Transcript of How Google builds the perfect team

one of the biggest questions is how to build the perfect team and in fact about four years ago Google invited me to come spend some time with them because they were in the middle of a big project called Project Aristotle a huge data study to try and figure out how to build the perfect team at Google [Music] initially their hypothesis was that the best teams are teams where you put people together who like each other right maybe you need a good mix of e extroverts and introverts maybe you need people who are friends away from the conference room and so they looked at the data and they did experiments and they found that who was on a team actually didn't matter at all they couldn't find any correlations between team membership and team success so then they started looking at how a team interacts and this is where suddenly everything became clear because what they found is that the people who are on a team matter much much less than how those people interact that you could have enemies on a team together or you could have strangers or friends or people who don't get along or all introverts or all extroverts and as long as they treat each other a certain way as long as there's a certain culture then that team will gel so as they started looking at these behaviors what they found was that there were two in particular that mattered more than anything else the first was called equality and conversational turntaking during a meeting or a set of meetings if everyone speaks at roughly the same amount then that team is much more likely to succeed but just speaking isn't actually enough the second characteristic that teams need in order to do well is called ostentatious listening that basically in addition to encouraging you to talk more I as a team leader or team member have to show you that I'm listening by doing things like repeating what you just told me or closing my computer so I can make eye contact with you if you have these two characteristics conversational turn taking and ostentatious listening it creates what psychologists refer to as psychological safety and psychological safety is shown as the single greatest coralate with a group's success when a group feels like they are psychologically safe with each other you unlock their best ideas their ability to work together their innovative capacities google's fundamental belief as is true for many other companies is that it's only when a team comes together that you actually get the best ideas out of each person and the best work at getting things done