07 - Team Success

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Google’s main finding is that what matters most in successful teams is not who is on the team, but how people interact—especially whether the group creates “psychological safety,” where members feel safe to speak up without fear of embarrassment or punishment.

What Google Studied

• Google launched “Project Aristotle” to analyze hundreds of teams and discover why some consistently performed better than others.
• They tested many hypotheses about team composition: putting the “smartest” people together, matching personality types, balancing introverts and extroverts, or grouping close friends. None of these factors reliably explained performance.

Key Discovery: Group Norms and Psychological Safety

• The strongest predictor of team success was the team’s “group norms” – the unwritten rules about how people treat each other in meetings and day‑to‑day work.
• Effective teams showed two consistent patterns: roughly equal conversational turn‑taking (everyone gets heard) and high social sensitivity (members are attuned to one another’s feelings and reactions).
• These patterns create “psychological safety,” a climate where people feel comfortable taking risks, admitting mistakes, asking questions, and sharing unconventional ideas.

Why Psychological Safety Matters

• In psychologically safe teams, members share more information, correct one another, and build on each other’s ideas, which raises the “collective intelligence” of the group.
• People are more willing to acknowledge problems early, ask for help, and challenge assumptions, which leads to better decisions and more innovation.
• By contrast, teams lacking psychological safety often have people withdrawing, staying quiet, or focusing on self‑protection instead of collaboration, even when the individuals are very talented.

How Teams Can Build It

• Leaders who model openness—by sharing their own uncertainties or vulnerabilities and by actively inviting input—help set norms that encourage others to speak up.
• Simple practices help: starting meetings with quick personal check‑ins, ensuring everyone speaks, noticing who is quiet, and explicitly linking each person’s work to the broader mission so members feel their contributions matter.
• One example described a manager asking each team member to share something personal; this deepened trust and made people more comfortable raising concerns about work processes afterward.

Big Takeaway

• Google concluded that the “perfect team” is less about assembling star performers and more about cultivating a safe, respectful, and emotionally aware environment where everyone can contribute.
• In other words, good team culture—listening, empathy, and shared norms—outweighs individual brilliance in predicting whether a team will thrive.

Successful Tam (Video)

Intro

• Studies show that teams tend to innovate faster, achieve higher productivity, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems
• Yet not every team is successful

How do you build a successful team?

• A study made by Google found an answers
• Project Aristotle tracked 180 separate teams for 3 years
• The goal was simply, yet ambitious, to find out what are the traits of the highest performing teams
• Why some teams stumbled while other succeeded?
• At first theories don't seem to matter, skills, backgrounds do not matter.

Traits of a successful team

1. Team members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researches call: equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking
2. Good teams all had high average social sensitivity, a fancy way of saying they were skilled at reading how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues.

Conclusion

• It does not matter who is on the team, what matters is how team members treat each other.
• This highlights the importance of creating a psychological safety atmosphere inside the team.