1: Google’s People Analytics group wanted to understand how to build the perfect team.
Google has consistently been ranked by Fortune magazine as one of America’s top workplaces.
This result was no accident. “Even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
The People Analytics group, part of the company’s human resources division, had achieved a significant win—code-named Project Oxygen—by examining why some managers were more effective than others.
Ultimately, researchers had identified eight critical management skills.* [See below for the complete list.]
Yet, the quality of the manager alone did not explain why some teams were successful and others were not.
“Googlers would say things like ‘I have a great manager, but my team has never clicked’ or ‘My manager isn’t fantastic, but the team is so strong it doesn’t matter,’” says Abeer Dubey, a People Analytics manager.
2: So, the People Analytics team launched another mammoth effort, this one code-named Project Aristotle, to understand what makes a great team.
“With enough data, People Analytics believed, almost any behavioral puzzle could be solved,” Charles writes.
So, they dove in. The team started with a comprehensive review of the academic literature.
“Some scientists had found that teams functioned best when they contained a concentration of people with similar levels of extroversion and introversion,” he notes, “while others had found that a balance of personalities was key.
“There were studies about the importance of teammates having similar tastes and hobbies, and others lauding diversity within groups.
“Some research suggested that teams needed people who like to collaborate,” Charles shares. “Others said groups were more successful when individuals had healthy rivalries.
“The literature, in other words, was all over the place,” he concludes.
Next, the Project Aristotle team invested more than 150 hours interviewing Google team members about what they thought made a team effective.
“We learned that teams are somewhat in the eye of the beholder,” said Abeer, the People Analytics manager. “One group might appear like it’s working really well from the outside, but, inside, everyone is miserable.”
So, eventually, they developed metrics to measure teams’ effectiveness based on both external factors, such as whether a group achieved its targets, and internal drivers, such as how productive team members felt.
Then, the Aristotle group measured everything they could find. “Researchers examined how often teammates socialized outside of work and how members divided up tasks,” Charles explains.
“They drew complicated diagrams to show teams’ overlapping memberships, and then compared those against statistics of which groups had exceeded their department’s goals.
“They studied,” he notes, “how long teams stuck together and if gender balance had an impact on effectiveness.”
Still nothing. There were no clear patterns or proof that the composition of the team determined its success.
“We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,” Abeer says. “We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
For example, some highly effective Google teams were made up of friends who played sports together outside of work. Other productive teams rarely socialized outside the office. Some teams wanted a strong manager. Still others preferred a flat organizational structure.
“Most confounding of all,” Charles writes, “sometimes two teams would have nearly identical compositions, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness.”
“At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,” says Abeer. “There weren’t strong patterns here.”
3: Faced with inconclusive results, the Project Aristotle veered in a different direction. They explored a second body of academic research on “group norms.”
“Any group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior,” a team of psychologists had written in the Sociology of Sport Journal.
What are norms?
They “are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function,” Charles writes. “Norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates. . .
“When a team comes to an unspoken consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate, that’s a norm asserting itself,” he notes.
“If a team develops a culture that encourages differences of opinion and spurns groupthink, that’s another norm holding sway.”
Group norms often hold sway over individual preferences or personality types.
“Team members might behave certain ways as individuals—they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently,” Charles observes, “but often, inside a group, there’s a set of norms that override those preferences and encourage deference to the team.”
Guided by this new direction, the Project Aristotle researchers decided to revisit all of the data they had collected and view it through the lens of group norms.
This shift in perspective paid off.
Group norms were the answer they had been searching for. “The data finally started making sense,” Abeer says. “We had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”
But what were the norms that really mattered?
“Google’s research had identified dozens of norms that seemed important—and, sometimes, the norms of one effective team contradicted the norms of another, equally successful group,” Charles writes.
“They found that some teams consistently allowed people to interrupt one another. Others enforced taking conversational turns,” Charles notes.
“Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with a few minutes of informal chitchat. Others got right to business.
“There were teams that contained extroverts who hewed to the group’s sedate norms whenever they assembled,” he writes, “and others where introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.”
Yes, there was a lot of noise in the data. But certain norms accurately predicted team success.
For example, an engineer on one of Google’s most effective teams said his team leader “is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks…. She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.”
The “safe space” the engineer refers to is called “psychological safety.”
More next week… when we will delve deeper into what psychological safety means, why it is so vital for team effectiveness, and explore practical steps for fostering it within groups.
__________________________
Reflection: Am I spending too much time focusing on who is on my team and not enough time thinking about the norms and behaviors that shape how we work together?
Action: Observe one team I am part of this week and identify two or three unwritten norms that influence how people communicate, collaborate, and make decisions.
__________________________
*The eight critical management skills identified by Google:
- Be a good coach.
- Empower the team; don’t micromanage.
- Show interest in employees’ success and well-being.
- Be productive and results-oriented.
- Be a good communicator and listener.
- Help employees with career development.
- Have a clear vision and strategy.
- Have technical skills that help advise the team.
For more information on this research, see Google’s 8 Simple Rules for Being a Better Manager.