Get your pen and paper ready. What do you think is the #1 ingredient for making the perfect team? Is it communication, technical expertise or a dash of something else. My slide deck with the answer to this golden question is available at bit.ly/the-perfect-team.
Is The Office a perfect team? The Office is classic TV series known for its slapstick comedy. However, it provides many anti-patterns of the perfect team. Let's start by discussing a few of those anti-pattern ingredients of the perfect team:
- Fear - most of the employees in The Office went to work fearful if they made a mistake a co-worker would call them out and they may lose their job.
- Bullying - Some employees took advantage of their power or intimidated the vulnerable characters in the office.
- Name calling - Most employees were called names for their beliefs, habits or lifestyle.
- Inappropriate jokes - These jokes made The Office a classic but are not meant for a "real" office.
Project Aristotle
Google's Project Aristotle was a research study to determine what makes a perfect team (see Figure 1). Project Aristotle analyzed data on inventive and productive teams. Their study spanned 2 years, 180 teams, 37,000 employees and they invested millions in the quest to find the answer to the golden question. With this much time and money invested my ears were wide open for the answer.
Drum roll please... The answer is, psychological safety. Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. However, topping the list was emotional safety which has two key ingredients. 1) No bullying. And 2) to succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard. However, we desperately need the expertise of those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.
Is your team perfect?
Take your team photo, place it in the picture frame in figure 2 and ask yourself, is this a perfect team? If not, share this study with your team, your department, or your company because the perfect ingredient is a handful of psychological safety.
