What You Need to Know About Project Aristotle

In 2012, Google launched a research initiative called Project Aristotle to answer a question every executive eventually asks: how do you build the perfect team? The company sought to understand the dynamics of team performance and identify the key factors that lead to success.

How do you build the perfect team?

Many assumed that team success would be based on a mix of individual competencies and demographics, including (but not limited to) age, tenure, ethnicity, hobbies, socializing outside of work, gender balance, and educational backgrounds. The goal was simple: uncover the key characteristics of effective teams and, more importantly, understand why some teams excel while others fall short.

Google analyzed more than 180 teams across its organization, including teams of engineers, salespeople, and cross-functional groups. Teams varied widely in their work styles, personalities, and goals. More than 250 variables were analyzed, from individual skills and team diversity to leadership structures and decision-making processes.

After years of research, Google uncovered an unexpected finding: there was no single demographic or characteristic that predicted or informed team performance. In fact, the chemical makeup of the team mattered very little. It was their interactions and behavior that made all the difference.

The findings

At the conclusion of the study, Google found that all high-performing teams shared two general behaviors: equality in conversational turn-taking, and high average social sensitivity.

In teams where members felt safe to take risks, speak their minds, or admit mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment, the overall performance skyrocketed. Eventually, researchers combined these findings under a unified term: psychological safety.

Although the Project Aristotle research does well identifying psychological safety as the fundamental mechanism of high performance, the research itself (and the consequent New York Times article about it) do little to explain how to create a culture of psychological safety at the tactical, team level. To do that, we can’t focus on theory alone. We have to look at our behavior.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is the key to mending broken interactions and creating cultures of rewarded vulnerability in every social setting. The workplace is the primary example here because the primary benefits of psychological safety have unique workplace dividends.

When you respect your teams’ innate humanity and give them permission to engage across psychological safety’s four stages, you create sanctuaries of inclusion and incubators of innovation. People will feel safe to be their authentic selves and create value exponentially.

The full guide keeps going from here: the practical approach — The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ (Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, Challenger Safety) with the definition of respect, definition of permission, and social exchange for each stage — a word wall of everyday acts of vulnerability to model and reward, what a blue zone is, the L.I.V.E. model for teams (look, identify, validate, encourage), and the four patterns of teams with high psychological safety.