Cracking the Code: Ultimate Team Performance, the Google Way

You know, what makes the best teams and Google is not exactly new Google studies is back in 2012, looking at all their teams through their project Aristotle, to outline what are the five key factors that makes a team effective. In this video, I will walk you through those five key factors and also making sure that you have tools to implement those key factors in your team ready for an upgrade. My name is Greg Enjalbert. I’ve had about a 20 year corporate career when I went from being a trainee to eventually a vice president and managing director of a business and I went from managing just one person myself to eventually about 1000 people.

Today, I’m a master coach, helping people team and organization to know themselves to design their future selves and to become their future selves project.

Aristotle was a study research at Google that was about finding what makes team effective.

The study began in 2012. And it involves hundreds of interviews from different teams, 180 teams across Google and the researchers analyzed a range of factors which included the team composition, the communication patterns, and also the work practices of each team.

It is called Aristotle, because it’s related to a quote from Aristotle, which is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, Google’s study was very much based on data, the team used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, surveys, and observational data, and also use machine learning algorithm to sift through all this large amount of data that they collected with regards to what effectiveness meant for Google, it meant an evaluation which was done by the executive evaluation of the team, the team leader evaluation of the team, the team member evaluation of the team, and also sales performance against quarterly quota.

So it was a mix of quantitative objectives and at the same time, some important cultural objectives and without further ado, the five key elements. Number one is psychological safety. The second one is dependability, then you have structure and clarity, meaning and finally, impact. Psychological safety is a concept that refers to the degree to which individuals in a team organization feel safe to take interpersonal risk, such as expressing ideas, asking question or admitting mistakes without fear of negative consequences, or why is that good, it allows for open and honest communication.

With collaboration and experimentation, the team is more likely to identify problems and opportunities, it is also more likely to propose innovative solutions, and that makes a team work together to achieve their personal and team goals.

Amy Edmondson who is a professor at Harvard first coined the term psychological safety. In 1999. She did a study in 2003 That shows that 16 Operating Room teams learning to use a new technology for cardiac surgery with once we had the highest psychological safety were successful in implementing it compared to the ones who did not. So we certainly want to see psychological safety in the health industry. Here are some practical ways that you can implement psychological safety in your team start each team meeting with a checking exercise where each team member will be sharing, how they feel, what they’re working on, and also what challenges they’re facing foster active listening ways measuring how much time everybody is taking in meetings to talk, because you want to make sure that everyone is heard.

And check at the end of the meeting. Ask yourself Are we all understood the same thing from this meeting? Do we know where we’re going, you can also do a feed forward exercise individually where each person share what they want to improve, and each person is giving a suggestion to that person about how to improve if you want to know more about this exercise, check here. Psychological safety is essential about building trust. And if you want to build trust, check out this video here and you will see plenty of practical exercises for how you can do this.

Dependability refers to the degree to which team members can rely on each other to get things done on dependable teams member reliably complete quality work on time, the opposite of that is to shirk responsibility.

So what is dependability? Good offers people take responsibility for their work. They communicate clearly about their progress and roadblocks. And they’re committed to delivering results.

Here are some practical ways that you can use to increase dependability between team members. For example, Google uses the OKR system – objective, key results – to make sure that they have clear expectations between team members. whatever tool you use, make sure that you start by having that in place and make sure that there is also an interaction between team members To ensure that every goal is understood clearly by each team member build clear definitions of each person’s roles and I use the plural for roles here because each person in a job might have different roles to play. And each role is usually attached to a domain of responsibility which needs to be clearly defined act as a facilitator for your team members success be a connector to resources in the organization that you people should have access to mentor on topics that you know well and that your team members would benefit to learn from.

And finally, coach your team members so they can find their own solutions to their problem, dependability as a clear link to the concept of meaning, impact and motivation, because people can only work really dependably, if they know why they’re doing, what they’re doing and the impact that they’re producing.

You like this video so far? So you know what to do. And also subscribe to the channel and put the notifications on if you want content like this every week.

For summary of key points and tools from this video, sign up to my Patreon below. And check out the other videos from the project Aristotle that you can find in the description from other famous YouTubers.

Structure and clarity refers to the degree to which team members understand their roles and responsibility and understand the team goals. It is also the process of fulfilling those expectation and also the impact that each team member is having on the team effectiveness. So why is it good to have structure and clarity, it makes it easier to coordinate efforts and collaborate.

