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0:00:09.0 Junior: Project Aristotle is Google's answer to the question, what makes a team effective? The answer is psychological safety. But in Project Aristotle, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you probably don't know that you definitely should know. And that is our topic today. So Tim, we're gonna take on Project Aristotle.

0:00:29.1 Timothy Clark: I can't wait. This is gonna be a great discussion.

0:00:31.2 Junior: You've probably read the New York Times article and have a general idea of what the project was about, but there's a lot in there that people don't know about. And interestingly enough, if you go and you search Project Aristotle, you'll find that leader factor is the number two hit.

0:00:51.3 Timothy Clark: [laughter] That's pretty amazing.

0:00:52.4 Junior: Right behind New York Times, the original article.

0:00:55.5 Timothy Clark: Well Google doesn't share a lot about it, it's just a bit of an outline.

0:00:58.6 Junior: Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. So we can call ourselves authoritative in that sense. You're number two in the search results. It's not saying nothing.

0:01:09.7 Timothy Clark: Well, listen and see what you think. Yeah.

0:01:12.8 Junior: So Google did Project Aristotle, New York Times, publishes about it. Charles Duhigg writes the article, it's called What Google Learned from its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. So this came out in February of 2016.

0:01:29.9 Timothy Clark: Do you know what's incredible? Junior?

0:01:30.0 Junior: It's a long time ago.

0:01:31.1 Timothy Clark: It is incredible that they began Project Aristotle more than 10 years ago now. It's been more than a decade. They spent a couple of years on it. Yep.

0:01:41.2 Junior: 2012 they started.

0:01:42.3 Timothy Clark: Right. And I think they finished up in about 2014 or so, 15. And then they published. So it's been a while. This was the most important study done in a generation on team effectiveness for the whole world. Really. That's what we're talking about.

0:02:02.4 Junior: So you'll see the subtitle here. New research reveals Surprising Truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter. So tell us a little bit more about that question that they set out to answer Tim.

0:02:15.5 Timothy Clark: Sure. Well, let's give some context. So here we are. It's 2012. We're at Google and we can hire pretty much anyone we want. We can hire the best of the best, and we do. And so we have hundreds of teams that are filled with, and this is not an exaggeration geniuses. So we put a, here's a group of geniuses here and a group of geniuses here. And we have all these teams, hundreds of teams filled with the best talent that you can get. And some of these teams, filled with geniuses are getting nothing done. They can't work together. They're not productive, they're not producing good work. And others are, other teams are doing well, they're performing well, they're innovating, they're coming up with all kinds of breakthroughs and new solutions. And so what's going on here? That is the context in which we find ourselves in 2012. And it makes sense because they're asking the question, why are some teams performing so well and other teams are performing poorly? We need to understand, we want to replicate the high performing teams. Turns out, as you're gonna explain Junior, it's not about who's on the team. [laughter] Which is so ironic.

0:03:49.6 Junior: It is. That's the spoiler alert. You gave it away. But here, let's read this piece of the article itself. How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their department's goals. They studied how long teams stuck together, and if gender balance seemed to have an impact on team success. So they're looking at a whole host of variables.

0:04:24.7 Timothy Clark: Everything. Yeah.

0:04:25.8 Junior: And for those listening, what variables would you consider? How would you build your team? If you could choose to group these variables a certain way, what would you do? Would it be IQ, technical skill, geographic proximity? There are a whole host of variables that you could choose to look at and then build your team according to. So here, let's go to the next one. No matter how researchers arrange the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference.

0:05:00.9 Timothy Clark: It's incredible. That is a completely counterintuitive finding. No one anticipated that this would be the primary finding.

0:05:10.0 Junior: We looked at 180 teams from all over the company, Duby said. 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. [laughter]

0:05:27.1 Timothy Clark: It's incredible.

0:05:28.2 Junior: When I first read this, I asked the who part of the equation didn't seem to matter. Isn't that precisely the most important part of a team? Yeah. 'Cause the team's comprised of people, and you're telling me that who's on that team doesn't matter.

