Revealed: the secret to Google’s success
There are not enough case studies into what happens when teams benefit from environments where colleagues share diverse perspectives, great ideas and concerns without the worry it will be weaponised against them. The majority focus on ‘when things go wrong’, for example the Tenerife Airport disaster (1977), NASA Columbia (2003), and Blackberry’s groupthink (2007).
This led me to speaking with teams at Netflix and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital so we collectively benefit from understanding some of the secret sauce. Netflix appoints ‘Informed Captains’ whose obligation is to ‘farm for dissent’ to torture test innovation and make the right decisions for Netflix and their consumers.
And at Alder Hey hospital their openness, humility and curiosity enabled ‘experts’ to ask for help, have open discussions about risk which led to innovation that saved a young girls life.
Another great case study is Google’s Project Aristotle. Their mission was to establish what makes high-performing teams. This case is well documented thanks to Charles Dunhigg’s article in the New York Times in Feb 2016. Here’s my take…
For context, in 1998, Google had ten employees. In 2012 is had 53,861, today it’s 182,502. So, you can understand their obsession with wanting to know what makes great teams.
Like all good researchers, Julia Rozovsky, the lead, went in with some hypothesis. For example, the best teams, ‘will be composed of the best individual performers’; ‘have the best leaders’; ‘have unlimited resources’. What the research revealed were five factors;
In 5th place: Impact: team members believe their work matters and contributes to the organisation's goals.
4th place: Meaning: the work is personally important to team members. ‘Meaning’ can vary e.g. self-expression, help the team be successful, financial security, supporting your family.
3rd: Structure and Clarity: clear roles, priorities, decision making rights, plans, goals and boundaries.
2nd: Dependability: team members reliably complete tasks on time vs. shirking responsibility.
And in 1st place: Psychological Safety: team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other with the confidence no one will embarrass or punish them for admitting mistakes, asking questions or offering a new idea.
The robustness of this research included defining teams as groups operating together with mutual goals, having the need for interdependence and collaboration. Researchers employed both qualitative (e.g. interviews) and quantitative research (e.g. surveys) investigating 250 attributes in 180 teams over a two year period. Interestingly, variables that did not correlate significantly with high performance included things like extroversion of team members; seniority; tenure; co-location (sitting together in the same office); individual performance of team members.
Project Aristotle revealed that the interactions within teams, were key to success, with psychological safety emerging as a crucial factor. From this Google invested heavily to capitalise on this finding, summarised below under the four domains aligned to supporting colleagues speak freely.
Inclusion & diversity: to encourage input from all team members, Google defined behaviours that promote open conversations, for example vulnerability, admitting mistakes, active listening, conversational turn-taking.
Attitude to risk and failure: they created an atmosphere where employees felt comfortable taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them without fear of negative consequences. And they put their money where they mouths were – with budget allocated to trying new things and experimentation.
Willingness to ask for help: they cultivated an environment where employees felt comfortable asking for help rather than what prevents most doing this - the concern we will look incompetent.
Open discussions: programs were introduced including workshops on empathy, active listening, and conflict resolution.
And to top this off, Google encouraged employees to set work-life boundaries and were early in really following through with flexible work arrangements. This included support for colleagues to manage their time effectively, creating an environment where employees could focus on their well-being and critically feel psychologically safe doing so.