Blog Post #4

Secrets of Successful Teamwork: Insights From Google

    The video titled, "Secrets of Successful Teamwork: Insights From Google", discusses how technology companies encourage their employees to work together because studies show that teams tend to innovate faster, achieve higher productivity, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems yet not all teams are successful. This video highlights how do you actually build a highly effective team with studies ran by the company, "Google". 

    Firstly, Google conducted a huge data study called the, "Aristotle", which led them spending millions of dollars tracking one hundred eighty separate teams throughout the course of three years with the goal of finding the traits of the highest performing teams and learning how sometimes teams would succeed while others would fail. One hypothesis in why teams would succeed was that they would consist of people that liked each other or contained a mix of skills from different backgrounds with one another however this wasn't the case and researchers were not able to find any specific patterns within the data. Later down the line however they found two behaviors that all the best team shared.

    One of them was that the best teams had team members speaking at roughly the same amount of time. A phenomenon they called, "equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking". Teams would sometimes have all members speaking during each task or one member speaking through each task shifting leadership from time to time, but in each situation everyone roughly had spoken the same amount. Meaning that as long as everyone got to speak the team ended up succeeding which sort of makes sense, while when teams that had only few members or one person speaking at all times, the collective intelligence would drop.

    The second behavior was that the teams that did well consisted of members that had high average social sensitivity, meaning that they were skilled at understanding how others felt based on their expressions, tone of their voice and other nonverbal cues. The video then later discusses a way that you could determine whether or not a person had a good understanding of social sensitivity through an exam called, "reading the mind in the eyes". Which consisted of a collection of pictures of people with just their eyes and people had to guess how they were feeling just from the way their eyes looked. The best teams scored quite well on this test and were able to determine whether or not someone was feeling down or joyful, while the teams that were not quite successful scored below average. 

    In the end the researchers came to a conclusion that it didn't matter who was on the team, what mattered was how team members treated each other. By giving everyone the chance to talk and showing respect by paying attention and listening to your fellow team members, created a psychologically safe atmosphere, which gave a positive effect on the teams ability to work together.

    The video applies to workplaces that want to find ways in improving their team skills, through more specific ways rather than practical advice you would find anywhere else. I found myself relating to this video through the first behavior where everyone had the same proportion of time to speak. When people don't speak in groups often they are more reserved or don't understand what is going on so they don't feel the need to speak, this is coming from personal experience because I sometimes find myself not speaking in group activities but its also something I'm working on and a skill I'm currently honing in Red River College.

    Coding Tech. (2018, October 12). Secrets Of Successful Teamwork: Insights From Google. YouTube. Retrieved March 23, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHIikHJV9fI