0:05:40.3 Timothy Clark: So your thesis. Would be the exact opposite.

0:05:41.4 Junior: At least in terms of composition. The composition of the team made little to no difference. So tell us about that finding. What do you make of this?

0:05:54.5 Timothy Clark: Well, it goes back to the way that the team is interacting. Now, certainly they're skilled people, but, it's not a matter of finding the best talent, the highest IQ. It's the way that the team functions. So normally the assumption junior for a team is that the team is greater than the sum of its parts. That's the assumption of what, of team performance and what a team can do. And what Google was finding in some cases was that that was not true of certain teams. And some teams it was, and for some teams it was not. So what's the differentiator? What is explaining the difference in performance and to our astonishment it is not based on these factors.

0:06:56.6 Junior: Yeah. So let's read a part about their discovery. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an unwritten rule, or when they explained certain things as part of the team's culture. Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly, and that team leaders reinforce that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order. And when someone cut off a teammate group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chit chat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip.

0:07:33.5 Junior: There were teams that contained outsized personalities who hued to their group's, sate norms and others in which introverts came out of their shells. As soon as meetings began, after looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google's teams. So the two findings are pretty, pretty fascinating. First, we have equality in conversational turn taking. And then high average social sensitivity. Those are the two. So equality and conversational turn taking. How is this the finding? How is this the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? They've been on this quest, this grand adventure for two years and like that's it. Yeah. Equality and conversational turn taking.

0:08:29.7 Timothy Clark: It's counterintuitive.

0:08:30.8 Junior: So tell me about why this matters so much?

0:08:33.9 Timothy Clark: Because it's a barometer and it's an overall proxy of the way the team is interacting. And what it's saying about the team is that the team is showing the members of the team are showing respect for each other. They're showing respect for each other. They are participating in a harmonious way. There's coherence, there's continuity, there's equal participation. There's give and take. All of those things are reflected in conversational turn taking. It's, it sounds like maybe even almost trivial when you first look at it. Yeah. But it is an indication of all of those things.

0:09:23.0 Junior: Well, as I started to unpack it, I started to see, wow, actually there is a lot here. What do I know about a team that's characterized by conversational turn taking? I know that there's respect one to another because they're allowing the other person to speak in order to even perceive that that's a thing. I have to have high self-awareness to monitor my own conversation.

0:09:45.6 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:09:46.4 Junior: Am I taking up too much time? I'm aware. And the social awareness, I'm aware of the conversational dynamic more broadly and my involvement in it. Those two things are huge.

0:10:00.7 Timothy Clark: Are huge.

0:10:01.3 Junior: If you know that, that that's a characteristic of the team, you know a whole bunch about that team that sits behind the seemingly obvious equality and conversational turn taking.

0:10:10.1 Timothy Clark: So junior, here's some other implications. If you are a dominant personality and your tendency is to come in and in a team meeting and maybe commandeer the discussion and take more than your fair share of airtime, what this is suggesting is that you are managing yourself. You're restraining yourself, you're aware of what's going on. You're sensitized, as you said to group dynamics. You're not only are you doing that, but you're drawing others out. And so now you get a healthy egalitarian approach to conversation and interaction. So there's a whole lot going on.

0:10:57.2 Junior: And then we go into high average social sensitivity. What does this mean? Emotional Intelligence.

0:11:04.3 Timothy Clark: Emotional Intelligence.

0:11:05.4 Junior: It's Precisely what it means. The ability of the group to perceive and understand the emotions of other people. And certainly themselves. How well can you observe cues, verbal, nonverbal, and respond to those appropriately?

0:11:21.5 Timothy Clark: So everyone's reading the room to together.

0:11:23.6 Junior: Yeah. And everyone's empathic as they're reading the room. High average social sensitivity. So they are monitoring themselves, they're monitoring the situation, and then they're behaving appropriately. You've probably been in some teams or observed some teams where this is not the case. Everyone listening.

0:11:43.7 Timothy Clark: Especially with technical people. Yeah.

0:11:45.8 Junior: Especially.

