Companies do better when workers collaborate.
Employees who work in teams produce better results and report higher job satisfaction. It's been proven over and over again. Most recently by Google.
In 2012, Google decided to ask itself a really important question: why do some Google teams shine while others stumble? When you happen to be Google you have access to some of the smartest statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers around. They deployed this incredible talent on a quest to find out what makes their best teams click. They dubbed the assignment Project Aristotle.
Project Aristotle researchers looked at teams in every possible way to figure out what set apart the teams that excelled at Google versus the teams that didn't. Some of the correlations they looked at included:
- Were the teams made up of people with similar interests?
- Were they motivated by the same kind of rewards?
- Did teammates socialize outside the office? How often?
- How did their education backgrounds compare to each other?
- Were teammates outgoing or shy?
- What was the gender ratio of each team?
Do Personality Types, Skills, or Background Predict Team Success? No
Over the course of a year, the researchers looked at 180 teams from all over the company and found no patterns showing that, "a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference." Each time they thought they had narrowed down a set of group norms ("traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather"), they would discover another, equally successful team with the complete opposite set of characteristics.
As time went on however, the researchers recognized two behaviors that all good teams shared.
First, all members spoke approximately the same amount of time, a practice known as conversational turn-taking. "As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well...But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined."
Second, good teams all had high average social sensitivity, meaning "they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
Coincidentally (or not) conversational turn-taking and average social sensitivity are traits of what's known as something psychologists refer to as psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as:
"a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking...[It instills] 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."
What Project Aristotle researchers found was that while there were many behaviors that seemed important to establish as team norms, psychological safety was the most critical. That begged the question...
How do you establish psychological safety?
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