You can also allocate resources more efficiently, there’s usually a reduction in conflicts as people don’t overlap on their roles. People are fully accountable for their roles so there’s no shirking and decisions are faster because people are pulling in the same direction.

Here are some practical ways that you can use to build structure and clarity in your team.

Ask yourself, how much am am I allocating every week to share critical information with my team? And what is that essential information that my team might need to have? Have you actually asked them? How are you setting up your objectives individually?

And as a team? Have you reserved the time for this? And same as for dependability, use the concept of roles of domains and the person who is in charge of those domains? To clarify roles and responsibilities in the team? How do you ensures that information is shared efficiently and without taking too much time and adds the right level of quality and quantity for the effectiveness of your team.

All of those points are not about telling your team what to do it is about you facilitating individual and collective discussions for what needs to happen in the team. Meaning refers to the sense of purpose and fulfilment that team members derive from their work. It’s not only the personal meetings that people have in their work, it’s also houses personal meaning is applied to the meaning that there is for the team’s work. So why do we need meaning because if leverage is the key human need, which is to have purpose in our life, and it unifies your team with a shared view of the world and what your team is fighting for, it makes every team member feel special individually with a personal meaning and at the same time, feel a sense of community with a shared meaning. Here are some practical ways that you can bring meaning into your team’s work, do a personal core values, icebreaker exercise with your team.

Ask them to pick one core value, something that really matters in their lives, something that helps them decide what’s right or wrong in their life and ask them to write down why that value is important to them. Then once they all have their core values and split your team into pairs, and makes them share with each other their core value, then repeat as much as you want with many different people and different core values. also review your organization values. What does your team relate their personal values to the organization’s values? How can you create a wording that is specific to your team about the core values that there is in the organization and the meanings that it has for your team.

And when you talk about personal development plans, make sure that you’re linking that personal development to the team values and at the same time the personal values of the person. If you want to work more on building meaning in your team, then check out this video here which talks about the interaction that there is into personal values, team values and organization values.

Impact refers to the degree to which team members believe their work is making a meaningful difference. The impact here is about the organization’s goals though it can also be about a broader stakeholder impact. It can be about other employees, it can be about shareholders, it can be about the broader community around the organization.
So why having impact is important for team effectiveness.

We build our personal life story based on milestones and having impact Act is a measurable way of building that story. And he drives engagement in a big way, because people are feeling that they’re moving towards something which matters and engage people don’t leave an organization, it drives people to learn more, so they can have an even bigger impact. It creates a positive reputation for your team and the team members, which in turn will bring more trust and will make your team actually a magnet for talent.

Here are some practical ways that you can ensure that your team and your team members have impact have you defined what your team’s impact is on all its stakeholders, I think golden result is not the same thing as worrying what is the positive or negative impact that your team can have on others.

If your team is having positive impact, or even negative impact, make sure that you have systems that allow for the negative feedback to come back. And also for the acknowledgement of all the positives that you do from all its stakeholders, having an impact is great hearing it from the people that you’re impacting. That’s the real thing. If you’ve worked on the personal values of the members, then you will probably discover that people would like to have an impact outside of the organization.

And that’s an opportunity for you to discuss as a team, what could be team activities that you do which are outside of the organization for broader impact, have an impact is also about positively impacting the people around us with the way that we respect them and also acknowledge them.

A great way to do this is to know and use your love language. And if you’re intrigued, check out this video to know more. As you’ve probably guessed by now, there are some clear links between the different factors, the five factors that we’ve talked about for team effectiveness, so they reinforce each other you work on one will happen also when if you work on the five, it becomes a lot more powerful. Make sure if one thing is about those five factors is make sure that you know where you stand for each one of them. It’s hard to improve if you do not know what the gap is, as your team member the following that can be done whether individually or you can do it anonymously, depending on what you prefer.

How would you rate each one of the five factors of team effectiveness? If you put a rating from one to 10? What would it be once you know where the biggest gap is? As a question? What can we do to get better at this?

And also think about it from an individual perspective. Can your team members do a feed forward exercise on that factor of improvement one to one with other people in the team? I’ll leave you with a quote from Vince Lombardi, a famous sports coach individual commitment to a group effort. That is what makes a team work, a company work society work to civilization work. The five factors that we discuss are also supported by psychological needs that every human needs to fulfil to be truly motivated.

You want to know more about how to build true motivation in your team, then check out this video.

FRESH
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