class14b.md

What Google Learned From It's Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Why do some groups thrive and others falter?

Today, on corporate campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves.

‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University who studies how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’

Studies show that teams tend to:

• innovate faster
• see mistakes more quickly
• find better solutions to problems
• achieve better results
• higher job satisfaction

If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.

Building the best teams means combining the right people.

Understanding and influencing group norms is the key to improving teams.

The thing that distinguishes the good teams from the dysfunctional teams is:

• how teammates treat one another
• good conversational skills; everyone - gets a chance to talk
• social sensitivity; being aware of - how others feel based on things like their tone of voice and facial experssions
• having clear goals
• creating a culture of dependability

Create a group that has an enviroment of psycological safety.

‘‘I might be the luckiest individual on earth,’’ Sakaguchi (a mid-level manager at Google) told me. ‘‘I’m not really an engineer. I didn’t study computers in college. Everyone who works for me is much smarter than I am.’’ But he is talented at managing technical workers, and as a result, Sakaguchi has thrived at Google.

Human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else.

‘‘I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life,’’ Laurent told me. ‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

No one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. We want to know that work is more then just "labor".

‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number...Why would I walk away from (work)? Why wouldn’t I spend time with people who care about me?’’

Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

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.