0:11:46.9 Timothy Clark: Especially with technical people. How many tech companies have we worked with Junior, where that's not the strong point. And when the teams are together and they're interacting, you can see massive deficiencies in their ability to interact. To monitor group dynamics to even care. And so if you can do this with a group of highly technical, highly proficient people, you can understand that this is where the magic happens. Yeah.

0:12:20.0 Junior: So they find those two points and then they continue, how do we synthesize these findings? What is at the heart of these findings? Here's another quote from the article. When Rosovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety and academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. For Project Aristotle Research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well, like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google's data indicated that psychological safety more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. Those two findings, the ones we looked at, equality and conversational turn taking and high average social sensitivity are underneath the umbrella of psychological safety. If you have a psychologically safe environment, you are going to have those two things as consequence.

0:13:19.0 Timothy Clark: That's very true. Junior. It makes me, think about, well, we're talking about norms. It all comes down to norms. What is a norm? A norm is a pattern of shared behavior. The team has, and if we go back to some of the original research in this area, the father of organizational culture is a gentleman by the name of Edgar Schein who taught at MIT for like 44 years. And one thing that he taught us that is so important that we all need to understand is that when a group of human beings begins to interact, the patterns of interaction begin to appear instantaneously. It doesn't take a day or a week or a month or a year. Instantaneously. Those patterns of interaction, which we call norms, they begin to appear. They are also dynamic. So we shape them and we in turn are shaped by them. What psychological safety means is that we're developing a norm where we can model vulnerability, we can engage in acts of vulnerability, and we will be rewarded when we do that. So that means everybody on the team has a shared norm of doing two things. Number one, modeling acts of vulnerability. Number two, rewarding those acts of vulnerability in others. That is the all important norm that is going on here.

0:15:05.1 Junior: Well, and that norm is not something that's spelled out in the article.

0:15:09.3 Timothy Clark: No, it's not.

0:15:09.8 Junior: And that's something that we're gonna get to.

0:15:11.0 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:15:12.9 Junior: So if you look at this quote in the article, this is the most important thing that people need to pay attention to. So if you were to summarize Project Aristotle in one sentence, it would be this one. Google's data indicated that psychological safety more than anything else was critical to making it teamwork. So now back to that original question, how do you make a team work? Or what's the characteristic of the highest performing team? Exactly that.

0:15:36.8 Timothy Clark: Exactly that.

0:15:37.5 Junior: Psychological safety. So that's the summary of the article. To this point in the conversation, we've answered that question, what is the point of the article? Psychological safety. That's the point you get to the end of the article. And as it pertains to implementation, behavior change, practicality, the article leaves something to be desired.

0:15:57.2 Timothy Clark: What do you do now?

0:15:58.3 Junior: And in the article, it actually says, it speaks to this point a little bit. And what it says is that it's hard.

0:16:06.5 Timothy Clark: That's Right.

0:16:07.7 Junior: It is pretty difficult to do. And to me, that's disappointing in the article because you've just set up this most beautiful experiment. And you have a spectacular finding. Psychological safety's the most important thing you could possibly have, but we're not exactly sure what to tell you about how to go build it.

0:16:29.6 Timothy Clark: That's because in the article, and even in Google's research, they did not get all the way down to the behavioral mechanism that makes this happen.

0:16:41.7 Junior: Which is where we are going to go in the remainder of the conversation. So that's what we hope to be able to add today. We appreciate Project Aristotle. We're very grateful for it. We lean on it, but there's more to be done. And organizations will come to us through Project Aristotle, through other work that's been done in the area of psychological safety. And it's a story that we hear all the time. What do we do now? What do we do about it? We know that we need this thing called psychological safety, but we're not sure what step to take next. They ask... So we ask this question, how do you foster the right norms? Because they pose the question in the article, how do you create the norms that will help build psychological safety? And you started talking about it. This right here, model and reward acts of vulnerability. So this is the crux of the issue as far as we're concerned. When you ask the question, how do you build psychological safety? This is the short answer. You model and reward acts of vulnerability. Walk us through some of the context and some of the antecedents to that thinking. So what is vulnerability? Tell us about human interaction so that we can get here.

