- Google spent two years studying 180 diverse in-house teams doing “real” work
- They named the exercise ‘Project Aristotle’ after the Greek philosopher’s quote: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”
- They wanted to find a recipe for:
‘What makes teams successful?’
- Initially, they thought the ingredients would be:
- Put the best people together
- Add an experienced manager
- Give them a free pass to all resources
- However, they found this wasn’t true!
-
The composition of the team or its geographical location didn’t matter a lot
-
How the teams worked together made the big difference viz:
-
Cohesive teams – When teams work in synergy, they achieve extraordinary performance
- Dysfunctional teams – Their whole performance ends up being a lot less than the sum of their parts
-
- The following extracts from an article by Tushar Vakil, published by ‘New Age Leadership’, explain more
Individual brilliance versus Team effectiveness?
- Individual brilliance is great, but team cohesiveness is more important – most of the work done today is in projects involving multiple people working in teams
- Talent management’s primary focus has been on measuring and managing individual performance, but that is not enough – analysing and improving individual performance does not translate into the performance of teams or workgroups
- Michael Jordan: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships”.
What factors didn’t matter a lot for a team’s effectiveness?
- To their surprise, Project Aristotle discovered that several common factors thought to impact team performance and effectiveness DID NOT matter much
- They were collocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office), consensus-driven decision making, extroversion of team members, individual performance of team members, workload size, seniority, team size and tenure.
The Five Factors found common to effective teams, listed in order of importance, were:
1. Psychological safety – the lynchpin:
- Team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable in front of each other without fear of being embarrassed, ridiculed, or facing other consequences
- Otherwise, team members may have difficulty sharing their concerns, ideas, and issues – and remote teams remain ineffective
- “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me.”
2. Dependability:
- Team members reliably complete quality work on time – the opposite of dependability is shirking responsibilities – team members get things done on time
- “When my teammates say they’ll do something, they follow through with it.”
3. Structure and clarity:
- Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals – they understand job expectations and responsibilities so collaboration becomes more effective
- “Our team has an effective decision-making process.”
4. Meaning:
- Teams perform better when they find their work meaningful – connecting individual tasks to a larger purpose fosters motivation and engagement
- “The work I do for our team is meaningful to me.”
5. Impact:
- Teams have to feel that their work and their output are making a difference – and that their work matters to the company and the customers
- “I understand how our team’s work contributes to the organisation’s goals.”
P.S. What about WFH – ‘Working From Home’?
- Google found that teammates’ collocation (sitting together in the same office) didn’t impact team effectiveness much – it wasn’t in the top five factors that impacted team effectiveness
- Whether the team works in the same office or from home shouldn’t be much of a team effectiveness factor, especially after processes and habits have been installed properly.