What Project Aristotle found besides psychological safety

Team effectiveness, in the study Google code-named Project Aristotle, came out as a ranked list of five dynamics. The researchers measured them on interdependent teams, and they warned that findings which did not appear at Google may still matter somewhere else.

Google's re

guide, originally published in 2015, is the write-up. An editor's note says the project was released in 2016. The code name is a tribute to Aristotle's line that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which the guide says the researchers believed, because they thought people could do more together than alone. That line accounts for the name. The published results are the five dynamics and a list of what did not connect.

A work group, in the guide, has the least interdependence. It may meet to share information. A team plans, solves, decides, and reviews a specific project, and members need one another to finish. The study used groups that described themselves that way, three to fifty people, median nine. People who only share a boss and a status meeting are closer to the work group in that definition.

Leaders had wanted counts such as lines of code and bugs fixed. The guide says those can mislead, because more code is not necessarily better and more bugs fixed can mean more bugs were written. Executives rated results, team members rated culture, and team leads rated ownership, vision, and goals. The study kept all three ratings and added sales against quarterly quota. Across 180 teams, 115 engineering teams and 65 sales pods, hundreds of double-blind interviews and over 35 models, how people worked together mattered more than who was on the team.

The order was psychological safety, then dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Psychological safety means a teammate can admit a mistake, ask a question, or offer an idea without being embarrassed or punished, or seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. The guide uses Edmondson's definition of a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Dependability is quality work, done on time. Structure and clarity is knowing the job, the process, and the consequences. Meaning is personal: security, family, the team, or self-expression. Impact is judging that the work matters to the organisation's goals.

What did not significantly connect at Google was sitting together, consensus, extroversion, individual performance, workload, seniority, team size, and tenure. The guide then says a variable that missed in these measurements may still matter elsewhere, and it points to other research where teams under ten did better. People on teams with a stronger team culture were less likely to leave, more likely to use one another's ideas, brought in more revenue, and were rated effective twice as often by executives. In the guide, that result belongs to team culture. The "twice as often" figure, repeated without the culture measure and without the other four dynamics, is a thinner claim than the page makes.

Use the five items on the people who depend on each other for one live piece of work. "If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me." "When my teammates say they'll do something, they follow through with it." "Our team has an effective decision-making process." "The work I do for our team is meaningful to me." "I understand how our team's work contributes to the organization's goals." Google gave leads aggregated, anonymized scores to discuss, often with a facilitator. Score the five and spend the next month on the lowest one. The guide's habits for that month are specific: ask for input, put roles in a plan the team can see, run meetings with an agenda and a named leader, thank a real contribution in the room, and write down how the work reaches a user. If the pattern in your company differs, the guide's three moves are a shared name for the behaviours you want, a forum to discuss them, and leaders who practise them where the team can see.

A psychological safety session can be where an intact team scores those five items on the project in front of them and picks the dynamic they will practise before the next review.