The Collaboration Conundrum

While “toxic” workplaces (usually the result of management and co-workers) have been around since the beginning of organized work, their impact in today’s exceedingly networked environment is significantly greater.

With top-down decision-making losing its luster, businesses need highly evolved teams who collaborate and adapt more than ever before. Companies have discovered the secret recipe to innovation is networking coworkers more than cables, so that they more readily share information across previous impervious barriers.

Great teams, more than great players, create the best companies. Realizing this Google launched Project Aristotle in 2012 to discover what makes teams successful. After studying 180 Google teams, conducting 200-plus interviews, and analyzing over 250 different team attributes, they determined it wasn’t tools as much as behavioral standards that made the difference.

The five key characteristics found in teams that successfully collaborated were:

1. High performance teams have structure and clarity – The teams had clear goals, with well defined measurements, and were given roles within the group that matched experience, skillset, and personal goals.

2. High performance teams provide meaning – Each member felt there was personal significance in his or her work based on their measurement of importance.

3. High performance teams exhibit dependability – Team members reliably completed quality work on time and met expectations.

4. High performance teams know they have impact – Group members believed their work was purposeful and positively contributed toward the greater good.

5. High performance teams establish psychological safety – Instead of worrying about being viewed as incompetent or uninformed because of mistakes or miscommunication, every member trusted their teammates and leaders, and felt safe to voice opinions, ask questions and take risks.

Not surprising, trust (psychological safety) was the greatest influencer of the five.

Google describes it this way: “In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”

In other words, great teams flourish in an environment of trust.

While this makes sense, understanding doesn’t automatically bridge the differences found within groups of people. It takes work, humility, empathy, transparency, authentic leadership and sincere appreciation for what each member contributes.