How to Build a Successful Team in a Culture Obsessed With Front Men
By: Ines Panker
Tags: Team Management, Software Development, Startup, Teamwork, Programming

What About Different Personalities, Cultures, and Backgrounds?

Surely, not everybody is suited to work with everybody, right?

When depicting a successful team, we usually assign roles to people. We might think that we need one leader and the others should follow. Then we need one smart person, one brave person… the team members have to share strong team motivation and have a preference for the same type of action. But studies do not support this view.

In 2010, remarkable research was published by a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T., and Union College. They set out to find factors for a team’s success rate — a team’s “collective intelligence,” or collective IQ, so to speak.

The researchers recruited 699 people and organized them into groups of 2–5. Then they gave them a series of assignments with an emphasis on collaboration.

Interestingly, the groups which did well on any one of the assignments tended to do well on all assignments. Even more interestingly, many of the factors we would generally associate with a successful team, like team satisfaction, team cohesion, team motivation, or the individual intelligence of the team’s members were not correlated to the group’s collective intelligence.

When the same task was done by groups, however, the average individual intelligence of the group members was not a significant predictor of group performance

The study’s results identified three factors that constitute group intelligence:

how well the group’s members react to each other’s social cues

whether each team member gets an equal time slot to speak

how many women there are on the team (probably because studies have shown women to be better at reading social cues)

First, there was a significant correlation between [group intelligence] and the average social sensitivity of group members (r = 0.26, P =0.002). Second, [group intelligence] was negatively correlated with the variance in the number of speaking turns by group members (r=-0.41, P=0.01). In other words, groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking. Finally, c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group (r=0.23, P=0.007).

This same research was later collaborated by Google when they conducted their own statistical analysis of their own teams. In 2012, Google started Project Aristotle, with which they were trying to figure out what made some teams successful and others not.

After collecting and analyzing a year’s worth of data about more than 100 teams, they couldn’t find any real pattern — until they started looking at the team dynamic through the eyes of psychological safety.

One Google engineer from a successful team described his team lead as “direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.” Another Google engineer, from a less successful team, said his team lead has “poor emotional control.” “He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and might crash the car.”

By looking at all the answers again through the lens of social dynamics, Google found that psychological safety was by far the most important criteria differentiating effective and non-effective teams. In the end, a team’s effectiveness was not correlated to how senior the people on the team are, how intro- or extraverted, how educated, or which programming skills they possess. What matters is how the team members care for each other.

Some teams in an organization will be successful and others will not. The latter are governed by the team members with poor social skills. To improve a team’s dynamic, better social skills need to be developed, and people have to start giving social interactions more value. This, however, is not something that can be achieved by sending them to after-work drinks or to the yearly Christmas party.

The truth is, we see work as the professional realm — a place away from the broader society, where we only show about 10% of our actual self. Which is ludicrous. Given that on average we sleep 8 hours, work 8 hours, and relax for 8 hours, we spend about 50% of our waking hours at work. Are we really prepared to pretend we are robots for half of our life? A machine with no desires, no wishes, and no thoughts outside of the company’s goals?

As a society, we might not yet be emotionally mature enough to be able to handle emotions at work — our own, and those of the others. But just because we might refuse to handle them doesn’t mean we don’t all come to work with broad emotional needs. The relationships we form at work affect our motivations, our health, our self-esteem. We start our days with work, and then the stress or satisfaction we experienced at work affect the way we treat our family and friends later in the day.

I always find that knowledge is power. Knowing what affects and motivates you, and also what affects and motivates others around you is like a power-up. Suddenly you have access to this whole other dimension. Suddenly you see how things are connected, you see that the information was always there, and things were always clear and logical; it was just you who decided to keep your eyes closed.