249. Quick Thinks: Rituals That Make Teamwork Work

Summary

Podcast Summary

Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques

Episode 249. Quick Thinks: Rituals That Make Teamwork Work

Host: Matt Abrahams
Guest: Molly Sands, Head of Teamwork Lab at Atlassian
Date: December 11, 2025

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the key ingredients of effective team collaboration, with a particular focus on the practical rituals and routines that drive high-performing teams. Host Matt Abrahams is joined by Molly Sands from Atlassian, who shares research-backed insights and actionable tips for leaders and teams—especially in hybrid and distributed work environments—to strengthen collaboration and communication.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Measuring Collaboration: Beyond Output

• Challenge of Measuring Collaboration (03:02)

  • Collaboration can feel intangible; most default to measuring only output, but quality and depth also matter.
  • Effective collaboration measurement should be multifaceted—tracking progress on goals, surveying team dynamics, and observing team experiences.

• Molly Sands:

  "Measuring the output does not tell you if people are doing the right thing... I’m a fan of having a variety of metrics... Are these groups reaching their goals?... Consistently evolving goals... capturing data about what people are trying to achieve and how well is huge for being able to assess collaboration." (03:21)

• Include Team Experience Metrics:

  • Psychological safety, role clarity, speed of assembling/responding, and output are all important.
  • Teams feeling safe to speak and having clear roles are predictors of successful outcomes.

2. Rituals for Reflecting on Goals

• Goal-Setting and Review Rituals (06:14)

  • Atlassian’s Playbook: Free resource for best practices and team rituals.
  • Ritual Example:
    • All goals tracked and made visible company-wide.
    • Monthly: Teams self-score their OKRs with tweet-sized updates.
    • Quarterly: Teams review if goals still make sense, adjusting to new learnings or strategic shifts.
    • Projects are explicitly tied to goals, and weekly tweet-sized updates capture project progress.

• Benefits: Visibility, accountability, agility, continuous alignment.

• Matt Abrahams:

  "That ritualized nature, time-based nature every month, every quarter, every week can be really helpful." (07:59)

3. Enabling Spontaneous Collaboration in Hybrid Work

• Creating Space for Unplanned Collaboration (08:49)

  • Prevent overscheduling by canceling some standing meetings; allow for "collaboration hours."
  • Research shows “bursty” collaboration—periods of intense discussion followed by deep solo work—leads to high performance in distributed teams.

• Molly Sands:

  "You have to cancel some of the meetings. You cannot be in standing meetings all the time and still have those moments to come together... Set some collaboration hours… try to keep those free of standing meetings but do plan to interact and be available as needed throughout the week." (08:49)

4. Building Connection: The Chief Vibes Officer Ritual

• Chief Vibes Officer (CVO) Ritual (09:48)

  • Rotates weekly within teams; the CVO’s job is to inject fun—icebreaker prompts, serious or silly questions in Slack, etc.
  • Fosters engagement, social ties, psychological safety, and promotes help-seeking behaviors within teams.
  • Everyone’s participation is heightened by rotation, boosting inclusivity.

• Molly Sands:

  "Not only do they have more fun at work and feel better and more connected about their team, they also are more likely to ask each other for help and to feel comfortable coming forward when they have an issue flagging risks and problems." (11:20)

5. In-Person Gatherings: Three Purposes

• Optimizing In-Person Time (12:10)

  • Three effective uses:
    • Doing the work (project kickoffs, hands-on collaboration).
    • Learning about the work (business context, team knowledge, collaborator intros).
    • Planning the work (strategy, roadmap, alignment).
  • Plan sessions with intent—team building, clarifying working norms, communication strategies, and async update expectations.

• Molly Sands:

  "Anytime you’re bringing people together, that is that do, learn or plan is really effective... Within that, you also want to have moments for team building... those intentional conversations about ways of working." (13:13)

6. Collaborating Across Culture, Age, and Modality

• Principles for Diverse Teams (14:44)

  • Success in diverse teams hinges on explicit processes and communication norms.
  • Offer multiple ways to contribute (writing, speaking, whiteboards) to empower all voices.
  • Explicitly communicate and respect differing communication styles and needs.