0:17:57.8 Timothy Clark: Yeah. So to get there, we have to understand that human interaction by definition is a vulnerable activity. That means that as we participate, as we interact with other human beings in a social setting, we are engaging in acts of vulnerability all of the time. In fact, if you stop being vulnerable, you cease to be human. That's really what it comes down to. The question is, when you engage in an act of vulnerability, what happens next? There's a possibility that you could be punished or rewarded. So everything turns on your willingness to engage in an act of vulnerability to begin with. And then the response that you get back.

0:18:48.9 Timothy Clark: And so the mechanism for culture formation, junior in every organization on the planet is engaging in acts of vulnerability and then responding to those acts of vulnerability. And so that's why we have cultures that range from on the spectrum, from health all the way to pathology. And we have everything in between. If you look at teams and organizations around the world, they are somewhere on the spectrum from health to pathology. Again, what is the mechanism for culture formation? It is engaging in these acts of vulnerability and then responding to those. So we can engage in those and we can punish those. And that can take us to the pathology end of the spectrum. Or we can engage in those and we can reward those.

0:19:49.0 Timothy Clark: And that takes us to the health end of the spectrum. So the, I guess what we're saying here is that the fundamental mechanism for culture formation is the same. It turns on the same mechanism, but to get to psychological safety, the norm has to be engage in the acts of vulnerability, reward that vulnerability.

0:20:15.2 Junior: Let's jump into some of those acts of vulnerability, 'cause I think that this will help people contextualize what we're talking about. Here are some common acts of vulnerability at work. I'm not gonna go through all of these, I'll just pick out a few. Speaking with an accent, giving a wrong answer, delegating responsibility to another person, sharing relevant knowledge and resource, communicating bad news, saying no to an idea that has some merit, sharing an unpopular opinion, being unsure, so on and so forth. You can see a big list of acts of vulnerability at work. So when we talk about rewarding or punishing vulnerability, let's, again, contextualize that with one of these. Saying no to an idea that has some merit, that's an act of vulnerability. There's something here, but we're gonna go a different direction. How would you punish that act of vulnerability? We don't have time for this. Why would you put this on my table? You know what's going on.

0:21:13.5 Timothy Clark: Why didn't you think it through?

0:21:15.4 Junior: If you would have spent five minutes thinking about this, you never would have even brought this up.

0:21:20.2 Timothy Clark: That's right. There are a lot of different ways.

0:21:24.4 Junior: Oh yeah, there are a lot of ways we could punish that. Yeah. So that's an act of vulnerability. How do you think that that person feels after that interaction? Okay, horrible.

0:21:33.8 Timothy Clark: And what are they going to do next?

0:21:35.9 Junior: Not that again.

0:21:36.9 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:21:37.5 Junior: They're gonna go back and they'll learn through experience. I don't wanna do that again. So we're not going to.

0:21:44.5 Timothy Clark: And if there's consistent evidence that you will be punished for doing that, then that will continue to be the case.

0:21:51.2 Junior: Yeah. So let's take the other side. Someone comes, they share an idea that has some merit. We say no. Hey, I really appreciate the fact that you put time into this. Let's schedule some additional time to talk through it. I think that there's something here. Okay. That's one way to do it.

0:22:14.4 Timothy Clark: And by the way, just thanks for speaking up.

0:22:16.3 Junior: Yeah. Yeah.

0:22:18.9 Timothy Clark: And please continue to engage, to weigh in, to participate that way.

0:22:24.0 Junior: There are a whole host of ways that you can encourage this type of behavior. But that's what we're talking about. If someone, it could be as simple as someone saying good morning. You walk in, they say good morning, and you just brush it off and keep walking. Or you engage. Good morning. How you doing? And you have a short conversation. Those things matter. The more you punish, the more you'll get what we call a red zone, an environment where that vulnerability is consistently punished. You get non-performance. You get a lot of turnover and all of the things that we're trying to avoid. On the other side, you have blue zones, which are areas of rewarded vulnerability.

