Possessing a shared interest is one of the critical elements behind a good team. However, it is a known fact that as the team becomes bigger, more people have their own interests and it becomes harder to pull in the same direction.
Successful businesses have been able to employ large teams to great effect, and Google ran its own research project back in 2012 in an attempt to determine how this is the case. The experiment, dubbed “Project Aristotle” and headed by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics department, wanted to discover how the “perfect team” could be built at scale.
The project was named after the great philosopher, Aristotle, owing to his famous quotation about “the whole” being “greater than the sum of its parts”.
Google spent years analysing data and interviews from over 180 teams across the company, trying to determine whether successful teams were made up of individuals who possessed particular traits.
While Project Aristotle did not throw up any clear indicator for team success, it did throw up some interesting suggestions. Among these, Google found that the individual personalities within a team were not particularly relevant to it operating successfully.
Reflecting on the research, Dubey told The New York Times: “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.”
The researchers instead settled on five key characteristics which were necessary to build an “enhanced team”. These included:
Psychological safety: Everyone in the team feels safe in taking risks around their peers, and know they won’t be embarrassed or punished for doing so.
Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.
Structure and clarity: Everyone knows what their specific expectations and responsibilities are. These must be challenging but crucially, attainable.
Meaning: Everyone has a sense of purpose in the work they are doing.
Impact: Everyone sees that the result of their work is directly contributing to the overall aspirations of the organisation they work for.
The project also uncovered that in some teams that were not necessarily comprised of high IQ individuals, success was attained when they found ways to utilise each other’s strengths. Some groups had strong leaders, while others did not really have a “leader” as such and were more fluid. This led Google researchers to conclude that how individual members of the team behaved towards each other was a more telling factor in success rather than individual intelligence. The understanding each person had for another helped establish trust and other key factors needed to work coherently.
Elsewhere, “group norms” were also highlighted as an important element, primarily around behaviours. This could include mechanisms as simple as turn-taking during group conversations or adding time at the beginning or end of meetings for informal discussions and debriefs. The researchers eventually concluded that being able to influence such “cultural norms” within teams was vital to the success of the unit.
Yet, good leaders will have already known these things. As Charles Duhigg of The New York Times wrote following his interview with Dubey: “The paradox, of course, is that Google's intense data collection and number-crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”
Although stating the obvious, Google's discoveries do hold water. However, one major bone of contention - following some scientific studies - is Google's conclusion that personality is not of major importance in enabling a team to be successful.
In one such study, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at Columbia University, and Dave Winsborough, former vice-president at Hogan Assessment Systems, co-wrote in the Harvard Business Review that personality does indeed have a major influence on the role individuals take within their teams.
The two wrote: “Too often, organisations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows.
“This is why even the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player: There is no psychological synergy. A more effective approach focuses as much on people’s personalities as on their skills.”
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
