How to assess and improve your team’s effectiveness
Why do some teams succeed and others fail?
What startup and corporate innovation teams can learn from Google
Startups and corporate innovation teams bring people with diverse skills and thinking together to generate creative ideas, collaborate and develop new technologies, products and services. While diversity makes teams smarter and quicker to innovate, it also makes teams more prone to conflict. The conflict often blows up teams before they can make use of their differences. So what makes some teams succeed and other teams fail? Google’s own research on this question produces surprising results and lessons for every startup and corporate innovation team: It’s not ‘who’ is on the team but ‘how’ teams work together that makes a successful team. Changing the way your team works together can have a huge impact on performance, engagement and innovativeness.
What makes a successful team at Google?
In 2016, Charles Duhigg wrote an interesting article for the New York Times Magazine on Google’s quest to build the perfect team. Google had gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers to study what made teams succeed. In addition to reviewing decades of academic research, they undertook a two-year research project to study hundreds of Google’s teams.
As expected from a tech giant like Google, they collected vast amounts of data and looked for patterns across team performance and the team’s personality types, skills and backgrounds. Were high performing teams comprised of introverts or extraverts? Did they have similar levels of education? Were they gender balanced? Google also looked at how teams socialized. How often did they eat together? Were they friends outside of work? Did they have similar hobbies?
“No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. … The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
— Charles Duhigg ‘What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team’
Google found that some of its most effective teams were composed of friends who socialized outside work but others were composed of basically strangers. Some groups sought strong managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Google even found that two teams could have nearly identical makeups but radically different levels of effectiveness. The surprising results of this research led Google to focus on research relating to ‘group norms’. Norms are the written and unwritten rules of how a team functions when gathered together. Unwritten rules can sometimes be explained in terms of a team’s culture but can include the way that team communicates, debates and interacts.
While there are many different ways to describe how people work together, Google found 5 team dynamics that have a huge impact on performance, engagement, and innovativeness:
- Psychological Safety — Can we take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
- Dependability — Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
- Structure & Clarity — Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
- Meaning of Work — Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
- Impact of Work — Do we fundamentally believe that the work we are doing matters?
The researchers found that what really mattered was less about ‘who’ was on the team, and more about ‘how’ the team worked together. More importantly, Google has put together a framework to assess and improve how teams work together to create more effective teams.
What is ‘Psychological Safety’ and why is it so important to building an effective team?
Google found that the most important dynamic to a successful team was that the team members felt safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.
“The Google researchers found that 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.”
The concept and importance of psychological safety in team performance builds on the work by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson. In the late 1990s, she was researching medical mistakes at hospitals which were a big problem at the time. Expecting to find that better teams make fewer mistakes, she was surprised to find the opposite — more cohesive teams reported the most mistakes. Further research suggested that better teams weren’t making more mistakes, they were just more willing to talk and learn from their mistakes. In the decades since that research, psychological safety has been shown to improve learning, innovation and growth across many other industries. In particular, psychological safety is essential to high performing teams where interdependent teams work in complex, uncertain environments. This is why psychological trust is particularly important to startups and corporate innovation teams.
Note that psychological safety is not about team members being ‘nice’ to each other, or giving team members a sense that everything is going to be great. It is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is about team members are comfortable being honest and direct, taking risks and being willing to say “I screwed up”. In response, mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken, seamless coordination across groups or departments is enabled and potentially game-changing ideas for innovation are shared.
How can you assess and improve your team effectiveness?
Google share their data-driven practices, research and ideas through their re:Work website. The re:Work Guide on Teams provides research, tools and tips to create, foster and empower effective teams.
The re:Work Team Effectiveness Discussion Guide can be used to survey team members and identify areas where they might want to improve. The customisable survey focuses questions and discussion points around the 5 key dynamics of effective teams. For example, questions relating to psychological safety include:
- Do all team members feel comfortable brainstorming in front of each other?
- Do all team members feel they can fail openly, or will they feel shunned?
re:Work suggests ways in which team leaders and managers can improve team dynamics. For example, team leaders can take steps to improve psychological safety by:
- Soliciting input and opinions from the group
- Sharing information about personal work style preferences, and encourage others to do the same
- Asking the team to watch Amy Edmondson’s TED Talk on psychological safety
More generally, re:Work suggests that any type of organisation can build effective teams by taking these 3 steps:
- Establish a common vocabulary — Define the team behaviors and norms you want to foster in your organization.
- Create a forum to discuss team dynamics — Allow for teams to talk about subtle issues in safe, constructive ways. An HR Business Partner or trained facilitator may help.
- Commit leaders to reinforcing and improving — Get leadership onboard to model and seek continuous improvement can help put into practice your vocabulary.
While Google is a large organisation, the re:Work guidelines, tools and recommendations can be applied to any team including early stage startups and newly minted corporate innovation teams. Startups trying to solve complex problems are usually comprised of people with diverse skills and approaches. Corporate innovation teams often recruit talent from different parts of the organisation — they may not have worked together before. Psychological safety is key to getting these teams to generate new ideas, collaborate, and create new products and services.
Follow me to learn more about how I work with startups, corporate innovation and business teams on performance and conflict resolution, or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
