University of Georgia Developing and Leading Effective Teams at Google Article Paper Management- Developing and Leading Effective Teams Please read the at

University of Georgia Developing and Leading Effective Teams at Google Article Paper Management- Developing and Leading Effective Teams

Please read the attached article (“What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” by Charles Duhigg) and respond to the questions below:

What were some of the major findings discovered by Project Aristotle?
In trying to discover what made a team successful, what was one thing Project Aristotle consistently found identified in their research as important?
The article described two very different sample teams (i.e., Team A and Team B) and asks which team you would rather join. Which team would you rather join?
Did it surprise you which team the article suggested you should join if given the choice? Why/Why not?
In studying groups, what two behaviors were generally shared among the teams considered “good”?
Reflect on/Discuss the concept of psychological safety that is identified and discussed toward the end of the article. This is also a concept discussed in your Chapter 6 textbook material.
How important do you think psychological safety is in team interactions? Why?
Please discuss any concluding thoughts, take-aways, and/or new ways of thinking about team interactions resulting from this article. For example, were there points with which you particularly agreed or disagreed?

Formatting requirements:

A minimum of 3 full double-spaced pages.
Written in a professional manner (e.g., free from grammatical errors and typos, no slang, etc.) Grammarly is recommended.
Adherence to typical APA guidelines (e.g., double spaced throughout, Times New Roman 12-point font throughout, 1-inch margins, appropriate use of headings, etc.).
PLEASE CREATE HEADINGS FOR EACH QUESTION TO EASILY DISTINGUISH ONE RESPONSE FROM THE NEXT. The Work Issue
What Google Learned From Its Quest to
Build the Perfect Team
New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
By Charles Duhigg
•
Feb. 25, 2016
Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She
had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for
two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a
better fit. Or perhaps a fast-growing start-up. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to
find a job that was more social. ‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people
were building together,’’ she told me. She thought about various opportunities — Internet
companies, a Ph.D. program — but nothing seemed exactly right. So in 2009, she chose the path
that allowed her to put off making a decision: She applied to business schools and was accepted
by the Yale School of Management.
When Rozovsky arrived on campus, she was assigned to a study group carefully engineered by
the school to foster tight bonds. Study groups have become a rite of passage at M.B.A. programs,
a way for students to practice working in teams and a reflection of the increasing demand for
employees who can adroitly navigate group dynamics. A worker today might start the morning
by collaborating with a team of engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand,
then jump on a conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling
team meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee. To prepare students for that
complex world, business schools around the country have revised their curriculums to emphasize
team-focused learning.
Every day, between classes or after dinner, Rozovsky and her four teammates gathered to discuss
homework assignments, compare spreadsheets and strategize for exams. Everyone was smart and
curious, and they had a lot in common: They had gone to similar colleges and had worked at
analogous firms. These shared experiences, Rozovsky hoped, would make it easy for them to
work well together. But it didn’t turn out that way. ‘‘There are lots of people who say some of
their best business-school friends come from their study groups,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It wasn’t
like that for me.’’
Instead, Rozovsky’s study group was a source of stress. ‘‘I always felt like I had to prove
myself,’’ she said. The team’s dynamics could put her on edge. When the group met, teammates
sometimes jockeyed for the leadership position or criticized one another’s ideas. There were
conflicts over who was in charge and who got to represent the group in class. ‘‘People would try
to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘I always
felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.’’
So Rozovsky started looking for other groups she could join. A classmate mentioned that some
students were putting together teams for ‘‘case competitions,’’ contests in which participants
proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by judges, who awarded
trophies and cash. The competitions were voluntary, but the work wasn’t all that different from
what Rozovsky did with her study group: conducting lots of research and financial analyses,
writing reports and giving presentations. The members of her case-competition team had a
variety of professional experiences: Army officer, researcher at a think tank, director of a healtheducation nonprofit organization and consultant to a refugee program. Despite their disparate
backgrounds, however, everyone clicked. They emailed one another dumb jokes and usually
spent the first 10 minutes of each meeting chatting. When it came time to brainstorm, ‘‘we had
lots of crazy ideas,’’ Rozovsky said.
One of her favorite competitions asked teams to come up with a new business to replace a
student-run snack store on Yale’s campus. Rozovsky proposed a nap room and selling earplugs
and eyeshades to make money. Someone else suggested filling the space with old video games.
There were ideas about clothing swaps. Most of the proposals were impractical, but ‘‘we all felt
like we could say anything to each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘No one worried that the rest of
the team was judging them.’’ Eventually, the team settled on a plan for a microgym with a
handful of exercise classes and a few weight machines. They won the competition. (The microgym — with two stationary bicycles and three treadmills — still exists.)
Rozovsky’s study group dissolved in her second semester (it was up to the students whether they
wanted to continue). Her case team, however, stuck together for the two years she was at Yale.
It always struck Rozovsky as odd that her experiences with the two groups were dissimilar. Each
was composed of people who were bright and outgoing. When she talked one on one with
members of her study group, the exchanges were friendly and warm. It was only when they
gathered as a team that things became fraught. By contrast, her case-competition team was
always fun and easygoing. In some ways, the team’s members got along better as a group than as
individual friends.
‘‘I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It didn’t
seem like it had to happen that way.’’
Our data-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits and office quirks with a scrutiny
that our cubicle-bound forebears could only dream of. Today, on corporate campuses and within
university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to
studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make
employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves. ‘‘We’re living through
a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at
Boston University who studies how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick
apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out
why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’
Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving
individual workers — a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t
enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is
more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month,
found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned
by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than threequarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies
show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to
problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and
report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when
workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in
government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a
company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but
also how they work together.
Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can
transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the
tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’
lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently
particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by
rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good
communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many
Google managers).
The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the
best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put
introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or
‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it
turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’
In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study
hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a
leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational
psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers. Rozovsky, by then, had
decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After
graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.
Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking
at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests? Or did it
matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of rewards? Based on those
studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did
teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational
backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy?
They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had
exceeded their departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender
balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.
No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns
— or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180
teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing
showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference.
The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams, for instance, were
composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who were
basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong managers.
Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two teams might have
nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of
effectiveness. ‘‘At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘There weren’t strong
patterns here.’’
As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept
coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as
‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern
how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding
disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages
vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged,
but their influence is often profound. Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals
— they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather,
the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.
Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for
norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an
‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some
groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced
that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational
order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to
wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal
chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There
were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and
others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.
After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers
concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s
teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most.
Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that
sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally
successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong
leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one
another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data
sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is
finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones
that successful teams shared?
Imagine you have been invited to join one of two groups.
Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch
a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they
are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone
makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the
meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The
meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.
Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers
with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People
interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic,
the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t
actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.
Which group would you rather join?
In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College began to try
to answer a question very much like this one. ‘‘Over the past century, psychologists made
considerable progress in defining and systematically measuring intelligence in individuals,’’ the
researchers wrote in the journal Science in 2010. ‘‘We have used the statistical approach they
developed for individual intelligence to systematically measure the intelligence of groups.’’ Put
differently, the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I. Q. that emerges within a
team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.
To accomplish this, the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into small groups and
gave each a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation. One assignment,
for instance, asked participants to brainstorm possible uses for a brick. Some teams came up with
dozens of clever uses; others kept describing the same ideas in different words. Another had the
groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a different list of groceries. The only way to
maximize the group’s score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for
something the team needed. Some groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn’t fill their
shopping carts because no one was willing to compromise.
What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment
usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at
everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams
from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other
words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a
team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
But what was confusing was that not all the good teams appeared to behave in the same ways.
‘‘Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly,’’ said
Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. ‘‘Other groups had pretty average members, but they
came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths. Some groups had one
strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role.’’
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good
teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion,
a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turntaking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among
teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had
spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’
Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective
intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they
were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other
nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of
people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam
known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in
Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They
seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in
contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their
colleagues.
In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing
Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all
optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there
are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what
people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will
continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a
group, they will become more collectively intelligent.
In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead
of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all
the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and
share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars,
the sum will be greater than its …
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