What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Google’s Project Aritotole sought to understand what the elements of an effective team are. They found that ‘who’ is on a team matters less than the group norms, or shared culture within the group. They concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving teams, but could not pinpoint specific norms that resulted in more effective teams.

Another research study found that the thing that separated successful teams from unsuccessful teams was they way in which members treated one another because by doing so the groups’ collective IQ could reach its full potential, regardless of the task they were given to complete. The two behaviors that successful teams shared were:

1. Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

2. The good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.

These qualities create an atmosphere that supports psychological safety, a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

Ultimjately, it’s the emotional bonds, the real human elements, that allow a team to gel. Being able to be one’s most genuine, actualized self within a group is the indicator of whether or not that group will be successful. Being empathetic, and understanding that everyone on the team is having their own unique human experience is critical to a team’s success.