What a 2-year long study by Google of their top performing 180 teams revealed. It’s not what they expected
Dean Van Leeuwen
Chief Exploration Officer @ TomorrowTodayConsulting — Pioneering Business as a Force for Good
Like most leaders, Google Execs had believed that the best teams were those that had the best people — the right people, on the right bus — You want to employ the best engineer, the best manager and the best scientist and give them the best resource. Right? This is logical, there you have it, the perfect performing project team. But according to Julia Rozovsky, Google’s people analytics manager, “we were dead wrong.” The best teams, according to the study, have psychological safety nets.
A two-year long study of 180 teams undertaken by Alphabet (Google), a company which has embarked on countless meaningful moonshots, discovered that one trait — psychological safety — stood out and was shared by their most successful teams.
Most meetings and projects are full of a veneer of fear. Fear of failure, fear of seeming incompetent, fear of asking perceived silly or inappropriate questions. These fears can immobilise teams and prevent them from achieving their best. These teams feel like they are working in an environment where everything they say or do is under a microscope. “But imagine a different environment. A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard. That’s psychological safety,” says Michael Schneider in an article for Inc Magazine. What Google discovered is that teams with “psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who were more successful.”
My research shows that a quest’s destination creates this psychological safety. We all know that every quest undergoes trials and tribulations, failures and setbacks. That is the nature of a quest. It’s the agility and resilience of a questing mind-set that sets moonshots apart from other projects. This improves the chance of success and ensures resilience for the overall projects success.
Your role as a quester leader is to provide the air cover, safe houses and corporate politics no-fly zones where your band of questers can feel safe to dream, explore and do their best work.
Further optimising plans and processes together | Program and Project Management | Sharing knowledge inside and outside our University of Applied Science Van Hall Larenstein
7 年Interesting indeed. Research shows that the High Performance Organisation framework works!
Finance Controller at Entero Healthcare
7 年Excellent article
Madhuri Pai and Burcu Cantekinler Koc
Global HR Transformation Director
7 年Jennifer Brown For sharing to our internal audience
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7 年Good article. Whenever as a teacher we have the opportunity to give feed back, we are always blocked by this response ...... "RELATIONSHIPS are at the heart of the classroom." This stops the conversation because it has firstly CHANGED the subject and econdly, it infers that our problem is is fuelled by some personal or social defect. I witnessed this exchange at a conference last week. When a question was deflected to government restrictions, policies and funding, I raised my hand to remind her that RELATIONSHIPS were at the heart of her position but I wasn't asked. ?? Jan