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What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

667 points by aarghh 11y ago

ghshephard 11y ago
Wow - how do we even classify this - it's clearly not just a story. Is it a case study? Series? It feels like it's almost book length - sort of thing we'll be readying for days (if not weeks). Has NYT ever done an article in this format before? The "Blind Hiring" section starts off great: A few years ago, Kedar Iyer, an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, became acutely aware of a problem in his industry: A surfeit of talented coders were routinely overlooked by employers because they lacked elite pedigrees. Hiring managers, he thought, were too often swayed by the name of a fancy college on a résumé.
- eterm 11y ago
  Let's not go crazy here, it's 11 pages / 5.6k words. While it's unusual to have magazine articles that length these days, it's not a huge amount of time since that was more normal. It's an excerpt from a book: > Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and the paper’s senior editor of live journalism. He is the author of ‘‘The Power of Habit’’ and the forthcoming book ‘‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business,’’ from which this article is adapted.
boothead 11y ago
I'd be willing to bet that Sakaguchi has read "The 5 dysfunctions of a team" [1]. One of my favorite books about how people jell together in groups. Like him I was also in a military setting before I became a programmer. I haven't yet experienced the same level of engagement and team cohesion outside of the military but I believe that the answers are to be found in the kinds of insights that studies like this uncover. [1] http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions
eitally 11y ago
Even if it turns out this is a puff piece supplied to the Times by Google, it's still a very well written and insightful article explaining a bit of why psychological safety is critical for teams to perform optimally. It's probably my favorite Google-related article this year, actually. I'd much prefer reading about companies trying to improve their working environments than about whatever incremental new product feature they're launching.
- aarghh 11y ago
  Indeed - what I enjoyed and got out of this article is a fairly easy correlation to what separated good teams that I have been on from bad ones. I had classified the difference as "camaraderie" - but the idea of psychological safety is a little more useful. Camaraderie is the superficial outcome, while psychological safety is the enabler.
  - tamana 11y ago
    Psychological safety is the modern euphemism for what used to be called "culture fit".
    - mc32 11y ago
      Not really, one term is the popular term the other one is a term from behavioral psychology. So they describe the same phenomenon but by different people.
      - mox111 11y ago
        Someone could fit very nicely into a given working culture despite that culture not being 'psychologically safe' by the author's definition. They are not the same concept.
        mc32 11y ago
        Is fitting in or the ability to fit in the same as a good cultural fit? Never the less, one of the terms is from psychology, one of the terms is from pop culture and may not overlap completely
cmurphycode 11y ago
Wow. Lots of interesting points, and a few things that made me say WTF and wonder how much this will be torn apart in the comments. In other words, a very worthy read.
boothead 11y ago
I'd be willing to bet that Sakaguchi has read "The 5 dysfunctions of a team" [1]. One of my favorite books about how people jell together in groups. Like him I was also in a military setting before I became a programmer. I haven't yet experienced the same level of engagement and team cohesion outside of the military but I believe that the answers are to be found in the kinds of insights that studies like this uncover. [1] http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions edit formatting
- eitally 11y ago
  He may or may not have, but I can tell you that some of Google's core internal team training focuses on the same concepts in the same triangular hierarchy, so even if he hasn't, someone has! :)
- calinet6 11y ago
  The 5 dysfunctions of a team also closely echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs. However, I have to chime in: I don't agree with the accountability aspect. Responsibility is necessary, along with knowledge and support from the whole system: this broad "ability to be effective" makes accountability obsolete, and is superior. That combination of Knowledge, Psychology, Systems thinking, and a fourth: an understanding of variation and statistical reality -- leads to a much more complete and functional model of the organization. This is W. Edwards Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. However, you can see why "The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team" caught on, and his name didn't.
  - poof131 11y ago
    I may be misunderstanding as I'm not familiar with your sources, but I’m not sure how you can have an effective team without accountability? If you are responsible for delivering something and you don’t and there’s never any ramification (accountability) things degenerate. I’ve seen this more than I’d like where a manager’s team is failing and he or she constantly blames subordinates and other teams for the lack of results, always ready to pull something out of the excuse matrix. When senior leaders fail to hold these managers accountable, the process continues, new mistakes, missed targets, and new scape goats found. Responsibility without accountability seems like the life of a Roman Emperor and I’ve never seen it work well with teams or leaders.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
They used 'meeting behavior' to predict team performance. And not in the way you would expect. Its not about productivity in the team meetings. Its about feeling safe, respected, and sharing the load. Makes some sense. Team meetings are not where anything gets done after all. If team members are engaged with their peers, they may invest in team goals and perform better. Issue: they correlated team meeting metrics (talking time; socialization time vs problem solving time etc) with team success at achieving goals. They could have used behavior outside the meetings (communications per day; social interactions after work) and predicted successful teams that way. It doesn't mean that "Meetings that go like this indicates good teams"? I.e. changing your team meetings to look like what good teams do, may not improve your team at all. That might be put under 'cargo cult management'.
- jerf 11y ago
  "Its about feeling safe, respected, and sharing the load." You know, I think it's worth pointing something out about the word "safe" given the sense it has been used in lately. In this case, it means people feel safe to express dissent. Not "safe from dissent", as the term is often used nowadays. Of course the two usages shouldn't be overlapping much anyhow. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a team where people actually attack each other's personal identities is not going to be very effective! But it's still worth pointing out the two very different ways the term can be used, and important not to accidentally substitute one definition for the other.
  - jamii 11y ago
    Something the Recurse Center also put a lot of work into is making it safe to express lack of understanding/knowledge. There's a huge difference between a meeting where someone feels able to say "I'm totally lost, can we rewind" and one where they just quietly panic. That's somewhat in tension with being able to express dissent, in that being able to dissent constructively requires both social skill and an underlying environment of trust. It's easy to cultivate only one of those (eg most OS mailing lists choose dissent) but cultivating both is harder and I haven't seen it ever happen by accident - all the communities that come to mind are ones that direct a lot of attention and effort to community structure and expectations.
late2part 11y ago
The 3 word summary I infer is "egalitarian golden rule." If you work with people that are respectful, that listen, that care about you as a person, you're far more likely to work hard and be successful both individually and as a team.
radicalbyte 11y ago
Being able to understand the emotional state of your fellow man is key to more than just good teamwork: it's key to a successful marriage and to keeping close friends.
huac 11y ago
Read the other articles in the issue too (top nav bar) - they're all as good.
fitzwatermellow 11y ago
There is a concept in Japanese culture, Wa (和), or "group harmony" that seems to nicely complement ruminations on "collective intelligence". Perhaps most interesting is how fragile the cohesion really is, a single person, a single sentiment expressed poorly even, is enough to break the spell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_%28Japanese_culture%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_%28Japanese_culture%29
- dmourati 11y ago
  I really liked your point and the Wikipedia link. Group harmony is the essence of the piece. Wa succinctly captures the point.
filearts 11y ago
I really want to finish reading the article but the browser keeps locking up. Anyone else having their experience crippled like this?
- filearts 11y ago
  Shockwave ad. Thankfully this nonsense is on its way out :)
  - majewsky 11y ago
    > Thankfully this nonsense is on its way out Do you mean Shockwave, or ads? ;)
    - acveilleux 11y ago
      The former is likely out before the later but ads on the web in general are in dire needs of improvements or they will be erased from existence by browsers.
varelse 11y ago
IMO and experience, the best way to build a team is to exploit comparative advantage so that the whole is stronger than any of its parts. Assuming you've avoided hiring a sociopath, group cohesion follows from everyone having a critical skill they bring to the project uniquely. This is of course 100% anecdotal. This of course runs 180 degrees against the concept of fungible engineering and Google's generalist fetish. Or TLDR: I prefer building the A-Team instead of trying to be Agile.
- existencebox 11y ago
  I tend to agree with you. I think back through a decade of coworkers, and when I take your "A-Team" approach I find myself picking "The Sysadmin" and "The UX guy" etc. And when I ask myself how they stand up against even the best generalists I met at big5 companies, well, it's no competition. (In that the specialists wipe the floor with the generalists, and I say this as someone who has followed more of the generalist route) There is fundamentally too little time in the day, and too much to know to truly be GREAT in a domain, to expect anyone outside a select few (certainly not enough to fill out general employment at google) to be able to bridge these domains meaningfully and still be as deep as possible. Now; there is a massive benefit to the specialists having sufficient understanding to communicate with other domains. But this to me is not what being a generalist means, and is an asset that is often looked over even in the generalist-focused agile orgs I've worked for; "are we communicating well internally in general". (To bring this back to the article as well, I've also found the specialist groups with "eigenvectors" of skills to be MORE cohesive, as it's a great trust builder when someone can say "I'll be supporting your work in Y with X" and you know that they'll be doing X _light years_ better than you could, and you can truly TRUST them to have your back. Not that the same thing isn't very feasible in other environments, but that's an "easy way in" to trust.)
- elliotec 11y ago
  Teams in general should always be made up of specialists. Thats the point of teams, to have collaboration between people that know specifics of certain things. Teams of generalists will just be a bunch of people that are ok at a bunch of different stuff and will either end up specializing in one thing anyway, or just being mediocre at everything and bumping into each other. One-man bands are a different story though, if a full engineering team is not feasible, a generalist who has a broad but shallow knowledge of lots of things is far preferable to a specialist of one.
JSeymourATL 11y ago
> what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways. How do you get a group of cynical alphas to take-off their game-face for work? This screams for a How To manual.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  How many people felt psychologically safe in a meeting with Gates, Jobs or Ellison?
  - sdenton4 11y ago
    And how many people are Gates, Jobs or Ellison? The CEO design review isn't where the vast majority of people spend their time, or where ANY of the important work gets done.
riskneural 11y ago
The standup in a scrum lets people speak for equal amounts every morning.
SalmoShalazar 11y ago
Cool article - though I have to wonder how they measure team performance, given that it is our all important response variable. In modern animal breeding, our goal is typically to improve some trait through genetic means. We extract the animal's DNA, sequence it, and compare it across many different families in order to evaluate how that individual differs from others and how its genetics affects our trait of interest. We call this trait our 'phenotype', and in animal breeding, phenotype is king. We can do all of the analysis we want, but if our phenotype is inaccurately measured or uninformative, it's all a waste of time.
gnufied 11y ago
It is interesting that Agile movement has in general enshrined idea of time boxed team meetings for software teams. And in general - we engineers are wary of long meetings. And yet - most of us measure ourselves, how we are performing in a team by things that happen in team meetings(according to the article anyway): 1. Is idea my ideas heard and debated before being accepted/rejected? 2. Do I get opportunity to present my idea at all. A time boxed meeting does not by nature leave room for idle chit-chat or from my experience even opportunity to hear everyone's thoughts. Part of the problem of course is, meeting rooms in lot of companies are a scarce resource, so you better clear out after time is out. This is really curious because we hate meetings and yet we have adopted them in a sort of haphazard way which creates more problems than solves.
- tamana 11y ago
  Agile standups are designed to give everyone a minute to share info, not debate or reject anything. Debate is for targeted follow-up meetings.
  - gnufied 11y ago
    I didn't mean standups as meetings. I think standup is a good idea as it is and for most teams it lasts hardly more than 5-7 minutes (and some teams have moved it to emails). I meant 20-30 minute meetings that teams typically have, like retrospective or something. But I was not talking about Agile per-se. I meant in general most meetings of software teams are time boxed nowadays- no matter which development methodology they are following. I am also not criticizing time boxed meetings since I have no data to back that claim. But I am just curious, what if as a rule - teams decided to have fewer meetings but meeting last as long as they have to not because someone is knocking on the door for next slot. Will it make things easier?
    - squeaky-clean 11y ago
      The retrospective and sprint planning are supposed to be much longer than that, and not timeboxed, as far as I know. Also one of the core ideas of Agile is adapting to suit your team, rather than following some process from a book as if it were written in stone. If time limits on certain meetings are causing your team more grief than they help, remove the timeboxes! Talk to your team and see what they think, that's what the retrospective is meant for.
bobinator606 11y ago
I am a self-professed terrible team member, and I scored "average" (27 out of 36) on "Reading the Eyes" test. Its not that I can't read people's faces, its that I don't care.
unfocused 11y ago
This reminds of the comment I had left about another post here about the "Costs of under-confidence", where I posted what I though made a great team. Essentially, that we create a "safe zone". The article in this post echos what I had felt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731071 This is an interesting article since he cites a pub quiz and sports - something I participate in. I've been playing for about 4 years in a pub quiz. We've won once and are considered a strong team. However, the difference between the a strong team, and the better team in a night, is the fact that our team fosters a "no suggestion is a dumb suggestion" policy. No matter how stupid you think your answer is, you are encouraged to say it. In fact, if we see body language from a person hesitating we're quick to jump in and say "Spit it out! Just say it!" We essentially create a safe zone for our team members to not worry about the consequences of a wrong answer. There were so many times where a completely wrong suggestion makes another teammate say, "Hey! Wait, I think I remember!" We also have a policy of if a person has a different answer than the rest, then he/she has to "fight for it". That is, you have to convince the rest of the team. By having a "fight for it" rule, we put controlled confrontation on the centre of the table and let people hash it out. There is no regret, or fear, or worrying about feelings. It's just a normal part of our evening that is done with humour and friendliness. Firm, but friendly! By doing the above, we instil confidence in every team member. Those that are more confident by their nature, can still be challenged by anyone and keeps them in check, and the weaker confident ones feel safer to step forward when they need to. It balances out and our team has absolutely great chemistry because of it. I've also played team sports for most of my life and some of the best teams I've played for had former professional athletes. Since they were stronger than the rest and more confident, they always raised their hand and took the blame for any mistake! It was quite funny because we knew my screw up was not their fault, but they would make an excuse about how they should've done 'X' and I wouldn't have screwed up. Needless to say, that allowed players like me that weren't former pros, to be at ease and to be more confident and give my best, knowing that the strongest player on the team wasn't going to look down on me for every mistake. It was a very interesting dynamic where the more confident person ensured that the less confident person is playing their best and it raised their confidence. Again, it is a kind of delicate balance that can change on any given night.
Xcelerate 11y ago
> "It seemed like a total waste of time," said Sean Laurent, an engineer. "But Matt was our new boss, and he was really into this questionnaire, and so we said, sure, we'll do it, whatever." I started cracking up at this point because me and every engineer I know would have said the same thing in response to a survey designed to promote team building.
- gedy 11y ago
  The irony is, a lot of the time these "dysfunctional teams" were formed due to some managerial decision, and basically without the team members input. So it's natural to eye-roll when the same management structure comes in to preach about "you need to gel together! We need to measure you!" When people mostly pick who they work with and how, it's usually quite automatic and natural for things to work out without managerial baby-sitting.
swalsh 11y ago
Something I always wish existed was a recruiting platform that hired a team as a whole. Today it's pretty much just a recruiter coming to me, and saying "Hey wanna change the future at xyz?" where the only criteria that I might work is based on my skill set on my resume. Instead i'd rather fill out a survey, and get matched with some people I would probably work really well with. Maybe you hack together for a weekend. Once your team has a set of strengths and weakness, and a price, companies can bid, and the team as a whole judges where to go. I think how well a team works together is sometimes more important then how much knowledge you may have of some arcane framework.
- nathas 11y ago
  It feels like you may, in the longer-term, sacrifice different thinking for productivity. If I worked with the same team for years, unless we were some how really, really pushing ourselves as a group, I think I would miss out on whole worlds of approaches to problems.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- shimon 11y ago
  I think it's way more important. When you're working productively with people you enjoy working with, it's almost hard to imagine feeling bad about your job. This is one key advantage of startups, actually. Just take your dream team, and co-found a startup with them. Find the business that your particular group can excel at. The more this becomes a viable alternative to just taking a job, the more we'll be optimizing the matching of great teams to big opportunities.
  - shimon 11y ago
    Alternative, concise restatement: This already exists. The team is a startup, and the companies that bid for you are investors.
    - 11y ago
calinet6 11y ago
Oh this is good. Some conclusions: - Teams and focusing on team cohesion, team building, and team performance is far more important than individual performance. - Understanding psychology (of individuals, of individuals in teams, and of organizations) is critical for making companies work. "Psych Safety" amounts to the foundation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as but one example. This stuff is important. Build good teams, don't just hire good individuals.
xyzzy4 11y ago
Psychological safety is a double edged sword. If you feel free to interrupt people, express dissent, and joke around during meetings then people might begin to resent you. It's a big risk. Despite feeling "safe", it's still a risk that could affect your job security and finances.
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  It's about being able to determine when people are resenting you and why. The article focused on people who were sensitive enough to determine when others in their group were feeling upset or left out or something. Also if everyone speaks and interrupts and jokes as much as you, they should be allowed to also express their dissent in that they don't think your jokes are appropriate or that you don't listen or whatever.
  - xyzzy4 11y ago
    Even if it feels safe it doesn't mean it really is. If you aren't paranoid about these things you can lose a lot.
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      Like I said, isn't that where being a highly socially sensitive individual comes in?
cowardlydragon 11y ago
TLDR guess after two paragraphs: Is this how grades/salary/individual rewards will poison pill any imposed group goal dynamics?
- cowardlydragon 11y ago
  Hm, now that I read well, I feel this research group does too much "snapshotting" of dynamics. Groups not performing well could have had their "norms" subjected to a harsh external force, such as, say, performance reviews, hire / fire / downsize / layoff, etc. And where is the discussion of sociopathy and other classic psychological manipulations? You'd figure that subtle disruptors would be critical to the study, since I argue that middle management collapses in most large organizations due to the Machiavellian predilections of petty power brokering.
ksk 11y ago
I enjoy reading these articles because they always seem to trick me into thinking I got to know of a new insight when I didn't. I don't know why we still cling to psychology when its been shown over and over that the vast majority of psychology is junk science that cannot be reproduced.
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  I don't understand what is wrong with their methodology as described in this article that makes it junk science. Can you source something that says that the vast majority of psychology can't be reproduced (studies, etc)?
  - ksk 11y ago
    >I don't understand what is wrong with their methodology as described in this article that makes it junk science. There is nothing wrong with this article and their methodology because it's not about real science at all. Science produces models, with predictability (among other things) where you or I could go out and get the same results. That is far from what Google has actually demonstrated - and I don't know whether they intended to do that in the first place. Psychology has never been accepted as a science because they don't produce accurate, reproducible models. I don't want to sound rude, but all this stuff isn't exactly new and can be searched for online. A random set of links from 10 seconds of googling: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delive... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects-studies-contradicting-precognition/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects... http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/failing-to-replicate-bems-ability-to.html http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/failing-to-rep...
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      No rudeness taken; I just would rather people making the claims to have some links for people who don't really search for the reciprocity of fields of pseudoscience/science. What would you call this thing in the article that people did then? Statistical analysis?
randcraw 11y ago
Aren't psychological safety and forced ranking fundamentally at odds? Who will be generous when only the fittest survive? These results seem like a condemnation of any management practice based on competitive exclusion.
- mathattack 11y ago
  This is a strange cultural thing. On the surface I agree with you. And I'm not a huge fan of forced ratings. But I will say that at some of the places I've worked, there was such a strong culture of sharing that this transcended the forced ranking system. If anything, I've seen the lack of sharing a bigger issue in places with a culture of competing metrics. "You get paid on revenue, and I get paid on time to completion." I've seen terrible sharing behaviors absent the forced ranking.
dhatch387 11y ago
"But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place." Problematic stab at engineers. I don't think people go into software because they prefer computers to humans.
- shimon 11y ago
  It's a broad stereotype, but I don't think it's entirely wrong. My social awkwardness definitely contributed to my spending more time on the PC as a kid, and that got me excited about computers. I've since improved my social skills a ton, but it's natural to expect different psychological trends in a population of engineers than in, say, people who go into sales.
anonymousguy 11y ago
I don't understand why this is such a mystic secret to the corporate world. This is common sense to anybody who has served on a military deployment. Google could have saved a crap load of time and money by funding the military to conduct this study and simply applying the results internally.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  And what would the military do to take a team that was functioning poorly and turn it into a team that is functioning well?
  - anonymousguy 11y ago
    Many things. There are a great many ways to address that question (too many). The correct answer depends more specifically on the nature of the problem.
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  It's fluff, imho. I've been at Google a few years and have worked with people here who not only make me feel psychologically 'unsafe' but are bigger jerks than I've met at any other workplace. And they were, as far as I know, never censured for it. Granted, I've also worked with some really great people, better than other places I've worked. And I'm sure unconsciously been a jerk myself. So my summary is: run all the studies you want. People mostly behave in the personality patterns they set down as kids. And most of us grew up in schoolyards full of not-so-nice dynamics.
qznc 11y ago
This Woolley paper [0] cited in the article gives three reasons for effective teams. The NYT only tells you two behaviors. True enough. The third is not a behavior. It is "the proportion of females in the group". Paper says "Finally, c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group (r = 0.23, P = 0.007). However, this result appears to be largely mediated by social sensitivity (Sobelz = 1.93, P = 0.03), because (consistent with previous research) women in our sample scored better on the social sensitivity measure than men [t(441) = 3.42, P = 0.001]. In a regression analysis with the groups for which all three variables (social sensitivity, speaking turn variance, and percent female) were available, all had similar predictive power for c, although only social sensitivity reached statistical significance (b = 0.33, P = 0.05)." [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scie...
- Discordius 11y ago
  It seems to make sense to not cite that as an additional factor, given that it is almost fully mediated by one of the factors already listed. There is an interesting observation in here that women have on average higher social sensitivity, though it looks like measuring social sensitivity directly in job interviews and other team building processes is just more effective than looking at gender (though a bit harder to do, I would guess).
anu7df 11y ago
This has changed the way I think about teams. I used to think I am pretty good at "figuring out this team work business". A few times in this article I had to go.. wtf?. The title of the article seemed to suggest (my mistake, I jumped to the conclusion) that this is all fluff. Not so. This is very well written. If you think you are very good at this and don't need conclusions driven from poorly controlled experiments, please do yourself (and others) a favor and read through!
qznc 11y ago
> Sakaguchi had recently become the manager of a new team, and he wanted to make sure things went better this time. So he asked researchers at Project Aristotle if they could help. They provided him with a survey to gauge the group’s norms. Does anybody have an idea what that survey was or looked like?
ktRolster 11y ago
If the teammates respect each other, and feel respected, then they will feel safe, there will be a safe zone created by the respect. If the teammates don't respect each other, they will ignore what the others are saying, even if they are forced to listen to them.
thatfrenchguy 11y ago
I liked this until the "my life is my work" part. What is it with Silicon Valley that always ends up in "you spend all your life at work and it's a good thing" ?
- Nimitz14 11y ago
  I understood it differently: He's saying work is a large part of life and therefore should not be treated as if it's something apart/different. That does not mean that one 'should spend all your life at work'. It means one should try and have fun and not take things so seriously all the time. And I would completely agree with that. In STEM I'd say the majority does not understand the concept.
  - HappyTypist 11y ago
    I think you're right. Treating your work life as a separate component of your life is not something that's natural for humans and our social traits. Treating work life as part of your life does not imply anything about how long you work.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I don't think it should be surprising that one of the biggest, highest-earning science/engineering areas of the world are filled with people who enjoy "spending their life at work". Maybe that lifestyle is not for everyone, and that's fine, but you don't typically get to the top without some sacrifice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf-sRZBiHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf-sRZBiHo
  - thatfrenchguy 11y ago
    Yeah, I can get the "spending my life at work because it's fun/I like it" thing (although most SV companies are more into "spending my life at work" than actually be working productively most of the time), but "highest-earning" as an advantage ? Well, if you spend your whole life at work and have 2 weeks of vacation a year, I don't see how you can use that money :-). And being a software engineer anywhere, even in 40-hours-a-week-and-9-weeks-of-vacation France will make you earn a lot of money (relative to the cost of living).
thesz 11y ago
They tested group IQ on the brainstorming tasks! So they took wastly (40% worse) suboptimal method of groupwork [1], which emphasizes only communication abilities and then they try to infer general claims from that. Of course they will find that "emotional senitivity" makes "teams" that work in such conditions better. And of course they won't find "common patterns for successful teams" in their meetings because, basically, meetings are not where decisions are made. What a clueless research. [1] http://observer.com/2015/05/brainstorming-does-not-work/ http://observer.com/2015/05/brainstorming-does-not-work/
- rntz 11y ago
  The linked article doesn't support your claim that brainstorming "emphasizes only communication abilities"; it only claims that brainstorming in groups is a worse way to generate ideas than to have people generate ideas individually & then combine them.
  - thesz 11y ago
    Brainstorming is a social activity, with heavy use of communication abilities of ever participant. Would not you agree?
no_wave 11y ago
It's a huge mistake to frame this in terms of safety rather than belonging. Any criticism of someone who feels out of place will cut them to the quick, no matter how much you pad your language. If your standing within a group is assured, you can call each other dumb assholes all day and it won't matter. This is the classic phenomenon of male friendship. What works in a group isn't an absence of criticism, it's a sensation of security of your belonging in that group. How do you make people feel secure? The only real way it occurs is if everyone actually has respect for one another's contributions and work. This can't be faked, unfortunately, and respect has to be earned, and everyone's respect is earned slightly differently. Some peoples' respect algorithms are more compatible than others. An interesting study might be to try organizing people by what they value most in their co-workers.
- rntz 11y ago
  > This is the classic phenomenon of male friendship. Why do you single this out as an especially male phenomenon?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Its stated as a classic phenomena of male friendships. Not only male. Not all male. Just a strong mode, right?
jotux 11y ago
Google's conclusions, summarized: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...
matt_wulfeck 11y ago
I've been part of good teams before and loved it. However it wasn't until I was part of a "bad" team that I learned why it's so important to be inclusive. When it became difficult for me to make mistakes, immediately I went into self preservation mode with everyone else. That kills creativity and happiness. Now that I've felt the hammer of that first hand I want nothing to do with it. I try and be conscious of my teammates. What are they feeing? Do they have an idea that they are scared to share? What are they scared of?
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Nobody has done more research on this than the US Military, specifically the special operations community. The key takeaways that you find in very effective SOF teams are: 1. Clear and accepted authority chain (Top guy earned their place at the top) 2. Candid and constant communication/feedback between all members 3. A clearly defined, proven effective and specialized role for every member with each member knowing how each others role plays together 4. Common sense of purpose (Objective etc...) 5. Common experience (BUD/s, Q, FTC etc...) If you have all of those then pretty much everything else falls into place. Note also that this has no requirement for everyone to being an "A" personality or whatever and has basically no bearing on what they do outside of work. Those aspects can help, but they can equally hurt depending on the egos involved.
- jmngomes 11y ago
  This is very interesting, can you provide any information or research that led to those takeways? Thanks.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Here is a good starting point: https://hbr.org/2015/08/what-companies-can-learn-from-military-teams https://hbr.org/2015/08/what-companies-can-learn-from-milita... Team of Teams from McChrystal is a great book.
- kaffee 11y ago
  What do these acronyms mean? SOF, BUD, Q, FTC?
  - kornish 11y ago
    I believe SOF is Special Operations Forces and BUD/S is Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (the intense training regimen through which all incoming Navy SEALs must pass). Not sure about the others.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Sorry. SOF: Special Operations Forces BUD/s: Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training Course Q: Special Forces Training Course FTC: Field Tradecraft Course
bambax 11y ago
I didn't read every paragraph of the article but it seems it doesn't describe what "success" means? In the outside world, the success of a company can be measured quite objectively; but inside one company, what defines success? Isn't it possible that patterns are hard to find because "success" is vague and, fundamentally, random?
GnarlyWhale 11y ago
I recently read a (fiction) novel, The Affinities, that focused on the ramifications of optimizing productivity of teams, raising the collective I.Q., not just professionally but socially as well. It's a pretty light read, but I recommend it to anyone else who finds this subject fascinating. https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Affinities.html?id=zPd-BwAAQBAJ&hl=en https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Affinities.html?id=z...
asdfologist 11y ago
"People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test." I wonder if giving this test during interviews would help in building better teams.
mactitan 11y ago
The article pulls you in making you think there is some subtle dynamic. Then the first discovery is psychological safety. Very important but not that insightful because everyone is looking for this environment. I wonder if Alan Turing's enigma project had a psychologically safe environment? Now this notion of psychological safety is interesting because it makes me think of our larger environment (too much a leap!) that it's similar to our personal safety ( perhaps requiring more surveillance?). It reminds me of Hayek’s notion in "Road to serfdom" opining that submitting to less freedom for more safety will make you worse off. I do have to say I would probably submit to more safety - it's so much easier.
sangnoir 11y ago
I feel that the alluded conflict of personal efficiency vs team efficiency is something that is overlooked in the perennial open-plan vs office debate. It is easy for individuals to measure our own efficiency, but hard to measure, or even appreciate team efficiency. My suspicion is open plan offices are better for team efficiency than private offices, but worse for personal efficiency.
ap22213 11y ago
Early in my career, I emphatically asked my managers to work on most highly important yet most visibly failing products. They would look at me in shock. Why would I put my career at risk with such a thing? But, they would reluctantly agree. And, this may sound like masochism to some, but really I just liked a good puzzle and challenge, and I've always viewed work as a game. So, over the next 10 years and many products, I'm extremely proud to say, none of those products ended up failing. And, most eventually exceeded expectations. Who knows, it could have been by chance. Or, maybe it was regression toward the mean. But, I like to think that my focus on the problem and my motivation helped solve it. Over all of this, I was rarely directly credited, which is not surprising. Often I wasn't the 'manager' or even the 'technical lead'. I was just some relatively smart dude on the team, and I was in it for the thrill and enjoyment. The key is to 1) be a good manipulator (or, more politically correctly, a good 'influencer') 2) clearly understand the strengths, personalities, motivations, and goals of each member of the team 3) view each person as a potential 'force multiplier' (to take another word from the military) 4) strategically coordinate the right activities between the right people at the right time 5) lead from the bottom, by example 6) be positive and optimistic 7) recognize potential conflict early and extinguish it subtly If you have a really awesome manager, they can do this from the start. But, as many of us know, management (in the U.S., at least) is a status position, and it attracts those who like status or competition. I've only worked with one manager (out of dozens) who has been able to do this, well. It's a rare skill.
perseusprime11 11y ago
So have they figured it out? I couldn't tell from reading the article.
perseusprime11 11y ago
There is no such thing as perfect team. A perfect team in one context can become an average team in another context. Good Teams embrace values as they solve problems while still having fun. End of story!
edem 11y ago
Is there a summary for this? I've read 3 sections but it only contained fluff about people and not the point of the article.
visarga 11y ago
So, basically, it's about the principles of differentiation and integration applied inside teams. Differentiation comes from "feeling psychologically safe" so you are able to be creative and express your ideas. When you feel safe to be different you do your most creative work. In the beginning of the article I thought the author will conclude that teams made of people with different skill sets would work better than teams with more similar members. The Google 20% time for creative work is also boosting differentiation through creativity. Integration comes from balancing speaking and listening. When everyone can speak, they become mutually integrated. Your ideas have a fair chance of being heard and influencing the group decisions. The same pair of principles (differentiation and integration) are present in other systems like the brain, the ecosystem, the free market and the open source community. I originally discovered these concepts from Giulio Tononi's consciousness theory of integrated information. The same two ideas interestingly coincide in name with the basic operations of calculus and are founding principles in the European Union.
deleted 11y ago
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DaveWalk 11y ago
> [Sakaguchi] wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. He asked the team to gather, off site, to discuss the survey’s results. He began by asking everyone to share something personal about themselves. He went first..."I have stage 4 cancer." Is this what is required to have a team jell at work? I imagine the same sentiment could have been achieved with a different question, but the article continually references this one. Does it make me a non team-player if I don't want to share my health issues with my coworkers? (In addition: is this legal to do?)
tdaltonc 11y ago
This is just a conclusion from data mining; what is google doing to experimentally confirm this finding? Or how would I use this insight to engineer a better team?

667 points by aarghh 11y ago

Wow - how do we even classify this - it's clearly not just a story. Is it a case study? Series? It feels like it's almost book length - sort of thing we'll be readying for days (if not weeks). Has NYT ever done an article in this format before? The "Blind Hiring" section starts off great: A few years ago, Kedar Iyer, an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, became acutely aware of a problem in his industry: A surfeit of talented coders were routinely overlooked by employers because they lacked elite pedigrees. Hiring managers, he thought, were too often swayed by the name of a fancy college on a résumé.

eterm 11y ago
Let's not go crazy here, it's 11 pages / 5.6k words. While it's unusual to have magazine articles that length these days, it's not a huge amount of time since that was more normal. It's an excerpt from a book: > Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and the paper’s senior editor of live journalism. He is the author of ‘‘The Power of Habit’’ and the forthcoming book ‘‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business,’’ from which this article is adapted.

boothead 11y ago

I'd be willing to bet that Sakaguchi has read "The 5 dysfunctions of a team" [1]. One of my favorite books about how people jell together in groups. Like him I was also in a military setting before I became a programmer. I haven't yet experienced the same level of engagement and team cohesion outside of the military but I believe that the answers are to be found in the kinds of insights that studies like this uncover. [1] http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions http://www.tablegroup.com/books/dysfunctions

eitally 11y ago

Even if it turns out this is a puff piece supplied to the Times by Google, it's still a very well written and insightful article explaining a bit of why psychological safety is critical for teams to perform optimally. It's probably my favorite Google-related article this year, actually. I'd much prefer reading about companies trying to improve their working environments than about whatever incremental new product feature they're launching.

aarghh 11y ago
Indeed - what I enjoyed and got out of this article is a fairly easy correlation to what separated good teams that I have been on from bad ones. I had classified the difference as "camaraderie" - but the idea of psychological safety is a little more useful. Camaraderie is the superficial outcome, while psychological safety is the enabler.
- tamana 11y ago
  Psychological safety is the modern euphemism for what used to be called "culture fit".
  - mc32 11y ago
    Not really, one term is the popular term the other one is a term from behavioral psychology. So they describe the same phenomenon but by different people.
    - mox111 11y ago
      Someone could fit very nicely into a given working culture despite that culture not being 'psychologically safe' by the author's definition. They are not the same concept.
      - mc32 11y ago
        Is fitting in or the ability to fit in the same as a good cultural fit? Never the less, one of the terms is from psychology, one of the terms is from pop culture and may not overlap completely

cmurphycode 11y ago

Wow. Lots of interesting points, and a few things that made me say WTF and wonder how much this will be torn apart in the comments. In other words, a very worthy read.

boothead 11y ago

eitally 11y ago
He may or may not have, but I can tell you that some of Google's core internal team training focuses on the same concepts in the same triangular hierarchy, so even if he hasn't, someone has! :)
calinet6 11y ago
The 5 dysfunctions of a team also closely echoes Maslow's hierarchy of needs. However, I have to chime in: I don't agree with the accountability aspect. Responsibility is necessary, along with knowledge and support from the whole system: this broad "ability to be effective" makes accountability obsolete, and is superior. That combination of Knowledge, Psychology, Systems thinking, and a fourth: an understanding of variation and statistical reality -- leads to a much more complete and functional model of the organization. This is W. Edwards Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. However, you can see why "The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team" caught on, and his name didn't.
- poof131 11y ago
  I may be misunderstanding as I'm not familiar with your sources, but I’m not sure how you can have an effective team without accountability? If you are responsible for delivering something and you don’t and there’s never any ramification (accountability) things degenerate. I’ve seen this more than I’d like where a manager’s team is failing and he or she constantly blames subordinates and other teams for the lack of results, always ready to pull something out of the excuse matrix. When senior leaders fail to hold these managers accountable, the process continues, new mistakes, missed targets, and new scape goats found. Responsibility without accountability seems like the life of a Roman Emperor and I’ve never seen it work well with teams or leaders.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

They used 'meeting behavior' to predict team performance. And not in the way you would expect. Its not about productivity in the team meetings. Its about feeling safe, respected, and sharing the load. Makes some sense. Team meetings are not where anything gets done after all. If team members are engaged with their peers, they may invest in team goals and perform better. Issue: they correlated team meeting metrics (talking time; socialization time vs problem solving time etc) with team success at achieving goals. They could have used behavior outside the meetings (communications per day; social interactions after work) and predicted successful teams that way. It doesn't mean that "Meetings that go like this indicates good teams"? I.e. changing your team meetings to look like what good teams do, may not improve your team at all. That might be put under 'cargo cult management'.

jerf 11y ago
"Its about feeling safe, respected, and sharing the load." You know, I think it's worth pointing something out about the word "safe" given the sense it has been used in lately. In this case, it means people feel safe to express dissent. Not "safe from dissent", as the term is often used nowadays. Of course the two usages shouldn't be overlapping much anyhow. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a team where people actually attack each other's personal identities is not going to be very effective! But it's still worth pointing out the two very different ways the term can be used, and important not to accidentally substitute one definition for the other.
- jamii 11y ago
  Something the Recurse Center also put a lot of work into is making it safe to express lack of understanding/knowledge. There's a huge difference between a meeting where someone feels able to say "I'm totally lost, can we rewind" and one where they just quietly panic. That's somewhat in tension with being able to express dissent, in that being able to dissent constructively requires both social skill and an underlying environment of trust. It's easy to cultivate only one of those (eg most OS mailing lists choose dissent) but cultivating both is harder and I haven't seen it ever happen by accident - all the communities that come to mind are ones that direct a lot of attention and effort to community structure and expectations.

late2part 11y ago

The 3 word summary I infer is "egalitarian golden rule." If you work with people that are respectful, that listen, that care about you as a person, you're far more likely to work hard and be successful both individually and as a team.

radicalbyte 11y ago

Being able to understand the emotional state of your fellow man is key to more than just good teamwork: it's key to a successful marriage and to keeping close friends.

huac 11y ago

Read the other articles in the issue too (top nav bar) - they're all as good.

fitzwatermellow 11y ago

There is a concept in Japanese culture, Wa (和), or "group harmony" that seems to nicely complement ruminations on "collective intelligence". Perhaps most interesting is how fragile the cohesion really is, a single person, a single sentiment expressed poorly even, is enough to break the spell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_%28Japanese_culture%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_%28Japanese_culture%29

dmourati 11y ago
I really liked your point and the Wikipedia link. Group harmony is the essence of the piece. Wa succinctly captures the point.

filearts 11y ago

I really want to finish reading the article but the browser keeps locking up. Anyone else having their experience crippled like this?

filearts 11y ago
Shockwave ad. Thankfully this nonsense is on its way out :)
- majewsky 11y ago
  > Thankfully this nonsense is on its way out Do you mean Shockwave, or ads? ;)
  - acveilleux 11y ago
    The former is likely out before the later but ads on the web in general are in dire needs of improvements or they will be erased from existence by browsers.

varelse 11y ago

IMO and experience, the best way to build a team is to exploit comparative advantage so that the whole is stronger than any of its parts. Assuming you've avoided hiring a sociopath, group cohesion follows from everyone having a critical skill they bring to the project uniquely. This is of course 100% anecdotal. This of course runs 180 degrees against the concept of fungible engineering and Google's generalist fetish. Or TLDR: I prefer building the A-Team instead of trying to be Agile.

existencebox 11y ago
I tend to agree with you. I think back through a decade of coworkers, and when I take your "A-Team" approach I find myself picking "The Sysadmin" and "The UX guy" etc. And when I ask myself how they stand up against even the best generalists I met at big5 companies, well, it's no competition. (In that the specialists wipe the floor with the generalists, and I say this as someone who has followed more of the generalist route) There is fundamentally too little time in the day, and too much to know to truly be GREAT in a domain, to expect anyone outside a select few (certainly not enough to fill out general employment at google) to be able to bridge these domains meaningfully and still be as deep as possible. Now; there is a massive benefit to the specialists having sufficient understanding to communicate with other domains. But this to me is not what being a generalist means, and is an asset that is often looked over even in the generalist-focused agile orgs I've worked for; "are we communicating well internally in general". (To bring this back to the article as well, I've also found the specialist groups with "eigenvectors" of skills to be MORE cohesive, as it's a great trust builder when someone can say "I'll be supporting your work in Y with X" and you know that they'll be doing X _light years_ better than you could, and you can truly TRUST them to have your back. Not that the same thing isn't very feasible in other environments, but that's an "easy way in" to trust.)
elliotec 11y ago
Teams in general should always be made up of specialists. Thats the point of teams, to have collaboration between people that know specifics of certain things. Teams of generalists will just be a bunch of people that are ok at a bunch of different stuff and will either end up specializing in one thing anyway, or just being mediocre at everything and bumping into each other. One-man bands are a different story though, if a full engineering team is not feasible, a generalist who has a broad but shallow knowledge of lots of things is far preferable to a specialist of one.