• Molly Sands:

  "The more that the rituals and the ways you communicate are just made explicit to everyone on the team, the easier it is to have all those voices contributing." (14:44)

• Matt Abrahams:

  "As leaders and managers... give them those different avenues to really help them... to make it explicit that what makes us strong is our diversity." (15:45)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Measurement:

  "Measuring the output does not tell you if people are doing the right thing." — Molly Sands (03:21)

• On Collaboration Rituals:

  "We have an amazing resource called the Atlassian Team Playbook… free on our website." — Molly Sands (06:27)

• On ‘Chief Vibes Officer’:

  "People come up with silly prompts... What is one thing you were hilariously terrified of as a child?" — Molly Sands (09:58)

• On Embracing Team Diversity:

  "Give them a way to contribute in writing... do a whiteboard exercise... even if they process or think differently." — Molly Sands (15:19)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:02 — Measuring Collaboration Beyond Output
• 06:14 — Building Rituals for Goal Reflection
• 08:49 — Designing Hybrid/Remote Teams for Spontaneity
• 09:48 — Chief Vibes Officer Ritual Explained
• 12:10 — Making In-Person Work Purposeful
• 14:44 — Collaborating with Diverse Teams: Best Practices

---

Conclusion and Actionable Takeaways

• Effective collaboration requires continuous reflection, explicit rituals, and active team engagement.
• Use regular, visible goal review cycles and assign responsibility across the team.
• Make time for bursty, spontaneous interactions—don’t let the calendar stifle team chemistry.
• Rotate roles that build culture and communication (like Chief Vibes Officer) to foster connection and safety.
• When meeting in person, have a clear purpose (do, learn, or plan), and invest in clarifying team norms.
• Embrace and leverage diversity by offering multiple avenues for participation and communication.

---

For further resources:

• Atlassian Team Playbook (free online)
• Additional in-depth conversation with Molly Sands in the full episode
• Related episode: #242 with Colin Fisher on teaming

---

Transcript

[Matt Abrahams]

Hi Matt here. Before we get started, I wanted to.

[Podcast Host or Announcer]

Remind you about our new Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community where listeners from around the world can come together to practice and transform their communication and careers. Members get access to exclusive on demand learning lessons, guided quests, live book club calls, an AI coach mat, and much more. Join today at Fastersmarter IO learning. If you sign up before January 2nd, you will get one month free and with the holidays coming, you can give the gift of better communication. Join soon so you can be part of our AMA. Ask Matt anything on December 16th. Go to fastersmarter IO learning to join now here's a message from one of our sponsors.

[Matt Abrahams]

One thing I teach all the time is that confidence begins before you ever open your mouth. It starts with feeling prepared and comfortable and that's one of the reasons I've really appreciated Quince. They make it easy to look put together without turning your wardrobe into another big decision. Quince focuses on the pieces most of us actually need well made sweaters, coats and everyday pants that fit the way they should. Everything comes from trusted factories that meet high standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. It's simple, straightforward and I really appreciate that. On a personal note, I recently picked up new shorts and pants from Quince and according to my wife, they're definitely a noticeable upgrade. They make getting ready easier and now that I know how reliable Quince is, I'll be using Quince for gifts too. They've got lots of options beyond clothing, things for your home bath, kitchen and travel. Get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com thinkfast for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C e.com thinkfast free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com thinkfast.

[Molly Sands]

The ability.

[Matt Abrahams]

To collaborate well with others, to learn, to do, to plan, often determines the success of your relationships both in your.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

Personal and professional lives.

[Matt Abrahams]

My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Think episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. I had a fantastic, insightful conversation with Molly Sands, who heads up the teamwork lab at Atlassian. Molly shared so many valuable skills and ideas that we couldn't put them all in one episode. So here comes some more practical tactical tips on how to collaborate better and institute important collaborative rituals.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

I know a lot of what you do as a company, but you personally is focus on Collaboration.

[Matt Abrahams]

And I'd love for you to explain.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

To me what effective collaboration is and how do you assess that? How do you assess collaboration? What is it? And then do you have one or two best practices to help us all be better in the collaboration that we do?

[Molly Sands]

Yeah, I think a ton about this and I think it's one of the biggest challenges. Right. How do you measure this thing that feels so ephemeral in so many ways?

[Interviewer or Co-host]

I think most people default to just measure the output of the collaboration, but the quality of the collaboration and the depth of the collaboration are also important.

[Matt Abrahams]

Yeah.

[Molly Sands]

And measuring the output does not tell you if people are doing the right thing. And I think that is a really big challenge that most companies face. I'm a fan of having a variety of metrics that you're looking at when you're thinking about collaboration, so you do get a more robust picture. And part of that is, are these groups reaching their goals? Are they achieving the things that they set out to do? And in order to do that, you need to be consistently evolving goals. We see in a lot of companies, it's a very set it and forget it kind of thing. Right. We do this big performative thing at the start of the fiscal year and then at the end you scramble to say, did it happen or not? And so we've created a lot of goal rituals for teams to help them continually assess their progress. That doesn't mean that if you're off track for a week, it's an issue, but you want to know, right? You want to pick up those patterns over time and you want to redirect and capturing data about what people are trying to achieve and if they are able to achieve it, and how well is huge for being able to assess collaboration. It's also really important to understand the experience within teams. And you see that teams experiences are very predictive of things like output and success and how often they achieve what they set out to do and how quickly they're able to get there. So I really do think it's valuable to survey teams to understand, do people, you know, feel safe speaking up? Do they have good psychological safety? We know that's a strong predictor of their outcomes, both in how quickly they can move and how likely they are to achieve what they want to do. We also really want to look at clarity. Do people understand what their roles are in teams? This is really critical for being successful. If I know it's my job to move that forward, or I need to care about this and think about what's going to happen next. It makes it much easier for us to all move quickly together. We do look at things like speed as well. Like our team's able to quickly assemble around a problem and then move forward and get through tasks and output. I still think output is relevant, but it just can't be that complete picture.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