0:23:05.9 Junior: You do that consistently. You're gonna get better engagement. You're gonna get better ideation and collaboration. You're gonna get, as a result, better innovation. And so that's where the rubber meets the road. It's the hinge that governs everything else. And if there's one thing that I could share about culture transformation or culture building, it's that. That everything hinges on those acts of vulnerability, the way that we respond to those. That's it.

0:23:31.1 Timothy Clark: That's it.

0:23:31.6 Junior: That's really it.

0:23:33.3 Timothy Clark: There's no other mechanism.

0:23:33.9 Junior: There's not. And so those acts of vulnerability occur across different stages, which we will get into. But those are the fundamental mechanism. So if there were, just another half page to page in the Project Aristotle article, that's what should be in there.

0:23:51.5 Timothy Clark: It tells us the how.

0:23:52.8 Junior: If we could write it, that's what we would do. And we wanna tell you about how to do that, practically speaking. So we call this the LIVE model. LIVE is an acronym for Look, Identify, Validate, and Encourage. So I'll take the first two. You take the second two. So look, look at the interactions and social dynamics around you. So if you go back to the original finding, we see the average social sensitivity and we see conversational turn taking. We remember that in order to do both of those things, we have to have a high degree of awareness. That's what look is. Look is an awareness function. Am I observing what's going on around me? If you don't look, you don't observe, you're not aware, the rest doesn't matter. You're not gonna see enough to even do anything that's going to make a difference. And you're going to be ignorant to a whole bunch of information that's really important in the social dynamic for you to be able to make a good decision. Next, we go into identify. Again, an awareness thing. But this is where knowledge plays a role too. If I tell you, I'll just look around and observe. Okay, that's fine. But what are you keying in on? What are you giving attention to? Acts of vulnerability.

0:25:08.4 Junior: We need to be able to scan the environment. And when someone does come to us with an idea that has some merit or they introduce themselves or they speak with an accent or they do whatever it is that's vulnerable for them, we can key in on that and say to ourselves, okay, there it is. That was it. The act of vulnerability. And then we move in to...

0:25:28.3 Timothy Clark: Real time. So you identify real time. Then we go into step three, which is to validate. You also want to do this real time. Validate the behavior so the person feels seen, heard, and understood. You can't hesitate. You can't delay. And by the way, Junior, it's also important to say that in all of our research, we've come to the conclusion that there is no neutral response. So you either reward the act of vulnerability or you punish the act of vulnerability. If I, for example, if you come with a suggestion and I ignore you or I don't respond, that's negative. You're going to interpret that as negative. Even if I don't do anything that's actively destructive, you will interpret that as negative. So it's very important to understand. And I would say to all leaders, please understand that it's a binary proposition. When someone engages in an act of vulnerability, you either reward it or punish it. So that's step three. Validate that and do it real time when it happens.

0:26:47.3 Timothy Clark: And then we go to step four, which is to encourage. Encourage the person to continue modeling the vulnerable behavior. What are we doing? Reinforcing the norm. Rewarding that norm. We have to keep that norm going. The pattern of shared behavior in which we engage in an act of vulnerability and then we reward it. So that's the last step. Encourage it. Let's keep it going.

0:27:15.6 Junior: So let's take an example and run it through the LIVE model. We're in a meeting and one of our peers asks a question. That's a pretty basic question. Let's say that we're not even running the meeting. After the fact, as a participant, as a peer, we could go to that person. First, we see that in the meeting. We identify it as an act of vulnerability. We go to that person and we say, hey, that question that you asked in the meeting, I really appreciate that you asked that. I had the same question. Next time you have another question, please ask it. It really helps us all out. And I'm encouraging that behavior. If you look for opportunities to do that, everything is going to go so much better interpersonally and you're gonna have a great reputation as a person and as a manager.

