Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

  It always struck Julia as odd that those two teams felt so different. Her study group felt stressful because everyone was always jousting for leadership and critiquing each other’s ideas. Her case competition team felt exciting because everyone was so supportive and enthusiastic. Both groups, however, were composed of basically the same kinds of people. They were all bright, and everyone was friendly outside of the team settings. There was no reason why the dynamic inside Julia’s study group needed to become so competitive, while the culture of the case team was so easygoing.

  “I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,” Julia told me. “It didn’t seem like it had to happen that way.”

  After graduation, Julia went to work at Google and joined its People Analytics group, which was tasked with studying nearly every aspect of how employees spent their time. What she was supposed to do with her life, it turned out, was use data to figure out why people behave in certain ways.

  For six years running, Google had been ranked by Fortune as one of America’s top workplaces. The company’s executives believed that was because, even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity. The People Analytics group, part of Google’s human resources division, helped examine if employees were satisfied with their bosses and coworkers, whether they felt overworked, intellectually challenged, and fairly paid, whether their work-life balance was actually balancing out, as well as hundreds of other variables. The division helped with hiring and firing decisions, and its analysts provided insights into who should be promoted and who, perhaps, had risen too fast. In the years before Julia joined the group, People Analytics had determined that Google needed to interview a job applicant only four times to predict, with 86 percent confidence, if they would be a good hire. The division had successfully pushed to increase paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks because computer models indicated that would reduce the frequency of new mothers quitting by 50 percent. At the most basic level, the division’s goal was to make life at Google a little bit better and a lot more productive. With enough data, People Analytics believed, almost any behavioral puzzle could be solved.

  People Analytics’ biggest undertaking in recent years had been a study—code-named Project Oxygen before it was revealed—that examined why some managers were more effective than others. Ultimately, researchers had identified eight critical management skills.*1 “Oxygen was a huge success for us,” said Abeer Dubey, a People Analytics manager. “It helped clarify what differentiated good managers from everyone else and how we could help people improve.” The project was so useful, in fact, that at about the same time Julia was hired, Google began another massive effort, this one code-named Project Aristotle.

  Dubey and his colleagues had noticed that many Google employees, in company surveys, had consistently mentioned the importance of their teams. “Googlers would say things like ‘I have a great manager, but my team has never clicked’ or ‘My manager isn’t fantastic, but the team is so strong it doesn’t matter,’ ” said Dubey. “And that was kind of eye opening, because Project Oxygen had looked at leadership, but it hadn’t focused on how teams function, or if there’s an optimal mix of different kinds of people or backgrounds.” Dubey and his colleagues wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team. Julia became one of the effort’s researchers.

  The project started with a sweeping review of academic literature. Some scientists had found that teams functioned best when they contained a concentration of people with similar levels of extroversion and introversion, while others had found that a balance of personalities was key. There were studies about the importance of teammates having similar tastes and hobbies, and others lauding diversity within groups. Some research suggested that teams needed people who like to collaborate; others said groups were more successful when individuals had healthy rivalries. The literature, in other words, was all over the place.

  So Project Aristotle spent more than 150 hours asking Google employees what they thought made a team effective. “We learned that teams are somewhat in the eye of the beholder,” said Dubey. “One group might appear like it’s working really well from the outside, but, inside, everyone is miserable.” Eventually, they established criteria for measuring teams’ effectiveness based on external factors, such as whether a group hit their sales targets, as well as internal variables, such as how productive team members felt. Then the Aristotle group began measuring everything they could. Researchers examined how often teammates socialized outside of work and how members divided up tasks. They drew complicated diagrams to show teams’ overlapping memberships, and then compared those against statistics of which groups had exceeded their department’s goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance had an impact on effectiveness.

  No matter how they arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns—or any evidence that a team’s composition was correlated with its success. “We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,” said Dubey. “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.”

  Some productive Google teams, for instance, were composed of friends who played sports together outside of work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups preferred strong managers. Others wanted a flatter structure. Most confounding of all, sometimes two teams would have nearly identical compositions, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. “At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,” said Dubey. “There weren’t strong patterns here.”