So many rich things that you said there. I want to make sure I get an example from you what a ritual is around helping people review goals, because that sounds really important. I'd love to know what that could look like. But it sounds like as people who are leading meetings, leading teams, fostering collaboration, we have to be paying attention to how we're doing it, not just what we're doing. Do you spend time training leaders, managers, facilitators on how to do that? Because, you know, I was a manager for a long time. I know a lot of people who manage and lead. I'm not sure they've ever received advice and guidance on how to do that piece of it. And so I'd love to hear what you do to help train people and I would love to get a goal ritual from you.

[Molly Sands]

Yes. So a lot of what my team focuses on is teaching people better ways of working. So we work with managers, leaders, teams, people at every level of the organization to help them implement rituals and habits. Goals is a good example that we can talk about that make them more likely to achieve success. We have an amazing resource called the Atlassian and Team Playbook where we put a lot of our research and tested best practices together as guidance for teams. So that's one of the ways that we make this available to everyone. It's free on our website, so if you want to learn more about any of these rituals or practices, you can find it there. But let's start with the goal example. So we track all of our goals. They're available and we, whenever possible, make them viewable by anyone in the company. And every month teams score their goal. We use an OKR based system and they will give it a score and track progress on any metrics that are relevant at that point and write a tweet size update. And anyone in the company can take a look at that goal and see what that update looks like. And every quarter we'll review those goals and say, does this still make sense? Given everything that we have learned from the work we've done here, is this still the right thing to be working towards? Has our strategy changed in any way? We're not reevaluating that every day. You can never make progress if you think about the big picture at every second. Sometimes you really need to execute. And then we tie those goals to projects. So any significant effort that is going into moving the needle on that thing gets connected to a goal. And teams reflect on progress for projects in a similar tweet sized update every week.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

So it's time based and it's about being explicit and making it available for everybody to see so people are accountable. You're putting this out and people will see it, but also allows others to check in and see what's going on. And that ritualized nature, time based nature every month, every quarter, every week can be really helpful. Thank you for that. I think all of us can benefit by thinking about how we can collaborate better and what we need to measure to make sure we're doing it. So we live in an era of hybrid and virtual work spontaneous collaboration. That would happen when you and I run into each other in the hall and I say, hey, I was just thinking about and you share your thoughts. How can teams intentionally design their communication practices for this sense of quick, spontaneous interaction that we miss when we're not all together in the same place?

[Molly Sands]

Two things. One, you have to cancel some of the meetings. You cannot be in standing meetings all the time and still have those moments to come together. We know from decades of research that these bursty collaboration patterns, so when teams talk a lot for a short time and have quick back and forths and then are quiet doing deeper work for an extended period of time as well and alternate between those modes, those are the highest performing remote and distributed teams and they continue to be so making sure that you do have some time in your schedule for things as they dynamically change. When we're over planned or over scheduled, we just can't hop on a call. We can't just jump in to talk about something or solve a problem together. So I always encourage teams to set some collaboration hours, especially if you're really distributed across time zones where you try to keep those free of those standing meetings, but do plan to interact and be available as needed throughout the week. That's huge for helping those groups move a lot faster. And then you also need ways to build connections. One of my favorite rituals that we have from Atlassian, that we've studied with hundreds and hundreds of teams, because every time we do this, everyone signs up is something we call the chief vibes officer, the cvo, if you will. And you will be the CVO for your team for a week. And it is your job to inject fun into work. So People come up with silly prompts and they might put a prompt in slack of hey, tell me, if you could magically transport yourself to any place in the world right now, where would you go? Or what is one thing you were hilariously terrified of as a child? It could be any sort of different type of fun question. Some are more serious, some are more fun, but creating some intentional touch points throughout your week where people do start to get to know each other better just helps build those bridges and those connections. And, and when you are in a really distributed team, you need some ways to make sure that continues to happen.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

So we have to put time aside to actually collaborate, which often means getting rid of those standing, highly structured meetings. And I love this idea of being chief vibe officer for your team.

