Re:What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
by tswartz on Thursday June 16, 2016 @10:37AM
(#11916392)
Here's the TL;DR
After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.
1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.
After studying over 180 google teams they didn't find any evidence that the composition of the teams mattered (i.e. friends outside of work, male/female, introverts, extroverts, intelligence). Instead what they focused on were the “group norms” or unwritten rules of how the groups interacted with each other. There were two norms that were most important to a successful group.
1) Members spoke in roughly the same proportion, what the researchers call, ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
2) Members all had “average social sensitivity”. They could understand how other team members felt based on non-verbal queues. The underperforming teams had low sensitivity amongst the team members.