What are the secret ingredients of highly effective teams? How do we spot the difference between a team that’s ‘just okay’ and a team that’s ‘awesome’?
Google’s targeted these questions in a special research study, called Project Aristotle. Though the study finished several years ago, the findings are still relevant to top companies today.
Google’s Project Aristotle: Uncovering The Secrets Of Highly Effective Teams
Google studied teams along a spectrum of performance – some were high performers, some low performers.
The goal of the research – uncover what makes a highly effective team.
The research group at the helm of this study looked at 180 teams, conducted interviews wth individuals, ran statistical models and reviewed hundreds of surveys.
They discovered a surprising result.
Team performance was less about who was in the team and and more about how the team worked together.1)
Project Aristotle identified five factors that drive high performing teams:
- Psychological Safety: does the team provide a safe environment in which team members can take risks, ask questions and try new ideas?
- Dependability: do team members reliably complete their work and can they be depended on?
- Structure and clarity: do team members understand expectations for their role and how is team performance managed?
- Meaning: does the team’s work contribute a deeper sense of meaning to the team members within it?
- Impact: do team members have a clear connection with how their effort translates to outcomes in the work they do?
How Teams (Not Times) Have Changed
While the findings show five factors that make teams effective, it’s also worth exploring why these factors are important.
The reality is the nature of work has changed since the turn of this century.
People are moving between jobs more than ever. In some developed countries, the average tenure for a role is 4.2 years 2) and even baby boomers will experience 11.9 jobs in a lifetime.3)
Technological change has resulted in many companies becoming more specialized. In turn, companies often seek higher levels of specialization in the people they hire. Millennials in particular are also reshaping the workplace and work habits.
Collaboration has also become a significant working style. As noted by HBR,“according to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.”4)
These drivers have led to work that is more fluid. The previous structures that stabilized teams (long term tenure, clear job descriptions, even where we sat in an office before they became open-plan), are less relevant in the modern work style.
Many of the previous structures were very tangible. While these have eroded, the five factors mentioned in Project Aristotle are less tangible (eg. we cannot point to psychological safety, but we can say what it means for us and when it is present), and yet still provide a mental support for people in a shifting environment.
There are also conventional ways we can support these factors. Having a clear mission or vision statement and being able to connect such a statement with the team’s work is a way to provide the team with meaning and clarity. If you are looking to refine the purpose for your company or team, mission statement examples provide a reference point.
The Intangibles Are Now The Great Supports For Teams
Project Aristotle highlights factors not often written down.
These factors are often about what is not spoken – a team’s unwritten norms, customs, and the way members behave and feel they’re part of something. 5)
Six years before Google published the results of Project Aristotle, another study looked at a subject that would prove influential to Google’s research. This study looked at a concept known as ‘collective intelligence’.
The theory of collective intelligence is that a type of intelligence exists among people operating as a team, that plays a similar role to the general intelligence possessed by an individual, only that it operates at a group level.
Five scientists across three universities led research that looked at how 699 people worked in teams.
In this research they asked questions like ‘does collective intelligence exist’? And if it exists, what causes it?
They found not only that it exists, but that it contributes to a team’s overall success.
They also identified three conditions that give rise to collective intelligence…
Let’s think about this for a moment.
Often when we’re building a team, we think about the unique skills, talents and specializations of individuals within the team. And yet the theory of collective intelligence would suggest beyond these credentials, we ought to consider other factors. These might include whether individuals in the team are socially sensitive…even whether the team make-up will promote balanced contribution to conversation?
In fact, these aspects may be far more important to the team’s performance, than any individual’s performance within the team.
Today, Teams Make More Decisions Than Ever
So why is this important? In our hyper-connected and hyper-collaborative world, teams are making more of the decisions than ever.
Teams are equally responsible for the well-being of an organization (its strategies, its products and its performance) as individuals.
As published in the New York Times, “nowadays, though we may still idolize the charismatic leader or creative genius, almost every decision of consequence is made by a group.” From Facebook through to the storytellers at Pixar, group-work is not just important, but can make or break a company.7)
Over and above other elements – the IQ of individual team members, the balance of extraverts or introverts – the smartest teams are those that show three characteristics; do team members contribute equally to team discussions, can team members read the emotional states of their peers and, finally, do teams have more women than men.
The Implication for Leaders
As leaders, we need to be conscious of this shift and adapt to it.
Let’s start by setting up working environments in ways that promote the five factors outlined by Project Aristotle. Teams focused on technology or digital product development need this, because by their nature they’re highly cross-functional. But this also applies to any team in an organization and especially those companies undergoing significant change.
Beyond this, we need to adapt our focus as leaders (if we haven’t done so already) to include the concept of collective intelligence. Individual coaching is still important, and now coaching teams according to Project Aristotle’s findings requires an expanded leadership vocabulary.
This involves looking beyond the tangible elements of a team (who’s in it, what skills do they bring) to perceive the nuances of how a team is working together. We might ask questions like: is psychological safety present in this team, do we understand how team members take meaning from their work, and so on?
We also need to seek out ways to actively support the principles
Finally, when we are leading teams ourselves or seeking people to lead teams for us, we can audit whether the skill-set in the leader is up to task. Are the requisite talents in place to promote highly effective teams? Do we understand that teams may approach high performance with very different patterns, and still achieve incredible results?
I see little downside in upskilling ourselves to accomodate the changing nature of teams, but there is a lot to lose if we don’t.
I’d love to hear what you think about teams, what works and what doesn’t. Please consider sharing your thoughts with others by adding a comment below.
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