What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Aristotle Project

Aristotle is project that google lunched several years ago, which was huge data study focus on the team work, million of dollars had been spent to track over 180 teams for 3 years, they want to know why some teams stumbled while other soared?

first researchers thought that maybe best teams had members who liked each other a lot, or there was a healthy mix of personality types or the team members were friends out side of work!
but the researchers found that none of these seemed to matter, and there was no evidence that mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference, and as they continued to study the group of team, they noticed that all of the best teams shared 2 behaviors. First is that the team members spoke almost the same proportion, this phenomenon called equality in distribution of conversional turn-taking, where in some teams everyone spoke during task, others leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment, but in each case at the end of the day every one had spoken roughly the same amount, in an other words as every one git a chance to talk, the team did well, if one person or small group spoke all the time the collective intelligence declined.

Second, the good teams all had high average social sensitivity, which means they were skilled at reading how others felt based on their tone of voice and their expression, researchers made an exam to test social sensitivity for teams members the exam known as reading the mind in the eyes, people who were on successful teams scored about average in this test, while people in less effective teams in contrast scored below average, they seemed to be less sensitive towards their colleagues.
in the end of the project researchers came to conclusion that it did not matter who was on the team, what mattered was how team members treated each other, teams were everybody talked and every body showed respect by listening and paying attention created psychological safe atmosphere inside the team , and psychological safety in each member in the group had a positive effect on the team’s ability to succeed.