Last year the baseball World Series pitted the Los Angeles Dodgers vs Toronto Blue Jays. The Dodgers were the heavy favourites, yet the Dodgers found themselves in a “battle royal” with the Blue Jays. For those who missed it; the 7th and final game went into extra innings before being decided in the bottom of the 11th, with Toronto at bat, the bases loaded and 2 out.
The Dodger’s team payroll of $355 million was approximately $100 million higher than the Blue Jays’. If payroll is measure of talent, then on paper it should have been no contest. With that much more talent why didn’t the Dodgers crush the Blue Jays? Turns out talent isn’t the only thing that drives team performance and businesses, like sports teams have also been trying to figure this out.
Google was one of the businesses who also took an interest in team performance and launched their own research project, “Project Aristotle” to understand why some teams performed exceptionally well while others struggled to complete projects. They studied 180 teams across the Google enterprise scrutinizing performance data, conducting employee interviews and dissecting team compositions. Like baseball, where one would assume the most talented teams would perform the best, the hypothesis was the best teams at Google would have the brightest people, or the most experienced leaders or some magical mix of introverts and extroverts etc. What Google found shocked them and should inform how you organize your business teams in the future.
Google researchers were initially very frustrated because they couldn’t find any specific winning pattern. Team composition had little effect on how the team performed. A team of bright superstars could be as dysfunctional or as high performing as any other mix of people. Also, it didn’t seem to matter which personalities or skill sets were on what team. There was no “right mix of people”, “right composition of personalities” or “winning group of skills”. In short there seemed to be no predictor of success. Totally exasperated, someone finally asked if anyone had actually sat with any of these teams? They hadn’t and when they did it made all the difference to their understanding of high performing teams.
By sitting with the teams researchers were able to witness “group norms”, those unwritten rules that govern how teams operate. One norm surfaced that differentiated high performing teams from all the others – Psychological safety.
Psychological safety is defined by Harvard professor, Amy Edmondson 1, as the team’s shared belief that they are operating in a safe space. That’s a space where the unwritten rules allow you to speak up, ask dumb questions, propose wild ideas and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation or punishment.
What Google discovered was that members of high performing teams believed they could be vulnerable without fear of reprisal or being mocked. Teams that struggled had members who feared looking bad or being judged and thus held back ideas and double checked their opinions before speaking.
For sure there is a certain level of competency needed to work at Google or play professional baseball; however, the primary driver in team performance wasn’t based on skills, IQ, nor was it correlated with credentials. Instead, it’s about whether people feel safe with each other. Google identified two behaviors that stood out that created psychological safety on their best teams:
- No conversation dominators: everyone on the team spoke approximately equally and
- Team members looked out for each other: team members were good at reading each other’s emotional states and nonverbal cues.
Superstars are wonderful and play a role in team composition but the best teams aren’t necessarily stocked with them. The best teams are full of people who make their teammates feel safe enough to do their best work. Perhaps that’s what the Blue Jays were on to when they almost took down the Dodgers. Now think about how your teams are performing…
- Why Psychological Safety Is the Hidden Engine Behind Innovation – Harvard Business Impact