CLASS-14b
WHAT GOOGLE LEARNED ABOUT TEAMS
Working in groups can be very stressful. There is always a feeling that we have to prove ourselves to others. Many firms have been researching this topic for years and have come to realize that “employee performance optimization” which is the process of analyzing and improving individual workers, is not enough.
Studies have shown that software engineers working in groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.
Project Aristotle
Google’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. That turned out not to be true so the company started a project to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. They found out that 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. Also, how teammates treated one another had an impact on the results.
Google in its race to build the perfect team, has unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it is sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experience, like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel.
Things I want to know more about
- How to improve and develop the right skills to achieve better results working in teams.