0:28:02.9 Junior: People are going to wanna work with you. They're going to want to be around you because they know that that vulnerability is going to be rewarded. If you generate enough evidence for them, they'll see, okay, this is a safe place for me to be. I can put my ideas on the table even though they're not all the way baked. I can make a mistake and learn from it. I can give candid feedback. Those are the things that we'll need in order to have the most effective teams. And so it's well and good to identify that psychological safety is the variable we wanna solve for. But if we don't know how to get there, it doesn't matter.

0:28:36.1 Timothy Clark: True.

0:28:37.3 Junior: This is how we get there.

0:28:38.6 Timothy Clark: This is how we get there.

0:28:39.9 Junior: So let's talk about this next piece. How do you foster the right norms? We talked about validating the behaviors. I mentioned a few different stages through which we can do that. These are those four stages, the four stages of psychological safety. Can you walk us through real quick how this relates to the four stages?

0:29:00.0 Timothy Clark: Sure, Junior. So what we're saying is that there's a natural progression through four stages of psychological safety. And this is a universal and consistent pattern across the world regardless of demographics or background. Stage one is inclusion safety. It means that you feel included. You feel accepted. You have a sense of belonging. And you will feel stage one inclusion safety when you feel that it's not expensive to be yourself, when you can show up as your genuine authentic self and feel accepted for that, included for that, valued for that.

0:29:40.5 Timothy Clark: So that's stage one. And then we go to stage two, which is learner safety, which means that you can engage in the learning process without fear that you'll be embarrassed or marginalized. And there's a certain subset of, if you go back to those acts of vulnerability, some of those relate directly to learning. So you can do those things and you'll be rewarded for doing those. Stage three then comes after that, which is contributor safety. Contributor safety means that you feel safe and are given an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution, to do work that matters, to make a difference with an appropriate level of autonomy. And you'll be rewarded for that. So that's stage three. And as we move through the stages, in each case, you're satisfying a different category of human need.

0:30:35.9 Timothy Clark: And then finally, we go to stage four, the culminating stage, challenger safety, which means that you can challenge the status quo without fear that you'll be retaliated against. There's a whole set of adverse consequences that people worry about when they're taking on the status quo. That you won't injure your personal reputation, that you'll still have opportunities for upward mobility, that you're not going to lose your job. So this is the progression that all teams take. This is the journey. So we know the path. Empirically, we know the path from inclusion safety to learner, to contributor, to challenger.

0:31:20.0 Junior: I appreciate you going through that summary. To me, it's interesting because if you look at the acts of vulnerability, you can slot every single one into one of those four stages. And we need to be constantly validating those behaviors across all four.

0:31:32.7 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:31:33.0 Junior: Each one of those four is incredibly important. So let's summarize. Google set out to answer the question, what makes the best teams the best teams? The answer was psychological safety. And why? It's not about team composition. It's about team interaction. That team interaction piece, that is the most important piece of the answer to the question. Now, we're asking now, well, how do we improve team interaction? The answer to that question is to reward the acts of vulnerability that go on in that team. So if we were to add a page or two to the Project Aristotle article, that is where we would go. So we'd say, yes, it's well and good. That psychological safety is the most important variable.

0:32:22.3 Junior: We build psychological safety through rewarding the acts of vulnerability of our people. Final thoughts from you.

0:32:30.2 Timothy Clark: It all comes back to the way we interact and the norms that we shape and reinforce.

0:32:37.3 Junior: Excellent. Well, Tim, I appreciate the conversation today.

0:32:40.4 Timothy Clark: Thank you.

0:32:41.4 Junior: Hope that all of you listening enjoyed today's conversation as well. Everything that we talked about will be put into a downloadable for you that you can download as a free resource. If you wanna see more about the four stages of psychological safety, go ahead and check out the website, leaderfactor.com and read the book. If you haven't read the book yet, it's probably time to do that. If you liked Project Aristotle, the article, you would certainly love the book, The Four Stages of Psychological Safety. With that, we will say goodbye and we will see you next episode. Take care, everybody.

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0:33:17.4 Jillian: Hey, Leader Factory listeners. It's Jillian. If you liked the content in today's episode, we've compiled all of the concepts and slides into a downloadable resource for you. Click the link in the description or visit leaderfactory.com to explore our full content library. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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