  So Project Aristotle turned to a different approach. There was a second body of academic research that focused on what are known as “group norms.” “Any group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior,” a team of psychologists had written in the Sociology of Sport Journal. Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function. When a team comes to an unspoken consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate, that’s a norm asserting itself. If a team develops a culture that encourages differences of opinion and spurns groupthink, that’s another norm holding sway. Team members might behave certain ways as individuals—they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently—but often, inside a group, there’s a set of norms that override those preferences and encourage deference to the team.

  The Project Aristotle researchers went back to their data and analyzed it again, this time looking for norms. They found that some teams consistently allowed people to interrupt one another. Others enforced taking conversational turns. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with a few minutes of informal chitchat. Others got right to business. There were teams that contained extroverts who hewed to the group’s sedate norms whenever they assembled, and others where introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

  And some norms, the data indicated, consistently correlated with high team effectiveness. One engineer, for instance, told the researchers that his team leader “is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks….She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.” That was one of the most effective groups inside Google.

  Alternately, another engineer told the researchers that his “team leader has poor emotional control. He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.” That team did not perform well.

  Most of all, though, employees talked about how various teams felt. “And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,” Julia said. “I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exh
austed and others where I got so much energy from the group.”

  There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team. Research by psychologists from Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and elsewhere indicate that norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates. Julia’s study group at Yale, for instance, felt draining because the norms—the tussles over leadership, the pressure to constantly demonstrate expertise, the tendency to critique—had put her on guard. In contrast, the norms of her case competition team—enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, withholding criticisms, encouraging people to take a leadership role or hang back as they wanted—allowed everyone to be friendly and unconstrained. Coordination was easy.

  Group norms, the researchers on Project Aristotle concluded, were the answer to improving Google’s teams. “The data finally started making sense,” said Dubey. “We had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”

  The question, however, was which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of norms that seemed important—and, sometimes, the norms of one effective team contradicted the norms of another, equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be downplayed? Which norms were most crucial?

  II.

  In 1991, a first-year PhD student named Amy Edmondson began visiting hospital wards, intending to show that good teamwork and good medicine went hand in hand. But the data kept saying she was wrong.

  Edmondson was studying organizational behavior at Harvard. A professor had asked her to help with a study of medical mistakes, and so Edmondson, on the prowl for a dissertation topic, started visiting recovery rooms, talking to nurses, and paging through error reports from two Boston hospitals. In one cardiac ward, she discovered that a nurse had accidentally given a patient an IV of lidocaine, an anesthetic, rather than heparin, a blood thinner. In an orthopedic ward, a patient was given amphetamines rather than aspirin. “You would be shocked at how many mistakes occur every day,” Edmondson told me. “Not because of incompetence, but because hospitals are really complicated places and there’s usually a large team—as many as two dozen nurses and techs and doctors—who might be involved in each patient’s care. That’s a lot of opportunities for something to slip through the cracks.”

  Some parts of the hospitals Edmondson visited seemed more accident prone than others. The orthopedic ward, for instance, reported an average of one error every three weeks; the cardiac ward, on the other hand, reported a mistake almost every other day. Edmondson also found that the various departments had very different cultures. In the cardiac ward nurses were chatty and informal; they gossiped in the hallways and had pictures of their kids on the walls. In orthopedics, people were more sedate. Nurse managers wore business suits rather than scrubs and asked everyone to keep the public areas free of personal items and clutter. Perhaps, Edmondson thought, she could study the various teams’ cultures and see if they correlated with error rates.

  She and a colleague created a survey to measure team cohesion on various wards. She asked nurses to describe how frequently their team leader set clear goals and whether teammates discussed conflicts openly or avoided tense conversations. She measured the satisfaction, happiness, and self-motivation of different groups and hired a research assistant to observe the wards for two months.

  “I figured it would be pretty straightforward,” Edmondson told me. “The units with the strongest sense of teamwork would have the lowest error rates.” Except, when she tabulated her data, Edmondson found exactly the opposite. The wards with the strongest team cohesion had far more errors. She checked the data again. It didn’t make any sense. Why would strong teams make more mistakes?

