The Traits of a Successful Team — According to Google

Changing the perspective on team compositions

Written by Simon Dödtmann

Changing the perspective on team compositions

Whether it be in ESTIEM or your studies, in sports activities or your job: You will always work in teams. Collaboration -working together with other people- is becoming an increasingly important factor for successful businesses and any successful activity.

The reasons behind the success or failure of teams have been a subject of research for many years. Dr. Meredith Belbin started his research on teams in the 1960s and spent 10 years working on his thesis on this topic. In his well-known theory, Belbin defines nine team roles: Resource Investigator, Team Worker, Coordinator, Plant, Monitor Evaluator, Specialist, Shaper, Implementer and Completer. He states that each team needs access to each of the nine team roles, not necessarily at the same time and not in the form of nine different persons. But each of these distinctive behaviors should be present. [1]

However, diversity in the form of behavior, as suggested by Belbin, is not the only form of diversity that contributes to a successful team and ultimately leads to better results. In a study published in 2017, Boston Consulting Group showed that diversity in industrial background, country of origin, career path and gender are all positively correlated to innovation, measured by the share of revenue that was generated from the enhanced or entirely new products or services of that specific company. [2]

Does this mean a team’s success is fully dependent on the composition of the team? A recent study by Google showed different results. In fact, it suggests the complete opposite to be true. The results published included the following statement: [3]

Researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.

The five characteristics uncovered through this research, and that were found to be most significant in terms of team effectiveness are shown in figure 1, in order of importance. To put it in a single word, what mattered most in the teams studied was TRUST. The most successful of teams are those that work in an environment where everyone feels safe to take risks, admit mistakes, ask questions and offer new ideas. Feeling comfortable to engage in this behavior, without the fear of it negatively influencing the perception of others is a key requirement to harness the power of diversity.

This establishes an environment where team members can rely on each other and have a complete understanding of how their work contributes to the goal of the team and the organization and thus can feel as though they serve a much greater purpose, which also helps improve employee satisfaction.

The five traits presented in this study were the most impactful ones for teams working at Google. Elsewhere, other factors like diversity, team size or experience of team member might be just as important. It seems that creating the perfect, high-performing team is more complex and unpredictable than we may like it to be, but actively constructing a team with these traits may increase the likelihood of creating your dream team.

While this study cannot capture the individual complexity of building excellent teams, it offers a new perspective on the research of successful or failing teams, apart from personalities and distinctive behaviors and eventually suggests Aristotle might have been right yet again.

The whole is more than the sum of its part — Aristotle

Works Cited

[1]

R. M. Belbin, Management teams: Why they succeed or fail, London: Heinemann, 1987.

[2]

R. Lorenzo, N. Voigt, K. Schetelig, A. Zawadzki, I. Welpe und P. Brosi, „The Mix That Matters: Innovation Through Diversity,” Boston Consulting Group, 2017.

[3]

Google LLC, „re:Work — Guide: Understand team effectiveness,” [Online]. Available: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/identify-dynamics-of-effective-teams/. [Accessed 2nd of March 2019].

Originally published at http://estiemblog.azurewebsites.net on April 11, 2019.