What Google Can Learn From Its Quest to Ruin the Perfect Team

Does anyone remember Project Aristotle? Google’s flagship culture initiative to figure out how to build the perfect team.

I had only been working in corporate settings for a few years when this project made headlines as the be-all and end-all of company culture. Google became the company everyone wanted to emulate. HR Consultants and Keynote Speakers alike starting referencing Project Aristotle’s outcomes as the holy grail for high performing teams.

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the outcomes of that study were solid. Google employs some of the best, brightest, most innovative minds in the world. Unfortunately, they recently let 12,000 of those innovative minds go, in a way that makes you wonder if they accidentally deleted all findings from Project Aristotle from their servers, and collectively lost any memory of its existence.

Business Insider is having a field day with all of this, sharing headlines such as

“A Google engineer says survivors of the mass layoffs cried in meetings the day around 12,000 of their colleagues were culled.”

and

“Inside Google's all-hands meeting: Layoffs shatter the company's aura of stability and abundance.”

I find all of this incredibly interesting from a behavioral perspective. An organization studies how to build the perfect team, and finds that psychological safety is miles above everything else when it comes to culture factors contributing to high performance. That same organization subsequently decides to lay off 12,000 people in the middle of the night, deactivating their accounts at 3 in the morning, leading some employees to only find out they had been laid off when they arrived at the office and their badges weren’t working.

Psychological safety obviously doesn’t guarantee job security. Layoffs happen, and although Google is still a highly profitable organization, I guess the shareholders felt this was necessary. I have all sorts of opinions about that, but those are based on nothing more than my left-leaning tree-hugger tendencies. Unfortunately, this is how the corporate world works sometimes.

However, the way in which these layoffs happened, seriously makes me wonder if Google understands their own research. Psychological safety means people aren’t afraid to ask questions, make mistakes, or take risks. They aren’t worried about the consequences of speaking up or messing up. When 12,000 of your colleagues are laid off without warning, in the middle of the night, and you have no idea why you are still here, what do you think that will do to your willingness to take risks? To challenge the status quo? To ask difficult questions?

As one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Google relies on the creativity, resilience, and innovative mindsets of its employees to drive success. Exactly the skills that are built upon a foundation of psychological safety, which many of Google’s current employees do not feel right now. I’m sure the majority of people impacted by the layoffs will have no trouble finding a new job (pro-tip: putting ex-Google in your LinkedIn header will activate some beneficial biases for you). They are among the best in their industry, and any company would be lucky to have them.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is quoted as saying ‘I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.’ That’s great. At least he feels a great deal of psychological safety, and isn’t worried about his job. I do wonder exactly what ‘taking responsibility’ means in this scenario. I hope it means they will take a long, hard look at their actions, and how they align with what they claim their culture to be. Because these actions right here, certainly aren’t it.