What Google Learned in Its Study to Find the Perfect Team
Summarized from an article on the Google Aristotle Project by Ron Cacioppe, Integral
Introduction
Full Summary
Download the full summary, including research definitions and research data.
Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams. A team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction.
Google researchers wanted to find the key things that resulted in effective teams at Google. This study was called Project Aristotle after Aristotle’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". The goal was to find: “What makes a team effective at Google?”
Findings
The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance:
Psychological safety: Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.
Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time (vs the opposite - shirking responsibilities).
Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level, and must be specific, challenging, and attainable. Google often uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help set and communicate short and long term goals.
Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. The meaning of work is personal and can vary: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual.
Impact: The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact.
The researchers also discovered which variables were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:
Colocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office)
Consensus-driven decision making
Extroversion of team members
Individual performance of team members
Workload size
Seniority
Team size
Tenure
It’s important to note though that while these variables did not significantly impact team effectiveness measurements at Google, that doesn’t mean they’re not important elsewhere. For example, while team size didn’t pop in the Google analysis, there is a lot of research showing the importance of it. Many researchers have identified smaller teams - containing less than 10 members - to be more beneficial for team success than larger teams (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). Smaller teams also experience better work-life quality (Campion et al., 1993), work outcomes (Aube et al., 2011), less conflict, stronger communication, more cohesion (Moreland & Levine, 1992; Mathieu et al., 2008), and more organizational citizenship behaviors (Pearce and Herbik, 2004).
More tools and exercises based on the article.
Tool: Help teams determine their own needs
Beyond just communicating the study results, the Google research team wanted to empower Googlers to understand the dynamics of their own teams and offer tips for improving. So they created a survey for teams to take and discuss amongst themselves. Survey items focused on the five effectiveness pillars and questions included:
Psychological safety - “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me.”
Dependability - “When my teammates say they’ll do something, they follow through with it.”
Structure and Clarity - “Our team has an effective decision-making process.”
Meaning - “The work I do for our team is meaningful to me.”
Impact - “I understand how our team’s work contributes to the organization's goals.”
After completing the survey, team leads received aggregated and anonymized scores to share with team members to inform a discussion. A facilitator would often join the discussion, or the team lead would follow a discussion guide.
Team Effectiveness Discussion Guide
This discussion guide is focused on the five team dynamics Google found to be important for team effectiveness. The guide can help teams identify areas where they might want to improve and elicit ideas of how to do that.
Tool: Foster psychological safety
Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important. The Google researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.
Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the construct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Taking a risk around your team members may sound simple. But asking a basic question like “what’s the goal of this project?” may make you sound like you’re out of the loop. It might feel easier to continue without getting clarification in order to avoid being perceived as ignorant.
To measure a team’s level of psychological safety, Edmondson asked team members how strongly they agreed or disagreed with these statements:
If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.
In her TEDx talk, Edmondson offers three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:
Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
Acknowledge your own fallibility.
Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.
In promoting the results of Google’s research internally, the research team has been running workshops with teams. In the workshops, anonymized scenarios have been used to illustrate behaviors that can support and harm psychological safety. The scenarios are role-played and then the group debriefs. Here’s an example scenario: