GoogleÕs five keys to a successful team [00:00:11.52] - Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Google Partners Hangout on air. We'll get started in a minute. Just a quick reminder that you can ask your questions in the sidebar of the YouTube page or on the comments page of the events page that you have. My name is Abeer Dubey. [00:00:31.67] JULIA ROZOVSKY: Hi, I'm Julia Rozovsky. [00:00:33.65] - And we are part of the People Analytics Team here at Google. Our team focuses on questions around people and what makes employees effective, happy, and what drives their well-being. We have a lot of work on this topic that we have shared both internally and externally at a portal called Reworks So you see a URL at the top right of this page, where you can actually find a lot of details about the work that our team has shared. [00:00:57.64] Today, actually, we are going to focus on one of the recent studies that we have completed, which is around effective teams. What is it that makes teams effective at Google? [00:01:06.64] And I'm sure all of you, at some point in your career, have wondered about these questions. We all have theories and ideas of what was it about a certain team that made it a superstar. [00:01:16.98] And we think sometimes it's about having the right type of people in the team. Sometimes it's about aggressive goal-setting. Or maybe it's about that rousing speech that the leader gives that drives to the effective teams. And we think if we do all of those, we will get to the perfect team-- maybe this image or any other image of your favorite sporting team that comes to mind. [00:01:38.82] But what ends up happening is, more often than not, the actual situation looks something like this. And you are left wondering, what happened? I thought I had everything that I knew. I'd put that effort. What was it that differentiated that top-performing team from the bottom-performing team? [00:01:57.55] And that was the same question that we were trying to understand as part of that research. And we are definitely not the first ones to have wondered about this, right. Obviously, if you search anything on Google, you will find millions of links on it. But even on a very curated content page like Harvard Business Review, if you search for term "teams," you would find over 5,000 articles on this specific topic. [00:02:25.58] So what we wanted to understand was, from this vast existing body of knowledge, what is it that's actually relevant for us? And in social science and when you're studying people, it's almost never about finding a silver bullet solution that solves everything. It's much more about, from this vast set of possibilities, what is it in your context that is most meaningful that you should apply and spend a lot more time? Understanding is what we care the most about. [00:02:55.03] So that was exactly the intent of this study. We went about it in a much, much structured and scientific manner. When you are studying a question like this, the very first thing that came to our mind was, OK, how do you even define effectiveness in the context of the team? It's a very, very subjective question. [00:03:12.63] And when we started talking to the leaders and the team members, what we learned was, we actually need to triangulate this definition from multiple perspectives-- from what leaders are saying, from what the team managers are saying, and what the team members are saying-- and then layer on top of it things like revenue or other quantitative measures that we thought might be relevant for this study. [00:03:34.76] Then we actually went and collected information from about 180 teams across Google, from different locations, different functions, different sizes, different projects that they were working on. And the idea was to reflect the diversity of teams that we have in the company in the data set that we are using for our research. [00:03:54.50] What we did after that, we actually collected a lot of information about all these 180 teams, along with a variety of dimensions. We conducted about 200-odd interviews with the leaders and managers to get also a lot of qualitative information on what they saw was working really well or not working so well on their teams. [00:04:15.11] The type of information that we collected about the teams-- and it was about more than 250-odd variables about each of the teams-- but they roughly fell into two broad buckets. One was around composition. Who is on the team? What's their education history? What is their preferred working style? What has been their performance history in the company? Things like that. [00:04:35.46] And the second broad bucket was around team dynamics, which is about, what are the norms through which teams get their [INAUDIBLE] done? What is the process of goal-setting? How did they recognize some of the work that the team is doing? [00:04:47.32] And what we wanted to understand was, if we actually look at all these input variables, which of these are most positively associated with the higher performing teams at Google? So what followed was this really complex and involved analytical exercise where we looked at both the quantitative information, as well as the quantitative information, to understand, what are these key parameters that we ought to focus a lot more on. [00:05:13.93] So to tell you a bit more about what we found, I'm going to turn it over to Julia. [00:05:17.80] - Perfect. Thank you, Abeer. When we started doing this research, we really didn't know what we were going to find. We thought that building a perfect team would be pretty algorithmic in nature, because at Google, we love our algorithms. So we imagined that you just have to find the right number of superstars or x consultants, or just the most senior people within the organization. You put them on a team, and voila-- you have your dream team assembled. [00:05:47.48] What we actually found was something very different. At Google, what our research showed us was that it's less about who is on the team and more about how people interact that really makes the difference. [00:06:01.31] Specifically what we learned is that there are five common themes that were consistent across all high-performing teams at Google that really differentiated our best teams from the rest. So I'm going to walk you through them one by one in order of importance. [00:06:17.31] So the first one is around psychological safety. This is the most foundational of the five dimensions and the one that we found to be the very most important. You can't be a good team without it. What we mean by "psychological safety" is being able to take a risk on the team without feeling insecure or embarrassed. [00:06:39.84] The second is around dependability. Do your team members feel like the others are reliable? Can they actually produce high quality results on time? Next is around structure and clarity. Does the team have clear goals? Do team members have individual role responsibilities? And is there a really clear execution plan to work towards those goals? [00:07:07.12] Next is meaning. The people working on the team-- do they find the work that they're doing personally important to them? And lastly, impact. Do we as a team fundamentally believe that the work that we're doing matters? [00:07:23.82] So at Google, what we found is, when teams can answer "yes" to each of these five questions, they're much more likely to be an effective team. And what we saw is that this is a really good blueprint and checklist for teams to have in the back of their head when they're building new groups and pulling people together of what effectiveness might look like. [00:07:47.80] So I want to dive a little bit deeper into psychological safety, because as I said, it's the most important dynamic. OK. So what do we actually mean by "psychological safety"? We know it's a clinical-sounding term. And what we mean is feeling like you're comfortable enough to throw out a crazy idea, a really silly question, admit a mistake, and feel like your team will actually have your back. [00:08:16.33] So for example, think about the last time you were working on a project. You're in the middle, and all of a sudden you just got completely stuck-- so stuck that, all of a sudden, the goals are unclear, the path forward makes no sense, all of the work that you've been doing seems kind of worthless. [00:08:35.52] At that moment, what you really need is a thought partner-- somebody to bounce ideas off of. But simultaneously, you're terrified of asking for help and looking less competent. So what psychological safety is, is hushing that voice inside your head, asking the question, and knowing that nobody on your team will think less of you for doing so. [00:09:02.04] Amy Edmondson, a researcher from Harvard Business School, has a really great way of explaining why this is so important. What she says is, when you withhold your question, not only are you making the project less efficient, but you're also robbing yourself and your team members of small moments of learning. And this really plays out in how effective a team can be. [00:09:25.98] So we saw this trend really clearly in our own Google data. And with our sales teams, we actually saw that psychological safety on the team impacts the bottom line. [00:09:37.12] So let me walk you through that. When we looked at the sales teams in our sample and we looked at their average revenue targets, what we noticed is that teams that don't feel safe miss their target revenue by 19%. Whereas teams that do feel safe exceed their target revenue by almost the same amount. It's a big difference. [00:10:01.81] So when we're thinking about why this happens, what we see in our end is cross-sectional findings. But we see from plenty of external sources that psychological safety actually drives effectiveness. And the reason that this happens is when team members feel safe with one another, they're much more likely to ask for help. They're much more likely to admit a mistake. And they're much more likely to try on new roles. And when this happens, the team is able to learn. And as the team learns, it becomes much more effective. [00:10:39.81] So you might be thinking, OK, great. So we know that psychological safety is so important. But how do you foster it on a team? And there's definitely no easy answer here. But we wanted to share an anecdote with you from Astro Teller, who is a leader at Google X. [00:10:59.31] So Astro has really been able to create a culture of psychological safety on his team. And one way he does this is what he calls a "pre-mortem." What he does is, before any project ever launches, months before, he sits down his team, and he says, listen, imagine the launch is over. Imagine that this was the biggest failure that anybody has ever seen-- so big that we're embarrassed to look each other in the eye. [00:11:29.46] He asks his team to sit down for two minutes and write down every possible thing that could possibly lead to a failure like that. And then as a group, they go one by one and discuss why and ideas to get around that. By carving out this safe space to talk about concerns and possibilities to make errors, they clear the path to success. And that's usually how the launch goes. [00:11:59.10] So I want to turn it back over to Abeer to give you some high level thoughts about this research. [00:12:06.93] - Perfect. Thanks, Julia. So these are the five things which were sort of a synthesis of all the years of research that we have done. And you can learn about each of these a lot more in the resources that we'll share with you. [00:12:20.36] What I wanted to basically spend some time is recapping a few meta themes which were a really good learning for us. And hopefully it resonates with all of you as well, as you think about your own teams. [00:12:31.70] So the first one-- the most important one which we highlighted was, it was a surprise for us to see it's less about who is on the team and much, much more about how the team actually gets their work done. And so this notion of these things which may actually be sometimes much more subtle and not visible is much, much more important. And the need to be proactively paying attention to it is really important. [00:12:55.37] The second one is, if you look at this list of the five things, by themselves, all of them may not be a huge surprise. You might have listed them in your own list when you thought about it. But what's really important-- again, going back to the question of, there's so many possibilities of what could have been true-- and really trying to understand what of those, all the possibilities, is the most important in our context, was one of the most powerful aspects of this research. So the fact that things that did not show up, but could have shown up, was also just as big of a learning for us. [00:13:27.55] For example, consensus-driven decision making is something that we talk about a lot internally. And that wasn't in the top five list. We thought it's perhaps about putting people in the same location, in teams co-located. And that did not show up as one of the important factors. Or just having a lot of higher performers on the team could be associated. And you can see that is also not one of the top five things that has shown up. So identifying what works and what is most important in your context is really important. So that's the second point. [00:13:59.53] And the third point, which was really, I think, useful for us was, to know that all of these five things are things that you can actually work on. These are not static concepts. If the team actually puts effort, they can improve on these, which is why we have now instituted a mechanism internally where the teams can actually reflect and evaluate how they are doing on these dimensions and use their internal resources to improve on them. [00:14:26.96] And I hope as you guys reflect on these, some of these resonate. And you can start trying to implement some of these for your own teams. And I wanted to share a few things which might actually be really, really helpful if you go about that process. [00:14:42.61] Leaders, managers, team members all have an equally important role to play in this space, right. This is something which has to be collectively owned by the entire organization. But there are certain things which each of these members can play a much more proactive role, to get to the effective team path faster. [00:15:02.95] For leaders, it's really about communicating, understanding, identifying what are these key philosophies? What are these sort of key components which are most important in your context? Making sure that you've put an effort to understand. And then you can be the champion to make sure teams are paying attention to it. So that's the biggest role, I think, that a leader can play. [00:15:26.48] For the managers, it's much, much more about being the role model-- being the person who everybody in the team can see as actually displaying the qualities that are needed so they can start emulating some of these. So if it's set on psychological safety, it could be about showing a lot more vulnerability so that others feel the same in terms of being comfortable doing so. It could be around spending a lot of time to make sure the roles that you are assigning to the team members align with their personal values and what they care about and what's most meaningful for them. [00:16:00.11] And then for team members, they are actually the ones who have to experience all of these on a day-to-day basis. So they need to take charge of being very proactive in terms of managing. Have a mechanism to assess and measure how the team is doing on these dimensions to reflect on these. And actually own the process of driving change-- picking up the right things that are most important for your team to focus on, and then getting the collective team to actually put a deliberate effort to make improvements in these areas. [00:16:32.37] What we found at Google was the teams that were committed, where the leaders were committed, could actually see significant and meaningful changes on these dimensions in a period as short as 10 weeks. So this is not something which is static and can take years of work. If you are aware of it, if you have a mechanism to talk about it, if you deliberately put action to improve, you can see changes in a very short period of time. So we really hope you all reflect and see what resonates and try to find something similar that works for your team. [00:17:07.59] I wanted to remind you of this really, really amazing resource that we have put together. It's the portal called re:Work. This is a place where we are open-sourcing most of the work that we are doing on the people side, where we share research on topics like teams and many other topics which are in the people space. And it's work by Google, but then also by a lot of other companies who have been doing some pioneering work in this space. [00:17:32.05] So if you are interested, if these type of topics are a thing of interest to you, please go check out the URL g.co/rework. where you can find a lot more information on this topic and other topics. We are also going to share a lot more on the topic of teams on this portal throughout the year. We already have some information. And there will be a lot more. So please sign up there at the Contact Us page. And we can follow-up with you with more details, if you are interested. [00:18:03.57] And with that, I'm going to turn it over to questions. OK, let's start. Julia, what if my team has really low psych safety? [00:18:15.48] - Yeah. So this is a hard one. It's tricky to think about how do you improve psychological safety and team effectiveness in general when the team doesn't feel so great in the moment. One thing that we found at Google to be really helpful is, when you're going into a tricky conversation, you feel like psychological safety is really low, it's really helpful to have an external facilitator lead the way through this conversation. [00:18:47.34] So within your organization, it might be an HR business partner, or somebody from a learning and development role, or just anybody who is outside of the team who doesn't have the same team dynamics to facilitate the conversation. We find that that's been really, really helpful in making progress. [00:19:11.24] - So the next question is, did you find any evidence connecting diversity to team effectiveness? This is a really, really important question and something that we actually paid a lot of attention to. This was something that we were actually discussing when we are going about the research. [00:19:28.12] If you look in the external studies on this topic, the results are mixed, right. Some people find evidence of direct relationships, and some don't. There are some studies that would say, in the context when you have more innovative work happening, diversity matters more. [00:19:42.79] What we found in our results was really interesting in a nuanced perspective, which I wanted to share with all of you. We did not find direct association of diversity in team effectiveness if you just kind of look at them in isolation. [00:19:59.79] However, I think what was really interesting was the role that psychological safety played in this phase. So Julia shared with you how that factor is, by far, the most important in terms of assessing effectiveness. [00:20:15.68] What was really interesting also, in this context, was what we found was, the teams that were actually high on the psychological safety, in that context having a more diverse team actually leads to more effective teams. And what that really means is, basically, just having a set of diverse opinions is not sufficient. It's required. [00:20:36.82] But you also, then, need to create a culture where there's a safe space for all of these views to actually be expressed so that you can really leverage the power of diversity. So you need diversity, as well as psychological safety, to actually really get the full value of the piece. [00:20:52.88] - Great. OK. Next question. Did you factor in employee engagement-- so the level of how much people care and contribute to the team? So the way that we thought about employee engagement is that it's almost a collection of how meaningful people find their work and how important they think it is to their organization. The two of those things together sort of drive engagement. [00:21:21.51] And when we were thinking about it, the thing that we found most interesting about a sense of meaning that people have around their work is that it doesn't always come from the same place for the same people. So for example, some people might find meaning in their work because they're surrounded by incredible people and they find their teammates really energizing. Some people might find the actual task that they're doing meaningful. So for example, I love writing code. That, to me, is meaningful. [00:21:53.12] Other people find the output of their work really important, and thinking about how what they're doing is helping others succeed. So they can derive meaning from there. But what we see in terms of engagement is that it has to come from somewhere, but it doesn't matter where. [00:22:11.72] - Perfect. So Emily is asking, are some of the survey questions that were used available on the re:Work community? I can tell you that is one of the most requested items that we have gotten. And we are working on it. [00:22:28.35] What we are hoping through the rest of the year, is actually share a lot more material on how to conduct this research, what other types of resources that you can use. Some of these questions that we use in our research are actually available. So like we mentioned Amy Edmondson-- she has done a lot of work in this space. So we can look up for that specific content. And we will make a lot more of this available later in the year. [00:22:52.48] I mean, I think that the reason we have been very deliberate about how we share this is, going back to that initial comment that I made that, it's really important for every organization to understand what's most important for them. Does it really resonate in their context, right? [00:23:07.12] So it may make sense. And it may actually be fine for you to say, actually what Google found might work for my context. But what we want to share is actually the process of how to go about doing something similar in your organization so that when you find results, you can be comfortable that they are actually something that are relevant for your context. So we'll share a lot more. Right now we have not. We are in the process of building that resource. And we'll share a lot more later in the year. [00:23:37.38] - Great. OK, next question. How do you change the safety of the environment when the fear comes from the manager? I think this is a terrific question and a really important one. So what we see both from our examples at Google and external literature is that managers play a huge role in psychological safety because people mirror the behaviors they see from their managers. So if a manager is doing something that undermines psychological safety, it's more often than not that it will also trickle down to the team. [00:24:10.84] One thing that we have found is that if the issue really stems from the manager, the first thing that you want to do is coach the manager independent of the team. So what we do at Google is to, again, have an external facilitator like an HR business partner work directly with the manager to give feedback on some of the things that they're doing that might be lowering psychological safety in the room. And small actionable advice, like making eye contact, paraphrasing what other people are saying, making people feel really heard and understood and valued-- that might make a difference. [00:24:57.03] - Perfect. So the next question is, how often do you measure these factors for a sales team? This is really interesting, because we actually deliberately thought about, should this be a programmatic effort where every quarter or every cycle we ask teams to go through it? [00:25:13.25] What we found in the pilot studies that we ran was it's really important for the teams to understand which part and phase of the lifecycle they are at and figure out when it makes most sense for them to go through this process of self-reflection. And this may be a quarter for some teams, every six months for some other teams. We deliberately did not put a specific timeline because I think the context here is really, really important. Teams should have had enough time to understand and even assess the dynamics. [00:25:46.31] So I think we say, maybe we don't want to do the formal survey at the very beginning. We just want to be aware of these things and deliberately cultivate in the early stages of the team's lifecycle. Once, say, you have spent three months, six months with the team where the team can have meaningful feedback to share with each other, you can go through the formal assessment exercise. [00:26:06.92] After that, what we recommend is, just assessment alone is not sufficient, right. You then need to create an action plan, commit to what changes you're going to make. And when you have made that investment and you feel you have made meaningful changes, then maybe you reassess. So it may be twice a year. It may be once a year. It may be every