposed “Coasting”

What happens when a team member says they’re not stuck? Often, nothing to report is an indication that there’s something wrong. Either the employee is not feeling stretched, or they are unwilling to share. In either case, it’s worth having a one-on-one conversation to dig deeper. Engagement comes from stretching, not coasting along. The “stuck” question helps leaders ensure that everyone on their team is growing.

Motivated Growth

Spanx founder Sara Blakely famously shared a question her father asked at the dinner table, back when she was growing up: “What did you fail at today?” If Blakely or her siblings had nothing to report, her dad seemed crestfallen. He longed for them to appreciate that failure, though painful in the short term, is vital to achieving long-term success.

While the Blakely question has value, the word “failure” carries a stigma that makes it difficult to implement in the workplace. In contrast, feeling “stuck” conveys a similar experience with considerably less shame. It offers leaders a tool for communicating that pushing yourself and finding your limits is desirable, without coming across as preachy or out-of-touch.

Team meetings shouldn’t have to feel draining. Instead of robbing us of time, energy, and focus, they can do the opposite: Accelerate our progress, draw us closer to our team, and empower us to achieve more. As with any good solution, the secret to better meetings lies in first asking the right question.

5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently

When it comes to building extraordinary workplaces and high-performing teams, researchers have long appreciated that three psychological needs are essential: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Decades of research demonstrate that when people feel psychologically fulfilled, they tend to be healthier, happier, and more productive.

Of those three essential needs, relatedness, or the desire to feel connected to others, has always been the trickiest for organizations to cultivate. It’s one thing to attract talented employees — but how exactly do you get them to like each other?

Covid has made fostering relatedness all the more difficult. While working from home has been a boon for autonomy, empowering many to decide when and where they work, a lack of physical proximity to colleagues has made it exponentially more challenging to create close personal bonds.

Yet new research suggests that the highest-performing teams have found subtle ways of leveraging social connections during the pandemic to fuel their success. The findings offer important clues on ways any organization can foster greater connectedness — even within a remote or hybrid work setting — to engineer higher-performing teams.

Over the summer, my team at ignite80 partnered with the communication software company Front to survey 1,106 U.S.-based office workers. Our goal was simple: to determine what high-performing teams do differently.

To identify members of high-performing teams, we had respondents (1) rate their team’s effectiveness, and (2) compare their team’s performance to other teams in their industry. Workers who scored their team a 10 out of 10 on both items were designated members of high-performing teams, allowing us to compare their behaviors against everyone else’s.

So, what do high-performing teams do differently? Our study revealed five key differences, all of which highlight the vital role of close connection among colleagues as a driver of team performance.

High-Performing Teams Are Not Afraid to Pick Up the Phone

While telephone calls are becoming increasingly less common in the workplace in general, that’s not the case among high-performing teams. Our research found that they tend to communicate more frequently in general, and are significantly more likely to communicate with colleagues using the telephone than their less successful peers (10.1 vs. 6.1 calls per day on average).

This makes sense. Recent studies have found that while most people anticipate that phone calls will be awkward and uncomfortable, that’s a misperception. Not only are phone calls no more awkward in practice, they also tend to strengthen relationships and prevent misunderstanding, contributing to more fruitful interactions among teammates.

High-Performing Teams Are More Strategic With Their Meetings

It’s no secret that poorly run meetings contribute to employee dissatisfaction, drain cognitive bandwidth, and cost organizations billions.

Our findings indicate that high-performing teams avoid the common pitfalls of poorly run meetings by incorporating practices shown to foster more productive gatherings. Specifically, they are significantly more likely to require prework from participants (39% more likely), introduce an agenda (26% more likely), and begin with a check-in that keeps team members apprised of one another’s progress (55% more likely).

By ensuring that time together is both efficient and collaborative, high-performing teams don’t just make better use of their meetings — they also set the stage for more fruitful interactions, contributing to better relationships.

High-Performing Teams Invest Time Bonding Over Non-Work Topics

From a managerial standpoint, it’s easy to frown upon workplace conversations that have nothing to do with work. After all, what good can come from employees spending valuable work time chatting about a major sporting event or blockbuster film?

However, research suggests that discussing non-work topics offers major advantages. That’s because it’s in personal conversations that we identify shared interests, which fosters deeper liking and authentic connections.

Within our study, we found that high-performing team members are significantly more likely to spend time at the office discussing non-work matters with their colleagues (25% more) — topics that may extend to sports, books, and family. They’re also significantly more likely to have met their colleagues for coffee, tea, or an alcoholic beverage over the past six months.

In other words, the best teams aren’t more effective because they work all the time. On the contrary: They invest time connecting in genuine ways, which yields closer friendships and better teamwork later on.

High-Performing Teams Give and Receive Appreciation More Frequently

A key reason the need for relatedness contributes to better performance at work is that it makes us feel valued, appreciated, and respected by those whose opinions we prize. It’s why recognition is often a more powerful motivating force than monetary incentives.

Within our study, members of high-performing teams reported receiving more frequent appreciation at work — both from their colleagues (72% more) as well their managers (79% more). Critically, they also reported expressing appreciation to their colleagues more frequently (44% more), suggesting that within the best teams, appreciation doesn’t flow from the top down. It’s a cultural norm that’s observable in peer-to-peer interactions.

High-Performing Teams Are More Authentic at Work

Within our study, members of high-performing teams were significantly more likely to express positive emotions with their colleagues. They reported being more likely to compliment, joke with, and tease their teammates. In emails, they were more likely to use exclamation points, emojis, and GIFs.

Interestingly, however, they were also more likely to express negative emotions at work. We found that they were more likely to curse, complain, and express sarcasm with their teammates.

Why would expressing negative emotions at work yield more positive performance? It’s because the alternative to expressing negative emotions is suppressing them, and suppression is cognitively expensive. It involves expending valuable cognitive resources attempting to hide emotions from others, leaving less mental firepower for doing the work.

Previous studies have shown that authenticity contributes to workplace well-being and individual performance. Our research suggests it lifts team performance as well.

Needless to say, there are times when expressing negative emotions at the office isn’t helpful or appropriate. What this finding suggests is that, to the extent that team members experience the psychological safety to express their full range of emotions with their colleagues, overall team performance tends to benefit.

In sum, our study’s findings suggest that creating a high-performing workplace takes more than simply hiring the right people and arming them with the right tools to do their work. It requires creating opportunities for genuine, authentic relationships to develop.

Fostering close connections among teammates need not be expensive or time-consuming. By incorporating simple, evidence-based practices that yield better communication, more productive meetings, and deeper friendships, every workplace has the ability to fuel people’s basic psychological need for relatedness and lift team performance.

7 Ways To Think Like A Creative Genius

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Why Our Cubicles Make Us Miserable

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.