In fact, as far as effectiveness goes at Google, we found that how the team treats each other is much more important than who is on the team. That was a very surprising aspect of the research because, again, it was counter intuitive to what we had thought. We were thinking of it like a drafting a basketball team. You pick the right point guard, the right shooting guard, small forward and so on, and it’s all going to work. But it doesn’t, and there are key reasons why it doesn’t. That’s what Julia Rozovsky’s research has proven.

The practical part of the talk focuses on the small things you can do as a leader to instill trust, what we call “psychological safety”, in the study. This is a force multiplier if you are able to get people who are willing to be vulnerable, make mistakes in front of each other, and take risks. These aren’t product risks but rather personal risks. They know they can openly express their ideas and not be shot down by someone who says, “this is never going to work.”

That’s the art of leadership: getting people to do more than they normally would because they are a part of something bigger than themselves. That’s the secret sauce and the number one way to do that is to instill psychological safety. There are lots of small things that you can do to foster an environment where people feel safe and comfortable being their whole selves. It doesn’t have to be sitting around a campfire and playing the guitar. It’s a slight change in the way you run meetings. A small change in the way you interact with your people in front of others, the way people react when ideas are exchanged. All these things are small changes but can have a really big effect and payoff in the long run. 

Teams that have a performance environment eventually run into problems, because the team is made up of high performers who all want to get results. Seems to be pretty intuitive, right? Well, if your team environment is only about that, people aren’t going to want to make mistakes because they always want to be performing at their best. They don’t want to look incompetent or make any mistakes. It’s impossible to learn in environments like this. What you want is more of a classroom culture where the team is in learning mode. With learning environments, people feel comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas that seem crazy, and are open to trying things that don’t necessarily work out. Teams with learning environments are more effective because they have that strong culture of trust. 

The third is structure and clarity. This is interesting because with highly dependable teams you don’t need a lot of structure. More structure does not equal better results. You need enough structure and clarity that people know their roles and responsibilities but not so much that their creativity is stifled. We found in the research that adding more structure to highly dependable teams actually hurts more than it helps. On teams that are not dependable, though, adding more structure helps the team overall. People who are not dependable usually need more structure because they are not getting their deliverables done on time. 

The fourth one is meaning. Is the work meaningful to you? It’s not about whether the work is meaningful to the company, but is your work personally meaningful to you? I work a lot with our Safe Browsing team and their mission is to keep users safe. They perform mission critical tasks for Google, but on a personal level, they also all find meaning in their work.