What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

The article mainly talk about Julia Rozovsky, and her path to find a community that support her or a job that depend on teams and communicating with others.

‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’

At first she work as consulting firm but that didn’t fit with her. Then she worked as researcher for two professor at Harvard but also that didn’t work for her.

Then she worked at Yale School of Management but the team she work with was a source of stress.

‘‘I always felt like I had to prove myself,’’ ‘‘I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.’’

Then she start looking for another group to work with and that turned very well.

It always struck Rozovsky as odd that her experiences with the two groups were dissimilar.

her case-competition team was always fun and easygoing. In some ways, the team’s members got along better as a group than as individual friends

As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based

‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’

software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because:

Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team.

‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’

Project Aristotle

The main purpose of this project is to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while other soared.

Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.

conclusion:

Teams

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.

What would you pick: In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B.

‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘‘who’’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’