The importance of team working or collaboration could not be higher and this article is a nice reminder of some of the fundamentals. What is interesting to reflect on is that whilst the findings are not rocket science they do suggest that making an effort to be better at these can make a difference to your personal development or the effectiveness of your team(s).
Key messages*:
Good managers are good communicators & don’t micromanage
More productive people have larger networks
Best teams allow all members to talk in roughly equal measure (equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking) and have good awareness to the feelings of teammates (average social sensitivity).
SmartEngineer tip would be to:
- Communicating more and being sure to clearly articulate the intent (those of you familiar with Agile methodology will know how simple language is used to maximise understanding)
- Setting up a coffee/ lunch with loosely familiar and new colleagues every fortnight
- Roughly measure the air time your core teams are giving all participants and see whether there is an equitable split
The article
What Google Learned from Its Quest to build the Perfect Team
New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
*Actual text from article
People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviours that all the good teams generally shared.
First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.