The Emotional Keys to Great Collaboration
What makes a Google team effective? It is a questions that Google’s Project Aristotle set out to answer over the past two years. Naturally, google did what it does the best — a huge amount of data was collected from more than 180 active Google teams.
Ironically, this Google branded data-driven approach does not establish a rational procedure, but instead leads to an almost intuitive wisdom: “In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”
Based on our secondary research and our own teamwork experience, we would like to share the three key insights for facilitating emotional collaboration.
Step 1. Have good feelers in the team
In psychology, the term “social sensitivity” means the personal ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. One exam is known as the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes test,” where participants are asked to select the indicated feelings through looking at images of people’s eyes. Anita Woolley, the lead author of a study on group emotional intelligence, found out that people on the more successful teams in her experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
While collaboration plays a more and more crucial role in the success of any business, it is not too hard to imagine that in the future the ability to feel deeply will also be a qualification that companies look for in job candidates.
Step 2. Establish psychologically safe culture
The key insights from Google’s Project Aristotle is what’s called “psychological safety,” a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
If you are not sure if you have a psychologically safe culture in the workplace, ask yourself and the team the following questions:
Do you feel like you could always ask questions within the team however irrelevant or obtuse the questions might sound to you? Do you feel like you can talk openly about your emotions and the frictions in the group collaboration? Do you see team-member’s mistakes as constructive when they happen?
If you are thinking, “I honestly haven’t considered that,” it is time to to establish a work environment that feels safe psychologically. It is essential, because the safer we feel about working with each other, the more likely we become proactive, creative and passionate about making the whole team better.
According to Google’s analysis, individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.
Step 3. Cultivate emotional interactions
Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, made a great comment in The New York Times:
Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.
At Matter-Mind Studio, we intentionally design the way we collaborate in order to enable those emotional interactions. Among the tools we integrate into our emotional collaboration are “Formative Moments Timeline,” “Blind Portraits Ritual,“ and “How-we-are-doing Picnic.”
Formative Moments Timeline: right after a team is established, we map out key events of our lives that make who we are and share those insights with each other. During the exercise, we ask questions about the shared stories and win the trust of each other.
Blind Portraits Ritual: before a long meeting, we sit together and spend 10 mins drawing a blind contour of each other. This exercise embodies playfulness in itself and helps build a closer work relationship with each other.
How-we-are-doing Picnic: every three months, we have a picnic on a sunny day and reflect on what we have achieved and have missed. Surrounded by nature, we are relaxed and comfortable to slowly unpack reflective thoughts that we might not be able to bring up otherwise.
It is through these purposefully designed emotional conversations that we are able to open up to each other more and more. The results? We identified some of the pain points in our collaboration style and procedure, and came up with unconventional ways tailored to who and where we are as a team to work better together.
Curious about this topic and would like to learn more? Feel free to reach out to us through hello@mattermindstudio.com.
