Highly effective teams demonstrate higher engagement levels and strong morale, higher and more consistent rates of productivity and lower rates of turnover. What factors contribute to developing highly effective teams and what can leaders do to build highly effective teams? Psychological safety isn’t a commonly discussed topic amongst leaders, particularly in the context of developing highly effective teams. So what does psychological safety have to do with building highly effective teams? Read on…

In 2016, Charles Duhigg wrote an article that featured in the New York Times Magazine. Duhigg wrote about a group of Google employees who had set out to build the perfect team. He described how Google’s executive team had previously believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people, and some even went as far as believing that an effective team could be established if everyone was friends away from work.

Google called its study Project Aristotle. The name clearly reflected a view that the perfect team (the whole) would be greater than the sum of its individuals (the parts). But it turns out Google learnt a lot more than what its project’s name implied.

After examining more than 180 teams, Project Aristotle hadn’t found any patterns linking effective teams to the specific composition of those teams. Instead, they concluded that understanding and influencing team norms were, above all else, the key to creating highly effective teams.

These team norms were described through interviews with employees as ‘unwritten rules’ or ‘standards of behaviour’ which governed how people functioned when working in a team. These unwritten rules ranged in description from each team member being given equal time to contribute to discussions during a meeting, a degree of informal discussion between team members at the end of a meeting and a high level of mutual-respect between team members.

They found that these descriptions matched the definitions around the concept of psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson first described psychological safety back in 1999 as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up”.

The Project Aristotle research team built upon their learnings about team norms, going on to review thousands of surveys and data collected over the multi-year study. Eventually, they identified five factors for team success. These factors were determined to be psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. Each of these is described below.In 2016, Charles Duhigg wrote an article that featured in the New York Times Magazine. Duhigg wrote about a group of Google employees who had set out to build the perfect team. He described how Google’s executive team had previously believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people, and some even went as far as believing that an effective team could be established if everyone was friends away from work.

Google called its study Project Aristotle. The name clearly reflected a view that the perfect team (the whole) would be greater than the sum of its individuals (the parts). But it turns out Google learnt a lot more than what its project’s name implied.

After examining more than 180 teams, Project Aristotle hadn’t found any patterns linking effective teams to the specific composition of those teams. Instead, they concluded that understanding and influencing team norms were, above all else, the key to creating highly effective teams.

These team norms were described through interviews with employees as ‘unwritten rules’ or ‘standards of behaviour’ which governed how people functioned when working in a team. These unwritten rules ranged in description from each team member being given equal time to contribute to discussions during a meeting, a degree of informal discussion between team members at the end of a meeting and a high level of mutual-respect between team members.

They found that these descriptions matched the definitions around the concept of psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson first described psychological safety back in 1999 as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up”.

The Project Aristotle research team built upon their learnings about team norms, going on to review thousands of surveys and data collected over the multi-year study. Eventually, they identified five factors for team success. These factors were determined to be psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. Each of these is described below.