What makes a team optimal? Alignment, communication, collaboration, energy management, leverage and trust, what else? Google did some comprehensive research on this topic, this what they found:
Safety, Belonging, Mattering
I’ve found it all comes back to safety, belonging, mattering no matter what structure you want to wrap around optimal teaming. Over the course of two years (ending in Nov 2015) they conducted over 200 interviews where they assessed over 250 attributes of what they thought made an optimal team. The findings from the 180 teams they studied were surprising.
While they had hoped to find a “recipe” for an optimal team (take one Ivy League MBA, one extrovert, one expert engineer, etc.), they actually found that who was on the team mattered far less than how they interacted, structured their work, experienced their contributions. The answer was in behaviour and emotional resilience. Their work echoed some of what Carnegie Mellon found back in 2010 with their collective intelligence work.
Five key dynamics resulted in optimal teams:
- Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team 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’re doing matters?
Google found that Psychological Safety was by far the most important dynamic. Without this people don’t feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions, checking in. There’s too much risk of being labelled as “out of it” or “clueless”. All humans want to be “in” the group (to belong) and we’ll take tremendous risks (like not speaking out even if we feel it’s very important) if we feel we’ll become an outcast as a result, or lose status in our tribe, or be ostracized somehow.
G Teams
Googlers now use a tool they call gTeams. It’s a 10-minute check-in on the five dynamics. We’ll do a modified check-in below, one that our clients find works very well. To tie this topic up in a bow, over the past year over 3,000 Googlers across 300 teams have used gTeams and focused on the 5 factors above. They often will kick off team meetings by each team member sharing a risk they took in the past week. The net-net is they’ve seen Psychological Safety ratings increase by 6% and Structure/Clarity increase by 10%. But the best part is the increased connection in the team due to increased communication.
Consider the five factors from Google:
- Psychological Safety
- Dependability
- Structure & Clarity
- Meaning of Work
- Impact of Work
On a scale of 1-5 where 5 is excellent, rate your experience of each factor in your team. Now total up your score. Here’s our rating format. If your total score is:
Up to 10: High Risk. There’s a lot of work to do. Use the table below to map to safety, belonging, mattering. Get a neuroscience-based coach, and get to work healing your culture.
11-18: Risky. Your team is not performing nearly as well as it could. Let’s get everyone more connected and collaborative. Time for team training and coaching.
19-25: Solid. Congrats! You’re on a high-performing team. Time to raise the bar!
Easy, yes? Everything basically maps to safety, belonging, mattering. All other models simply help you implement programs to deliver these three core human needs.See how this model helps your team!
In our Culture Development Program we cover all the psychological safety factors to make your company thrive. Contact us for more information on this or email: jake@thrive-cm.com
First published on forbes.com/
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