  Confused, Edmondson decided to look at these nurses’ responses, question by question, alongside the error rates to see if any explanations emerged. Edmondson had included one survey question that inquired specifically about the personal risks associated with making errors. She asked people to agree or disagree with the statement: “If you make a mistake in this unit, it is held against you.” Once she compared the data from that question with error incidence, she realized what was going on. It wasn’t that wards with strong teams were making more mistakes. Rather, it was that nurses who belonged to strong teams felt more comfortable reporting their mistakes. The data indicated that one particular norm—whether people were punished for missteps—influenced if they were honest after they screwed up.

  Some leaders “have established a climate of openness that facilitates discussion of error, which is likely to be an important influence on detected error rates,” Edmondson wrote in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science in 1996. What particularly surprised her, however, was how complicated things got the closer she looked: it wasn’t simply that strong teams encouraged open communication and weak teams discouraged it. In fact, while some strong teams emboldened people to admit their mistakes, other, equally strong teams made it hard for nurses to speak up. What made the difference wasn’t team cohesion—rather, it was the culture each team established. In one ward with a strong team, for instance, nurses were overseen by “a hands-on manager who actively invites questions and concerns….In an interview, the nurse manager explains that a ‘certain level of error will occur’ so a ‘nonpunitive environment’ is essential to deal with this error productively,” Edmondson wrote. “There is an unspoken rule here to help each other and check each other,” a nurse told Edmondson’s assistant. “People feel more willing to admit to errors here, because the nurse manager goes to bat for you.”

  In another ward with a team that, at first glance, seemed equally strong, a nurse said that when she admitted hurting a patient while drawing blood, the nurse manager “made her feel like she was on trial.” Another said doctors “bite your head off if you make a mistake.” Yet measurements of group cohesion on this ward were still very high. A nurse told the research assistant that the ward “prides itself on being clean, neat and having an appearance of professionalism.” The nurse manager for the ward dressed in business suits and when she delivered criticism, she considerately offered her critiques behind closed doors. The staff said they appreciated the manager’s professionalism, were proud of their department, and felt a strong sense of unity. To Edmondson, the team seemed like they genuinely liked and respected one another. But they also admitted that the unit’s culture sometimes made it hard to confess making a mistake.

  It wasn’t the strength of the team that determined how many errors were reported—rather, it was one specific norm.

  When Edmondson started working on her dissertation, she visited technology companies and factory floors, and asked people about the unwritten rules that shaped how their teammates behaved. “People would say things like, ‘This is one of the best teams I’ve ever been on, because I don’t have to wear a work face here,’ or ‘We aren’t afraid to share crazy ideas,’ ” Edmondson told me. On those teams, norms of enthusiasm and support had taken hold and everyone felt empowered to voice opinions and take risks. “And other teams would tell me, ‘My group is really dedicated to each other and so I try not to go outside my department without checking with my supervisor first’ or ‘We’re all in this together, so I don’t like to bring up an idea unless I know it will work.’ ” Within those teams, a norm of loyalty held sway—and it undermined people’s willingness to make suggestions or take chances.

  Both enthusiasm and loyalty are admirable norms. It wasn’t clear to managers that they would have such different impacts on people’s behaviors. And yet they did. In that setting, enthusiastic norms made teams better. Loyalty norms made them less effective. “Managers never intend to create unhealthy norms,” Edmondson said. “Sometimes, though, they make choices that seem logical, like encouraging people t
o flesh out their ideas before presenting them, that ultimately undermine a team’s ability to work together.”

  As her research continued, Edmondson found a handful of good norms that seemed to be consistently associated with higher productivity. On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments. As Edmondson’s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.

  “We call it ‘psychological safety,’ ” she said. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in a 1999 paper. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

  Julia and her Google colleagues found Edmondson’s papers as they were researching norms. The idea of psychological safety, they felt, captured everything their data indicated was important to Google’s teams. The norms that Google’s surveys said were most effective—allowing others to fail without repercussions, respecting divergent opinions, feeling free to question others’ choices but also trusting that people aren’t trying to undermine you—were all aspects of feeling psychologically safe at work. “It was clear to us that this idea of psychological safety was pointing to which norms were most important,” said Julia. “But it wasn’t clear how to teach those inside Google. People here are really busy. We needed clear guidelines for creating psychological safety without losing the capacity for dissent and debate that’s critical to how Google functions.” In other words, how do you convince people to feel safe while also encouraging them to be willing to disagree?