#Project October 9
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Google is an interesting company that studies a lot of things often using all the data that they collect. They recently completed a study which they called PROJECT Aristotle.
This study was a PROJECT to study to see if Google could discover the secrets of effective teams.
If you want to read a great NY Times article on this PROJECT go to this link
If you are watching professional sports these days you will often hear the word analytics. Baseball managers have all kind of data available to them on what hitters do, what pitchers do, and how to best set-up defensive strategies. Yet data sometimes is not enough when it comes to building a championship team. Talent is not enough either.
Yes data is important in increasing an athlete personal productivity but there is more to having an effective team then just high performing team members. PROJECT Aristotle stumbled on to that.
So Google wanted to find out how to build the perfect team. Here is a quote from the NY Times on what they studied.
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.
Google was hoping this PROJECT would help them find patterns on what was necessary to create the best teams in their workplace to gain a competitive advantage.
They got frustrated with what they discovered. They kept finding two teams with nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, and yet their levels of effectiveness were at opposite ends of the performance spectrum.
Google is good at determining patterns and predicting outcomes but they didn’t find it. What they did discover was that group norms mattered.
What is a group norm? They are guidelines of behavior and a code of conduct that provides some order and conformity to teams, organizations, churches, and groups.
There were two big takeaways on those group norms.
- On the highly effective teams everybody spoke in roughly the same proportion.
- The best teams were made up of all members possessing social sensitivity. In essence they knew when someone was feeling upset or left out. More importantly they acted on that intuition.
In essence the PROJECT determined that trust and respect have to be part of a team culture to achieve championship results. It is not all talent.
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