Keys to a successful Google team

Speaking as a former member of more than one low-performing team at Google, none of the exercises would have helped our performance very much. What would have helped:

1. Being co-located. We would have been more effective sitting and working together, but instead we were distributed across multiple time zones and countries.

2. Working on a project with a future, instead of one that was winding down. It's difficult to "harness the power of diverse ideas" or be "rated as effective" when our team's charter is maintaining a project to its EOL date, with no plans for a successor.

3. Avoiding morale-sapping demotions in responsibility. One of my teams had its responsibilities changed from supporting the system we built and deployed, to assisting one of Google's "partners" deploy an inferior replacement. More than one member left when that happened.

4. Reducing the technology churn. When our leadership changes the product every six months, which forces us to switch to a different technology, we're stuck coming up to speed instead of contributing out of our expertise.

5. Reducing the team member churn. Constantly leaving and replacing team members is both a symptom and a cause of low performance. Here Google's internal mobility works against it.

(These events were due to leadership shifts at the VP level, and had nothing to do with our team's output, which I think was better than it ought to be given our circumstances.)

The point is that a team's performance has more to do with the larger organization than the team's internals. Frankly this article feels like blame-shifting: if we teach them some exercises to do at meetings, maybe they won't notice all these institutional issues.

In glad to see that top of the list is "psychological safety". It's a great term for something I have always found desperately important. Being secure enough to say "I don't know", is vital. I have promised myself "never lie", simply as that gives me the best psychological safety - it's horrific having lied about something (yeah that's ready, yes I know about X) and just waiting for the axe to fall.

A great term for a vital concept. How to create that? Dunno.

This article was a great introduction. When can I expect the rest of the analysis? Feels like it just ends very abruptly.

While reading it, I was constantly thinking how far this can be applied to an organization as well (Ex. a Startup). Quite a lot I would imagine, would love to have a startup (my own or otherwise) which has following culture. Paraphrasing the original text..

Psychological safety: Does it have open culture where people are humble, unpretentious and open to other people’s ideas and thoughts.

Dependability: Does it have A team which is smart and reliable (delivers on time and can be counted upon to gather around in crisis and firefights).

Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans of our startup clear?

Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters? Or, is there enough upside for a great exit, which frees us to do whatever we wish to do later in our life.

I liked how they put the entirety of the infographic text in the alt text - really shows that they care about accessibility!

I would have definitely liked their thoughts on (2)-(5), and perhaps release some anonymized case studies from their 200 data points.

This is a great tool to have for anyone on a team. I feel quite fortunate to be on a small team that, at first glance, does quite well in each of these five areas.

That being said it would be nice if Google shared more information about the gTeams exercise they do.

The give away is the use of "high performing team" which makes me sad that they've essentially identified Tuckman's stages of group development without referencing it (because I really hope they've heard of it).

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing (and the addition of Mourning) aren't particularly hard concepts to grasp yet all too often in the technology space get ignored. Many of the examples mentioned here of not sorting out how people are going to work together, throwing new tech or people into the team, all impact this concept and push you back down the ladder.

In 6+ years of professional development I've only ever been in one truly high performing team, plenty of people never have. That leadership and management, and they are two distinct things, is so bad about enabling their creation is something that doesn't get nearly enough attention.

The article strikes me as phony and light on substance. The author talks about five traits that everyone will agree are important and states that they are working on improving it. So far so good.

But take dependability for example. Improving it might take some boring things like improving employees' competence (ok, maybe not so relevant for google). Or some unpleasant things like holding people accountable. It is in odds with psychological safety (if risky behavior is encouraged the number of errors will inevitably increase and thus dependability will decrease). How is this tension resolved? The article says nothing.

Or take meaning and impact. Improving it might require working on a really important project and not some low-grade maintenance which big companies are full of. How is 10-minute pre-meeting talk going to help?

"improved 6% on psychological safety ratings" - seriously? What does it mean to feel 6% more safe? Please at least share how this rating is calculated and ideally also its impact on less ethereal metrics.

Does anyone have links to the original study(ies?) rather than just this summary? Some of these claims seem pretty hard to swallow. For example:

> Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

This result appears to be strongly at odds with Google's thorough interviewing. Perhaps they are saying that the data doesn't show a difference based on individual history given the employee was good enough to be hired at Google, and assigned to the team in question by some other HR team?

Any references would be appreciated. I tried searching Google Scholar for the author, but am finding nothing :/

Postmortems are very important part of this, and I love that these are shared, so one can watch&learn.

For example these external postmortems from the chromium team - https://www.chromium.org/developers/postmortems

So: two years, hundreds of interviews, lots of data analysis, god knows how many person-hours invested . . . to figure out what any competent human being would think of as blindingly obvious.

And some people wonder why so many other people think of HR as a complete waste of, well, human resources.

Lest I be mistaken for a troll, please let me elaborate.

I'm almost(?) certain that opening bit was tongue-in-cheek about just tossing a Rhodes Scholar, a couple extroverts, an engineer and a PhD into a team and expecting it to be a great team. But there is an uncomfortable truth hidden behind the exaggeration there. HR people can and do make those kinds of assumptions all the time. They do it when they are looking at resumes; they do it when they are setting up phone screens; they do it when they are setting up PIPs.

There's a deeply seated problem happening when you allow people with no subject matter experience be the gatekeepers of who does and doesn't get into a company. Externally, it manifests as bias or prejudice or racism. No amount of data analysis can get people to shunt a fundamentally flawed assumption though.

In my opinion, there's only one kind of person who could invent such a daft null hypothesis about what makes a good team: someone who's never worked on a team like that. I'm glad that the People Ops people at Google are making some progress. Perhaps other companies will follow suit, but the problem persists. There will still be the same people in HR making the same boneheaded assumptions about all kinds of things with little direct feedback.

I realize that any sizable company needs HR for at least some minimal amount of due diligence in the hiring process, and that HR employees are generally less expensive than Legal Counsel dept. employees. But we should stop giving HR the insane carte blanche it has in many large companies. We should stop letting it create policy. Because the policies created are so often antithetical to the needs of the company, and in some cases, to society.

Instead, we should embed HR workers in the teams they are working with. Perhaps every pod at Google doesn't need its own HR rep, but there is a level of management that would make sense to have one HR person to handle hiring/recruiting/necessary paperwork. You can argue that the HR person attached to a unit will be biased and perhaps not handle things appropriately when a complaint comes up. But you're wrong because in any situation where a complaint happens, HR is just a proxy for Legal. Cut out the middle-people and just have the Legal team handle it directly. HR doesn't really add anything to those situations except a level of misdirection(some people think HR is there for them, not the company).

As a general trend, these 5 markers of success are probably pretty good. But I challenge you to find something in any of that which is concrete enough to be actionable. I guarantee you the HR people will find some action, and it will be for some manager to do some evaluation on how well some team performs on those metrics.

To go full circle here, the final issue I have with a blog like this is that it makes the mistake of finding that what they thought was the general case was "not true." The goal for a team is not to achieve some success in hazy, ill-defined (and probably some variation of survivor-biased) ideas about how to manage a team.

Some teams will absolutely thrive with the goofy composition that was first stated. Others will fail. If you define success or failure as shipping a viable product. If you define success as how well you implemented the latest directives from HR, well, that's different.

We need to rethink the way we handle HR and what it does. It should not, for example (as done in this blog post) tell managers how to manage their teams. Nor should it tell teams what their identity is or should be.

Url changed from http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2015/11/23/why..., which points to https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-keys-successful-google-t... which points to this.