What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
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The quest to build the perfect team started five years ago, to start the experiment google managers decided to spend millions studying all aspects of their employee’s lives, from their work ethic and performance to their social skills and off-work activities. They initially thought that the best group would be formed of people that were similar minded and those who had social ties away from the work environment. A few years later the project “Aristotle” came into play, this was based on hundreds of studies about google teams and why some were deteriorating while others were flourishing.
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Aristotle was based on figuring out everyone’s personality which included; their social background, their interests, their motivators and their overall mindset to figure out who to best pair them with. The trials revolved around understanding the best way to group people, if it was to be based on similar motivators or on personality traits such as being introverted or extroverted. This wasn’t successful as no matter how many groups they looked at, which exceeded 180, they came to the conclusion that nothing showed that a certain mix of people gave certain results “The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
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Aristotle researchers landed on trying to identify group norms, making it an important point to focus on as these norms may be the key to developing the perfect team. This didn’t come without its challenges as equally efficient groups had very different norms. The two main groups A and B, took very different approaches but both gave results. Team A was more professional and ran a very tight shift; there was very little side chit chat and speaking out of order was frowned upon. Team B, on the other hand was quite the opposite, there was a lot of chit chat, the rigid agenda took the backseat as when one person went off topic so did the rest, and the meeting would end with gossip and personal conversations, this was unheard of in team A.
- Some teams might have rules about the way you should speak. Some groups have rules about not interrupting the other speakers while others may welcome interrupting as a part that helps them to generate new ideas.
- Some groups may stay formal with each other and keep distance while other teams may proceed to chat with each other. That’s why the personality of the member does not always matter. If an introvert inters a team were debates are welcomed, he\she should try to get into these environments and the same applies to the extroverts.
- The group norms are very important when it comes to the group’s productivity. Even when all of the group members are bright, when they do not work in a comfortable environment, the’ re unlikely to succeed.
- One major factor in the group’s success is having all of the members expressing their thought and having an equal time to say whatever they think of. When only some members speak the productivity of the team majorly declines.
- To sum up, the psychological environment takes a huge part of the team’s productivity, the respect that each member gets and the equal chances have huge effect on how they will work.