Psychological Safety For Startups

What makes teams successful and effective?

Google set out to answer this important question in 2012. The initiative was coined, ‘Project Aristotle.’ The name comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s quote – “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Google spent 2 years studying 180 real and diverse teams within its ranks - real Google employees in teams, doing “real” work in a corporate setting, not made up teams for the study! Over 200 interviews were conducted in an effort to find a ‘recipe’ for what makes teams successful. They defined what constitutes a team, analyzed over 250 different attributes of teams, and defined how to measure team effectiveness. They collected data with a view to define the winning ‘algorithm’.

To their surprise, Project Aristotle researchers discovered that several common factors thought to impact team performance and effectiveness didn’t matter much. These variables Being: The collocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office), consensus-driven decision making, extroversion, individual performance, workload size, seniority, team size, and tenure.

5 Factors common to effective teams Identified

What Google did find were 5 common factors in what makes teams successful. Where psychological safety was the primary factor. In order of importance, their findings were:

Psychological safety: In a team with high psychological safety, team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable in front of each other without the fear of being embarrassed, ridiculed, or facing any other consequences.

Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time. The opposite of dependability is shirking responsibilities. Team members get things done on time and meet Google’s high bar for excellence.

Structure and clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals and each team member clearly understands job expectations. They also know the process of fulfilling these expectations and the consequences of the individual team member’s performance are also clear.

Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. Work is personally important and meaningful to the team members. The meaning of work is personal and can vary amongst many factors. These factors can be: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual.

Impact: Teams have to feel that their work and their output are making a difference. When teams see their efforts contributing to the organization’s goals, they feel that their work impacts. Team members believe that their work matters to the company and the customers.

Let’s talk about how to position your team for success, starting with the building blocks for greater psychological safety.

HRO Core’s president Bryan Burns is a certified Search Inside Yourself (SIY) Leadership Institute teacher. SIY was born at Google and grounded in mindfulness and emotional intelligence, the cornerstones of Psychological safety.

Reach out to us and lets talk about why you need to and how to implement steps to building psychological safety. How to apply the learning of Google’s Project Aristotle to your teams at our organization.