[Matt Abrahams]

And what I like about it is.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

It sounds like it rotates. So everybody has an opportunity to do that, which means everybody brings their own personality to it. But because you know you're going to do it at some point, you're much more likely to contribute when somebody else does it. So it actually has a built in engagement. Engagement tool.

[Molly Sands]

Yeah. And we found from the teams that do that consistently that not only do they have more fun at work and feel better and more connected about their team, they also are more likely to ask each other for help and to feel comfortable coming forward when they have an issue flagging risks and problems. These kinds of things that we know are so key for high performing teams. But just building those social bridges really helps.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

What an easy way to get that really big unlock to people asking help. I know also that you all believe that when people do come together physically in the same place, that it's important to make that really easy as well and to make that part of the way that you operate as there are times where people come together and the space is easy you can plug in. So this notion of when we do come together, we don't want a lot of friction in that.

[Molly Sands]

Yeah, we have done a lot to make it easy for teams to come together in person because that is a really important experience, especially for newer teams, people that haven't worked together as long. My team did some interesting analyses. We have all the data about what people do with those gatherings. We have all of the agendas from them. And so we looked at those and we found that there were three types of gatherings that were really effective. One was what we call doing the work. So coming together around a key project or initiative, especially when it was kicking off and really getting started and getting momentum together. Another was learning about the work. So getting more context about the business, about the problems, setting out more information about collaborators and who we're going to work with. And then the third was planning the work. And that is really thinking about what is our strategy for this year, what does our roadmap look like, getting aligned about what we want to achieve. And those three use cases tended to help teams move faster. They felt like it was a great use of time and they felt more connected to each other. And so having a focus of any time you're bringing people together, that is that do, learn or plan is really effective. And within that, you also want to have moments for team building. And those can be social. Certainly it's lovely to go out to dinner, but it's also good to have those intentional conversations about ways of working. And these in person times can be a really good time to establish some of your working norms. How you're going to communicate, how you want to collaborate, how you're going to do your updates. Those are async updates. What does that look like? Getting those shared expectations really helps.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

It seems to me that if you're going to bring people together, you should have an intent and purpose in mind. And this notion of doing, learning or planning is a good way to do that. And it also helps set a clear vision for what that time together is for. So it helps focus the people when you're there and it helps you decide, should I do it or should I not? You know, we work in a world where we are geographically diverse and separated within a given workforce, you can have many generations in terms of age in your work, have you found best practices or advice? Or maybe even the opposite potholes and things, speed bumps that get in the way. When you're dealing with diversity in terms of culture, in terms of time, in terms of age, how do we navigate this to maximize the efficiency of collaboration and connection?

[Molly Sands]

There's so much value in having diverse teams and having lots of perspectives. And the thing that helps those teams be successful is being clear about how they work together. So the more that the rituals and the ways you communicate are just made explicit to everyone on the team, the easier it is to have all of those voices contributing. And I think there's a lot of practical ways teams can do this. The page led meetings are a great example. Anytime that I'm bringing together a group of people to talk about a problem, I want to give them multiple modalities to contribute. I may not be the loudest person in the room. I sometimes am the loudest person in the room. But not everyone is. They may not want the spotlight. They have useful feedback and ideas, so give them a way to contribute in writing. Give them a way to flag something, do a whiteboard exercise, do something that gives people many ways to get their voice into that conversation, even if they process or think differently.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

I really like that idea of respecting how different people show up and how they feel comfortable contributing. And I think that's important as leaders and managers to give them those different avenues to really help them. And I think to make it explicit that what makes us strong is our diversity. But that also means that we have different ways of communicating, different ways of contributing, and we want to make sure everybody feels feels comfortable. Very Key Advice well, there you have it.

[Matt Abrahams]

As promised, lots of useful tips and tactics to help you and your teams.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

To be more collaborative and productive.

[Matt Abrahams]

I hope each of you takes away valuable information from Molly and that you take on the role of Chief Vibes Officer. Be sure to let me know the fun things you institute.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think.

[Matt Abrahams]

Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast to learn more about teams and teaming. Please listen to episode 242 with Colin Fisher. This episode was produced by Katharine Reed, Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

With special thanks to the Podium podcast company.

[Matt Abrahams]

Please find us on YouTube and wherever.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

You get your podcasts.

[Matt Abrahams]

Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram and check out fastersmarterio for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended deep thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt anythings.

[Interviewer or Co-host]

And much more at Fastersmarter IO Premium.

[Matt Abrahams]

Thanks for joining me for this quick thanks episode. If these takeaways were helpful, I'd love for you to listen to the full episode that started this conversation. There's more context, more stories, and more tools to support your communication. Give it a listen and as always, thanks for your support.