quarter. It really depends on the context of the team. [00:26:31.14] - Great. Next question is, do you believe team size and location play an important role here? So what's interesting is, when we did our research, we certainly asked teams about their size and where team members sit. And for us, it didn't seem to matter as much as the other dimensions that we found. [00:26:52.69] What we mean by this is, we saw teams of various sizes-- some very small to very large-- both be effective and ineffective. And same was true for whether people sat in the same office or in different offices. What we saw is that if teams are able to get to the five dimensions that we're talking about, and really excel at things like psychological safety and structure and clarity and dependability and so on, then the team size and their location matters a lot less. [00:27:30.47] - Mm-hmm. OK, so the next question is, did we find any evidence that team leaders' behavior is particularly important or not? I think this is a really interesting question, because one of the most commonly asked questions on that list of five dimensions is, how come the leader is not explicitly listed, right? [00:27:52.37] Because a lot of the other sort of literature points to the importance of a leader. And what we found was, it's not so much about any specific kind of calling out a leader explicitly. If you go behind each of those five dimensions, I think leaders-- they are huge, huge and a very important role in setting the right tone and the norms for the team. [00:28:13.61] So for example, in psychological safety, I think we had this set of ideas that Amy Edmondson and I shared, which is around if the leader is a much more proactive in showing vulnerability, the team is more likely to do that. If the leader frames the problem as a learning opportunity versus an execution problem, that leads to higher psychological safety. [00:28:38.96] Similarly, if you think on the notion of structure and clarity and dependability, a leader to be aware of what stage the team is at and what's the appropriate amount of structure, they play a very proactive role in setting them. So leaders actually are absolutely important in setting the tone for each of the five dimensions. [00:28:59.02] - Great. So maybe we to a couple more questions. OK, the next one is around, I'd be interested in knowing if post research-- is there a framework or tool you've been able to equip teams with to help them live out these five elements? Is the research leaving the lab? [00:29:19.30] So one of the things that we did at Google after we had these results was exactly this. We tried to make sure that the research was going to leave the lab. We did two things that I thought was particularly helpful. [00:29:34.52] One is, we spent a lot of time talking about this framework of the five dimensions of team effectiveness with leaders, with big organizations to create a common language around how the organization thinks about team effectiveness. So it's top of mind whenever they're working in a group. That's number one. [00:29:56.56] And number two was, we developed an assessment tool. We realized that one of the things that was missing from our organizational context was an ability to quickly take a pulse of how the team is doing. That so rarely comes up in conversation because it's awkward to talk about things like psychological safety and evaluate the team. So we felt like creating this tool, giving a team the opportunity to pause, take a five-minute assessment, reflect, and discuss as a group, was really important to making progress towards more effective teams. [00:30:37.46] - All right. Maybe let's wrap up with this last one, which is around, how do you implement efficiently a culture where everyone can express their point of view? Can you give some specific examples? [00:30:51.88] So I think Julia sort of briefly touched on it. One of the things which, when we are reflecting on how come these norms are so much more important than the other things, what we realized was, many times these things are not as explicitly visible or tangible. And leaders sometimes can actually be unaware that some of these things are not working right. [00:31:14.09] So I think one of the biggest advantages that I think we have had from this research is, by creating this common language, actually giving a name to some of these sort of attributes that people feel really good or bad about when they're working on the team is really important. So I think the first thing is just understanding the importance and collectively, as an organization, sharing, creating a culture where people are aware of research like this. That they have terminology to talk about some of these very, very subtle dynamics that happen on a day-to-day basis is really important. [00:31:48.02] Second, as I mentioned, I think if you formalize a mechanism for discussing some of these things where you explicitly invite opinions for people to share their point of view on this thing, I think that could be really, really empowering, right. Because imagine if you're feeling low on psychological safety-- it's very unlikely that you will proactively, then, bring up that I feel that, right. [00:32:08.69] But if there is a forum there, in a safe way, people can express that that's something that they have felt as being low or high on the team, I think that's a really good pulse measure. I think it's important to do that not just when you're struggling, but even when you're doing well. Because it is very easy for these to be blindspots, which you need to actively pay attention to. [00:32:32.43] And then there are sort of the tips on how leaders can emulate these behaviors, making sure that you're proactively paying attention to small things like, are people getting to express views, inviting views from people who have not been as vocal, or moderating the discussion if you feel like people are interrupting or cutting off each other. It's a series of small things. It's never like this one large thing, other than this kind of creating this visible, which I think goes a long, long way in the space. [00:33:03.37] OK? With that, thank you very much for joining in. Please feel free to check out the re:Work portal for more information. And we'll share a lot more later in the year. [00:33:15.38] - Thanks so much. [00:33:15.98] - Thank you.