Project Aristotle and Team Success

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

The New York Times Magazine published this article by Charles Duhigg in February 2016 revealing surprising findings about why some groups have more success than others.

In 2012 Google initiated the Project Aristotle – to study hundreds of their teams and address the questions that mattered most for attaining good teams. They started with reviewing academic studies looking at how teams worked.

They also looked at their successful teams in search of patterns. Some of the most effective teams were composed of friends, others of strong managers. Some team members were strangers to each other outside the meeting room and some preferred a less hierarchical structure. “At Google, we’re good at finding patterns” said Dubey, a leader of the project. They couldn’t find strong patterns here.

At this stage, the Project Aristotle researchers started to look at “group norms”. Norms are traditions, behavioral standards and formal or informal rules that govern the group. So, when team members described a particular behavior as an “unwritten rule” or when they explained certain things as part of the “team culture” the researcher focused on the amount of time they had to speak and their art of conversational behavior. Some teams said that teammates interrupted one another constantly on other teams the team leader enforced conversational order. Some groups began each meeting with informal chitchat, whilst others got right down to business and discouraged gossip.

The key to improving Google’s teams was about understanding and influencing group norms.

Which norms mattered most?

Imagine you have been invited to join one of the two groups:

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. This team is efficient with professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they are expert, and then speak in length. There is no chitchat or long debate.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers and teammates jumping in and out of discussions. People interrupt each other and complete one another’s thoughts.

Which group would you rather join?

Psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T and Union College noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared:

First, members spoke in roughly the same proportion. A phenomenon, the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking”. Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author emphasized: “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

Second, all those in good teams had a high “average social sensitivity” – in other words they were skilled at intuiting if others felt upset or left out based on their tone of voice and their expressions.

The study suggests that if you are given the choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. There is a high chance that members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little chance that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.

Team B may seem inefficient to a casual observer. Team members speak as much as they need to and are sensitive to one another’s moods and even share personal stories and emotions. It may not contain as many individual stars the sum will be greater than its parts.

These two behaviors - equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking and average social sensitivity are known within psychology research as psychological safety – a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defined in a study published in 1999 as a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

For Project Aristotle, other behaviors seemed important as well – like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

After figuring out which norms were most critical the project team had to find a way to make communication and empathy – the building blocks of forging real connections – into an algorithm they could easily scale. By adapting the data-driven approach they encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel.

Matt Sakaguchi, a team leader at Google pointed out: “By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about. It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.”

Please read the article if you wish to know the stories behind the facts.

www.nytimes.com...am.html?mcubz=3

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