JSeymourATL 11y ago

> what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways. How do you get a group of cynical alphas to take-off their game-face for work? This screams for a How To manual.

tosseraccount 11y ago
How many people felt psychologically safe in a meeting with Gates, Jobs or Ellison?
- sdenton4 11y ago
  And how many people are Gates, Jobs or Ellison? The CEO design review isn't where the vast majority of people spend their time, or where ANY of the important work gets done.

riskneural 11y ago

The standup in a scrum lets people speak for equal amounts every morning.

SalmoShalazar 11y ago

Cool article - though I have to wonder how they measure team performance, given that it is our all important response variable. In modern animal breeding, our goal is typically to improve some trait through genetic means. We extract the animal's DNA, sequence it, and compare it across many different families in order to evaluate how that individual differs from others and how its genetics affects our trait of interest. We call this trait our 'phenotype', and in animal breeding, phenotype is king. We can do all of the analysis we want, but if our phenotype is inaccurately measured or uninformative, it's all a waste of time.

gnufied 11y ago

It is interesting that Agile movement has in general enshrined idea of time boxed team meetings for software teams. And in general - we engineers are wary of long meetings. And yet - most of us measure ourselves, how we are performing in a team by things that happen in team meetings(according to the article anyway): 1. Is idea my ideas heard and debated before being accepted/rejected? 2. Do I get opportunity to present my idea at all. A time boxed meeting does not by nature leave room for idle chit-chat or from my experience even opportunity to hear everyone's thoughts. Part of the problem of course is, meeting rooms in lot of companies are a scarce resource, so you better clear out after time is out. This is really curious because we hate meetings and yet we have adopted them in a sort of haphazard way which creates more problems than solves.

tamana 11y ago
Agile standups are designed to give everyone a minute to share info, not debate or reject anything. Debate is for targeted follow-up meetings.
- gnufied 11y ago
  I didn't mean standups as meetings. I think standup is a good idea as it is and for most teams it lasts hardly more than 5-7 minutes (and some teams have moved it to emails). I meant 20-30 minute meetings that teams typically have, like retrospective or something. But I was not talking about Agile per-se. I meant in general most meetings of software teams are time boxed nowadays- no matter which development methodology they are following. I am also not criticizing time boxed meetings since I have no data to back that claim. But I am just curious, what if as a rule - teams decided to have fewer meetings but meeting last as long as they have to not because someone is knocking on the door for next slot. Will it make things easier?
  - squeaky-clean 11y ago
    The retrospective and sprint planning are supposed to be much longer than that, and not timeboxed, as far as I know. Also one of the core ideas of Agile is adapting to suit your team, rather than following some process from a book as if it were written in stone. If time limits on certain meetings are causing your team more grief than they help, remove the timeboxes! Talk to your team and see what they think, that's what the retrospective is meant for.

bobinator606 11y ago

I am a self-professed terrible team member, and I scored "average" (27 out of 36) on "Reading the Eyes" test. Its not that I can't read people's faces, its that I don't care.

unfocused 11y ago

This reminds of the comment I had left about another post here about the "Costs of under-confidence", where I posted what I though made a great team. Essentially, that we create a "safe zone". The article in this post echos what I had felt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10731071 This is an interesting article since he cites a pub quiz and sports - something I participate in. I've been playing for about 4 years in a pub quiz. We've won once and are considered a strong team. However, the difference between the a strong team, and the better team in a night, is the fact that our team fosters a "no suggestion is a dumb suggestion" policy. No matter how stupid you think your answer is, you are encouraged to say it. In fact, if we see body language from a person hesitating we're quick to jump in and say "Spit it out! Just say it!" We essentially create a safe zone for our team members to not worry about the consequences of a wrong answer. There were so many times where a completely wrong suggestion makes another teammate say, "Hey! Wait, I think I remember!" We also have a policy of if a person has a different answer than the rest, then he/she has to "fight for it". That is, you have to convince the rest of the team. By having a "fight for it" rule, we put controlled confrontation on the centre of the table and let people hash it out. There is no regret, or fear, or worrying about feelings. It's just a normal part of our evening that is done with humour and friendliness. Firm, but friendly! By doing the above, we instil confidence in every team member. Those that are more confident by their nature, can still be challenged by anyone and keeps them in check, and the weaker confident ones feel safer to step forward when they need to. It balances out and our team has absolutely great chemistry because of it. I've also played team sports for most of my life and some of the best teams I've played for had former professional athletes. Since they were stronger than the rest and more confident, they always raised their hand and took the blame for any mistake! It was quite funny because we knew my screw up was not their fault, but they would make an excuse about how they should've done 'X' and I wouldn't have screwed up. Needless to say, that allowed players like me that weren't former pros, to be at ease and to be more confident and give my best, knowing that the strongest player on the team wasn't going to look down on me for every mistake. It was a very interesting dynamic where the more confident person ensured that the less confident person is playing their best and it raised their confidence. Again, it is a kind of delicate balance that can change on any given night.

Xcelerate 11y ago

> "It seemed like a total waste of time," said Sean Laurent, an engineer. "But Matt was our new boss, and he was really into this questionnaire, and so we said, sure, we'll do it, whatever." I started cracking up at this point because me and every engineer I know would have said the same thing in response to a survey designed to promote team building.

gedy 11y ago
The irony is, a lot of the time these "dysfunctional teams" were formed due to some managerial decision, and basically without the team members input. So it's natural to eye-roll when the same management structure comes in to preach about "you need to gel together! We need to measure you!" When people mostly pick who they work with and how, it's usually quite automatic and natural for things to work out without managerial baby-sitting.

swalsh 11y ago

Something I always wish existed was a recruiting platform that hired a team as a whole. Today it's pretty much just a recruiter coming to me, and saying "Hey wanna change the future at xyz?" where the only criteria that I might work is based on my skill set on my resume. Instead i'd rather fill out a survey, and get matched with some people I would probably work really well with. Maybe you hack together for a weekend. Once your team has a set of strengths and weakness, and a price, companies can bid, and the team as a whole judges where to go. I think how well a team works together is sometimes more important then how much knowledge you may have of some arcane framework.

nathas 11y ago
It feels like you may, in the longer-term, sacrifice different thinking for productivity. If I worked with the same team for years, unless we were some how really, really pushing ourselves as a group, I think I would miss out on whole worlds of approaches to problems.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
shimon 11y ago
I think it's way more important. When you're working productively with people you enjoy working with, it's almost hard to imagine feeling bad about your job. This is one key advantage of startups, actually. Just take your dream team, and co-found a startup with them. Find the business that your particular group can excel at. The more this becomes a viable alternative to just taking a job, the more we'll be optimizing the matching of great teams to big opportunities.
- shimon 11y ago
  Alternative, concise restatement: This already exists. The team is a startup, and the companies that bid for you are investors.
  - 11y ago

calinet6 11y ago

Oh this is good. Some conclusions: - Teams and focusing on team cohesion, team building, and team performance is far more important than individual performance. - Understanding psychology (of individuals, of individuals in teams, and of organizations) is critical for making companies work. "Psych Safety" amounts to the foundation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as but one example. This stuff is important. Build good teams, don't just hire good individuals.

xyzzy4 11y ago

Psychological safety is a double edged sword. If you feel free to interrupt people, express dissent, and joke around during meetings then people might begin to resent you. It's a big risk. Despite feeling "safe", it's still a risk that could affect your job security and finances.

SolaceQuantum 11y ago
It's about being able to determine when people are resenting you and why. The article focused on people who were sensitive enough to determine when others in their group were feeling upset or left out or something. Also if everyone speaks and interrupts and jokes as much as you, they should be allowed to also express their dissent in that they don't think your jokes are appropriate or that you don't listen or whatever.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Even if it feels safe it doesn't mean it really is. If you aren't paranoid about these things you can lose a lot.
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    Like I said, isn't that where being a highly socially sensitive individual comes in?

cowardlydragon 11y ago

TLDR guess after two paragraphs: Is this how grades/salary/individual rewards will poison pill any imposed group goal dynamics?

cowardlydragon 11y ago
Hm, now that I read well, I feel this research group does too much "snapshotting" of dynamics. Groups not performing well could have had their "norms" subjected to a harsh external force, such as, say, performance reviews, hire / fire / downsize / layoff, etc. And where is the discussion of sociopathy and other classic psychological manipulations? You'd figure that subtle disruptors would be critical to the study, since I argue that middle management collapses in most large organizations due to the Machiavellian predilections of petty power brokering.

ksk 11y ago

I enjoy reading these articles because they always seem to trick me into thinking I got to know of a new insight when I didn't. I don't know why we still cling to psychology when its been shown over and over that the vast majority of psychology is junk science that cannot be reproduced.

SolaceQuantum 11y ago
I don't understand what is wrong with their methodology as described in this article that makes it junk science. Can you source something that says that the vast majority of psychology can't be reproduced (studies, etc)?
- ksk 11y ago
  >I don't understand what is wrong with their methodology as described in this article that makes it junk science. There is nothing wrong with this article and their methodology because it's not about real science at all. Science produces models, with predictability (among other things) where you or I could go out and get the same results. That is far from what Google has actually demonstrated - and I don't know whether they intended to do that in the first place. Psychology has never been accepted as a science because they don't produce accurate, reproducible models. I don't want to sound rude, but all this stuff isn't exactly new and can be searched for online. A random set of links from 10 seconds of googling: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delive... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects-studies-contradicting-precognition/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects... http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/failing-to-replicate-bems-ability-to.html http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/failing-to-rep...
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    No rudeness taken; I just would rather people making the claims to have some links for people who don't really search for the reciprocity of fields of pseudoscience/science. What would you call this thing in the article that people did then? Statistical analysis?

randcraw 11y ago

Aren't psychological safety and forced ranking fundamentally at odds? Who will be generous when only the fittest survive? These results seem like a condemnation of any management practice based on competitive exclusion.

mathattack 11y ago
This is a strange cultural thing. On the surface I agree with you. And I'm not a huge fan of forced ratings. But I will say that at some of the places I've worked, there was such a strong culture of sharing that this transcended the forced ranking system. If anything, I've seen the lack of sharing a bigger issue in places with a culture of competing metrics. "You get paid on revenue, and I get paid on time to completion." I've seen terrible sharing behaviors absent the forced ranking.

dhatch387 11y ago

"But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place." Problematic stab at engineers. I don't think people go into software because they prefer computers to humans.

shimon 11y ago
It's a broad stereotype, but I don't think it's entirely wrong. My social awkwardness definitely contributed to my spending more time on the PC as a kid, and that got me excited about computers. I've since improved my social skills a ton, but it's natural to expect different psychological trends in a population of engineers than in, say, people who go into sales.

anonymousguy 11y ago

I don't understand why this is such a mystic secret to the corporate world. This is common sense to anybody who has served on a military deployment. Google could have saved a crap load of time and money by funding the military to conduct this study and simply applying the results internally.

ktRolster 11y ago
And what would the military do to take a team that was functioning poorly and turn it into a team that is functioning well?
- anonymousguy 11y ago
  Many things. There are a great many ways to address that question (too many). The correct answer depends more specifically on the nature of the problem.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
It's fluff, imho. I've been at Google a few years and have worked with people here who not only make me feel psychologically 'unsafe' but are bigger jerks than I've met at any other workplace. And they were, as far as I know, never censured for it. Granted, I've also worked with some really great people, better than other places I've worked. And I'm sure unconsciously been a jerk myself. So my summary is: run all the studies you want. People mostly behave in the personality patterns they set down as kids. And most of us grew up in schoolyards full of not-so-nice dynamics.

qznc 11y ago

This Woolley paper [0] cited in the article gives three reasons for effective teams. The NYT only tells you two behaviors. True enough. The third is not a behavior. It is "the proportion of females in the group". Paper says "Finally, c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group (r = 0.23, P = 0.007). However, this result appears to be largely mediated by social sensitivity (Sobelz = 1.93, P = 0.03), because (consistent with previous research) women in our sample scored better on the social sensitivity measure than men [t(441) = 3.42, P = 0.001]. In a regression analysis with the groups for which all three variables (social sensitivity, speaking turn variance, and percent female) were available, all had similar predictive power for c, although only social sensitivity reached statistical significance (b = 0.33, P = 0.05)." [0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scie...

Discordius 11y ago
It seems to make sense to not cite that as an additional factor, given that it is almost fully mediated by one of the factors already listed. There is an interesting observation in here that women have on average higher social sensitivity, though it looks like measuring social sensitivity directly in job interviews and other team building processes is just more effective than looking at gender (though a bit harder to do, I would guess).

anu7df 11y ago

This has changed the way I think about teams. I used to think I am pretty good at "figuring out this team work business". A few times in this article I had to go.. wtf?. The title of the article seemed to suggest (my mistake, I jumped to the conclusion) that this is all fluff. Not so. This is very well written. If you think you are very good at this and don't need conclusions driven from poorly controlled experiments, please do yourself (and others) a favor and read through!

qznc 11y ago

> Sakaguchi had recently become the manager of a new team, and he wanted to make sure things went better this time. So he asked researchers at Project Aristotle if they could help. They provided him with a survey to gauge the group’s norms. Does anybody have an idea what that survey was or looked like?

ktRolster 11y ago

If the teammates respect each other, and feel respected, then they will feel safe, there will be a safe zone created by the respect. If the teammates don't respect each other, they will ignore what the others are saying, even if they are forced to listen to them.

thatfrenchguy 11y ago

I liked this until the "my life is my work" part. What is it with Silicon Valley that always ends up in "you spend all your life at work and it's a good thing" ?

Nimitz14 11y ago
I understood it differently: He's saying work is a large part of life and therefore should not be treated as if it's something apart/different. That does not mean that one 'should spend all your life at work'. It means one should try and have fun and not take things so seriously all the time. And I would completely agree with that. In STEM I'd say the majority does not understand the concept.
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  I think you're right. Treating your work life as a separate component of your life is not something that's natural for humans and our social traits. Treating work life as part of your life does not imply anything about how long you work.
CaptSpify 11y ago
I don't think it should be surprising that one of the biggest, highest-earning science/engineering areas of the world are filled with people who enjoy "spending their life at work". Maybe that lifestyle is not for everyone, and that's fine, but you don't typically get to the top without some sacrifice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf-sRZBiHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf-sRZBiHo
- thatfrenchguy 11y ago
  Yeah, I can get the "spending my life at work because it's fun/I like it" thing (although most SV companies are more into "spending my life at work" than actually be working productively most of the time), but "highest-earning" as an advantage ? Well, if you spend your whole life at work and have 2 weeks of vacation a year, I don't see how you can use that money :-). And being a software engineer anywhere, even in 40-hours-a-week-and-9-weeks-of-vacation France will make you earn a lot of money (relative to the cost of living).

thesz 11y ago

They tested group IQ on the brainstorming tasks! So they took wastly (40% worse) suboptimal method of groupwork [1], which emphasizes only communication abilities and then they try to infer general claims from that. Of course they will find that "emotional senitivity" makes "teams" that work in such conditions better. And of course they won't find "common patterns for successful teams" in their meetings because, basically, meetings are not where decisions are made. What a clueless research. [1] http://observer.com/2015/05/brainstorming-does-not-work/ http://observer.com/2015/05/brainstorming-does-not-work/

rntz 11y ago
The linked article doesn't support your claim that brainstorming "emphasizes only communication abilities"; it only claims that brainstorming in groups is a worse way to generate ideas than to have people generate ideas individually & then combine them.
- thesz 11y ago
  Brainstorming is a social activity, with heavy use of communication abilities of ever participant. Would not you agree?

no_wave 11y ago

It's a huge mistake to frame this in terms of safety rather than belonging. Any criticism of someone who feels out of place will cut them to the quick, no matter how much you pad your language. If your standing within a group is assured, you can call each other dumb assholes all day and it won't matter. This is the classic phenomenon of male friendship. What works in a group isn't an absence of criticism, it's a sensation of security of your belonging in that group. How do you make people feel secure? The only real way it occurs is if everyone actually has respect for one another's contributions and work. This can't be faked, unfortunately, and respect has to be earned, and everyone's respect is earned slightly differently. Some peoples' respect algorithms are more compatible than others. An interesting study might be to try organizing people by what they value most in their co-workers.

rntz 11y ago
> This is the classic phenomenon of male friendship. Why do you single this out as an especially male phenomenon?
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Its stated as a classic phenomena of male friendships. Not only male. Not all male. Just a strong mode, right?

jotux 11y ago

Google's conclusions, summarized: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...

matt_wulfeck 11y ago

I've been part of good teams before and loved it. However it wasn't until I was part of a "bad" team that I learned why it's so important to be inclusive. When it became difficult for me to make mistakes, immediately I went into self preservation mode with everyone else. That kills creativity and happiness. Now that I've felt the hammer of that first hand I want nothing to do with it. I try and be conscious of my teammates. What are they feeing? Do they have an idea that they are scared to share? What are they scared of?

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

Nobody has done more research on this than the US Military, specifically the special operations community. The key takeaways that you find in very effective SOF teams are: 1. Clear and accepted authority chain (Top guy earned their place at the top) 2. Candid and constant communication/feedback between all members 3. A clearly defined, proven effective and specialized role for every member with each member knowing how each others role plays together 4. Common sense of purpose (Objective etc...) 5. Common experience (BUD/s, Q, FTC etc...) If you have all of those then pretty much everything else falls into place. Note also that this has no requirement for everyone to being an "A" personality or whatever and has basically no bearing on what they do outside of work. Those aspects can help, but they can equally hurt depending on the egos involved.

jmngomes 11y ago
This is very interesting, can you provide any information or research that led to those takeways? Thanks.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Here is a good starting point: https://hbr.org/2015/08/what-companies-can-learn-from-military-teams https://hbr.org/2015/08/what-companies-can-learn-from-milita... Team of Teams from McChrystal is a great book.
kaffee 11y ago
What do these acronyms mean? SOF, BUD, Q, FTC?
- kornish 11y ago
  I believe SOF is Special Operations Forces and BUD/S is Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (the intense training regimen through which all incoming Navy SEALs must pass). Not sure about the others.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Sorry. SOF: Special Operations Forces BUD/s: Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training Course Q: Special Forces Training Course FTC: Field Tradecraft Course

bambax 11y ago

I didn't read every paragraph of the article but it seems it doesn't describe what "success" means? In the outside world, the success of a company can be measured quite objectively; but inside one company, what defines success? Isn't it possible that patterns are hard to find because "success" is vague and, fundamentally, random?

GnarlyWhale 11y ago

I recently read a (fiction) novel, The Affinities, that focused on the ramifications of optimizing productivity of teams, raising the collective I.Q., not just professionally but socially as well. It's a pretty light read, but I recommend it to anyone else who finds this subject fascinating. https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Affinities.html?id=zPd-BwAAQBAJ&hl=en https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Affinities.html?id=z...

asdfologist 11y ago

"People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test." I wonder if giving this test during interviews would help in building better teams.

mactitan 11y ago

The article pulls you in making you think there is some subtle dynamic. Then the first discovery is psychological safety. Very important but not that insightful because everyone is looking for this environment. I wonder if Alan Turing's enigma project had a psychologically safe environment? Now this notion of psychological safety is interesting because it makes me think of our larger environment (too much a leap!) that it's similar to our personal safety ( perhaps requiring more surveillance?). It reminds me of Hayek’s notion in "Road to serfdom" opining that submitting to less freedom for more safety will make you worse off. I do have to say I would probably submit to more safety - it's so much easier.

sangnoir 11y ago

I feel that the alluded conflict of personal efficiency vs team efficiency is something that is overlooked in the perennial open-plan vs office debate. It is easy for individuals to measure our own efficiency, but hard to measure, or even appreciate team efficiency. My suspicion is open plan offices are better for team efficiency than private offices, but worse for personal efficiency.

ap22213 11y ago

Early in my career, I emphatically asked my managers to work on most highly important yet most visibly failing products. They would look at me in shock. Why would I put my career at risk with such a thing? But, they would reluctantly agree. And, this may sound like masochism to some, but really I just liked a good puzzle and challenge, and I've always viewed work as a game. So, over the next 10 years and many products, I'm extremely proud to say, none of those products ended up failing. And, most eventually exceeded expectations. Who knows, it could have been by chance. Or, maybe it was regression toward the mean. But, I like to think that my focus on the problem and my motivation helped solve it. Over all of this, I was rarely directly credited, which is not surprising. Often I wasn't the 'manager' or even the 'technical lead'. I was just some relatively smart dude on the team, and I was in it for the thrill and enjoyment. The key is to 1) be a good manipulator (or, more politically correctly, a good 'influencer') 2) clearly understand the strengths, personalities, motivations, and goals of each member of the team 3) view each person as a potential 'force multiplier' (to take another word from the military) 4) strategically coordinate the right activities between the right people at the right time 5) lead from the bottom, by example 6) be positive and optimistic 7) recognize potential conflict early and extinguish it subtly If you have a really awesome manager, they can do this from the start. But, as many of us know, management (in the U.S., at least) is a status position, and it attracts those who like status or competition. I've only worked with one manager (out of dozens) who has been able to do this, well. It's a rare skill.

perseusprime11 11y ago

So have they figured it out? I couldn't tell from reading the article.

perseusprime11 11y ago

There is no such thing as perfect team. A perfect team in one context can become an average team in another context. Good Teams embrace values as they solve problems while still having fun. End of story!

edem 11y ago

Is there a summary for this? I've read 3 sections but it only contained fluff about people and not the point of the article.

visarga 11y ago

So, basically, it's about the principles of differentiation and integration applied inside teams. Differentiation comes from "feeling psychologically safe" so you are able to be creative and express your ideas. When you feel safe to be different you do your most creative work. In the beginning of the article I thought the author will conclude that teams made of people with different skill sets would work better than teams with more similar members. The Google 20% time for creative work is also boosting differentiation through creativity. Integration comes from balancing speaking and listening. When everyone can speak, they become mutually integrated. Your ideas have a fair chance of being heard and influencing the group decisions. The same pair of principles (differentiation and integration) are present in other systems like the brain, the ecosystem, the free market and the open source community. I originally discovered these concepts from Giulio Tononi's consciousness theory of integrated information. The same two ideas interestingly coincide in name with the basic operations of calculus and are founding principles in the European Union.

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DaveWalk 11y ago

> [Sakaguchi] wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. He asked the team to gather, off site, to discuss the survey’s results. He began by asking everyone to share something personal about themselves. He went first..."I have stage 4 cancer." Is this what is required to have a team jell at work? I imagine the same sentiment could have been achieved with a different question, but the article continually references this one. Does it make me a non team-player if I don't want to share my health issues with my coworkers? (In addition: is this legal to do?)

tdaltonc 11y ago

This is just a conclusion from data mining; what is google doing to experimentally confirm this finding? Or how would I use this insight to engineer a better team?