I try not to read corporate blogs designed to squeeze more
work out of their workers. Most stink of patronizing platitudes spewed out by
consultants who promise output to whoever pays them for their fluff. So when a
reader emailed me a link to Google’s blog for their workers, I groaned. Not
only is the thing called re:Work, the home page shouts: Let’s Make Work Better.
Better for who?, my cynical self asked.
But then I started reading the particular post. Some of
their HR staff had spent two years studying “teams” within Google to find a
recipe that could make any team effective. By the second paragraph they’d
hooked me:
“…We were pretty confident that we'd find the perfect mix of
individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -- take one Rhodes
Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila.
Dream team assembled, right?
We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how
the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.
So much for that magical algorithm…”
That’s when I realized this was not the ordinary corporate
blog post. These HR people had hit on something that matters to any organization,
committee, or team; any group within nonprofits.
Their most profound discovery is that psychological safety
is the number one factor in effective teams. I ran this through many of my own
experiences as well as those I’ve guided leaders through and sure enough it hit
them all. For every organization I’ve seen fall apart, I could recall a loss of
psychological safety at the start of the downward spiral. I’d never identified
it this way. Rather, I’d viewed these tragedies as the fallout after factions
or rogues begin working against the others.
Reading this post from Google I realized that to cause
psychological safety in such groups could actually prevent factions and rogues
from splitting away. As I explain in Cures
for Ailing Organizations, some people truly want to harm an
organization by splitting the group, but more often rogues and factions are
good people who simply believe they have no other choice but to block the
efforts of the group. What if they felt comfortable voicing their ideas? I
wonder how many sad stories of broken groups could be avoided.
Take a few minutes to read the short post called “The
five keys to a successful Google team” and see what you think. The other
four keys are interesting, too, but that first one really hit home for me.
Have you discovered other traits of effective teams? Have
you witnessed any of these in action? Please offer your experiences in the
comments section.
Sue
