1. The Recipe for Team Success
CSCE 315 – Programming Studio
Spring 2019
Robert Lightfoot

2. What make a good team?
Each table come up with one characteristic of a good team.
Answer when called on.

3. What make a good team? What are the characteristics of good teams?
What makes some teams successful, others not successful?
How can you develop those “good” characteristics?
There have been MANY books, articles, studies, etc. on what makes good teams
We’ll look at one of them

4. Study of Teams at Google
Lots of conventional wisdom about how to put together good teams
But, most of it had not really been studied
Google wanted to understand what made good teams
Project Aristotle
Began in 2012
Studied hundreds of Google’s teams
Collected lots of data, for about 180 teams.
Classified teams as successful/unsuccessful

5. Early Data Looked at basic compositions of teams:
How often did the team socialize outside the office?
Did the team members have the same hobbies?
Did the team have similar educational backgrounds?
Were they all outgoing? All shy? A mixture?
Did gender balance have an impact?

6. Results from Team Composition Study
What factors of team composition had the biggest effect?

7. Results from Team Composition Study
What factors of team composition had the biggest effect?
None of them!

8. Results from Team Composition Study
What factors of team composition had the biggest effect?
None of them!
The personality types, skills, backgrounds made no difference
Google could not determine a pattern to successful teams based on team composition

9. Successful Teams Outside work:
Some were friends who socialized outside of work
Some did not interact outside work at all
Managers:
Some had strong managers
Some had little hierarchy
Discussion
Some would interrupt each other regularly, including the manager
Some would enforce more rigid conversational order
Personal Discussion
Some would celebrate birthdays, discuss weekend plans
Some would discuss work only
Make-up
Some teams had nearly identical makeup (even many of the same people) but very different performance

10. Studying successful groups
Different successful teams had very different “norms”
To study the effect of groups, some researchers have looked at a “group IQ”
The group IQ is not just a function of the individual members’ Iqs
Emotional Intelligence – can also play a factor.
So, what did matter?

11. Two Key Behaviors Members would speak in roughly equal proportion
Might be more at some times, less at others, but in the end, everyone was nearly even
Teams had high “average social sensitivity”
Good ability to understand what people were feeling based on tone, expression, nonverbal cues
Measured with tests of the individuals

12. Psychological Safety
Google identified this as the most important factor in their teams’ success
Speaking and Social sensitivity are components
People need to feel free to express ideas and not feel intimidation, recrimination, ostracizing/etc.
Nobody will feel pressure to keep silent

13. Creating Psychological Safety
Respect each others’ abilities
Be interested in each other as people
Don’t reject people for being themselves and stating what they think
Believe other members have positive intentions
Seek and give feedback
Make changes, improvements
Obtain and provide expertise
Experiment
Engage in constructive conflict / confrontation

14. The 5 Factors Google Identified
Psychological Safety was the #1 issue, by far
Four more factors were found to be important

15. Other Factors
Many other factors have been shown to have an impact on successful teams
e.g. cognitive diversity: the diversity of ideas and approaches to problem solving on a team
Cognitive diversity is not correlated with most traditional measures of diversity: unrelated to ethnicity/gender/age
Cognitive diversity involves:
Knowledge processing: the extent to which individuals prefer to consolidate and deploy existing knowledge or prefer to generate new knowledge
Perspective: the extent to which individuals prefer to deploy their own expertise, or prefer to orchestrate the ideas and expertise of others

16. References
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.
“What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” Charles Duhigg, New York Times Magazine, Feb. 25, 2016
google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

17. References
There is much talk of authentic leadership, i.e., being yourself. Perhaps it is even more important that leaders focus on enabling others to be themselves.
“Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse,” Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, Harvard Business Review, March 30, 2017
theyre-more-cognitively-diverse