One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask them to describe what that person is thinking or feeling—the empathy test described previously. This is a “test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the other person, and ‘tune in’ to their mental state,” wrote the creator of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. While men, on average, correctly guess the emotion of the person in the photo only 52 percent of the time, women typically guess right 61 percent.
People on the good teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. They spent time asking one another what they were thinking about. The good teams also contained more women.
Coming back to the question of which team to join, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded, professional Team A, or the free-flowing, more informal Team B, you should opt for Team B. Team A is smart and filled with effective colleagues. As individuals, they will all be successful. But as a team, they still tend to act like individuals. There’s little to suggest that, as a group, they become collectively intelligent, because there’s little evidence that everyone has an equal voice and that members are sensitive to teammates’ emotions and needs.
In contrast, Team B is messier. People speak over one another, they go on tangents, they socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. Everyone speaks as much as they need to, though. They feel equally heard and are attuned to one another’s body language and expressions. They try to anticipate how one another will react. Team B may not contain as many individual stars, but when that group unites, the sum is much greater than any of its parts.
If you ask the original Saturday Night Live team why the show was such a success, they’ll talk about Lorne Michaels. There’s something about his leadership, they’ll say, that made everything come together. He had an ability to make everyone feel heard, to make even the most self-centered actors and writers pay attention to each other. His eye for talent is nearly unrivaled in entertainment over the last forty years.
You’ll also find people who say that Michaels is aloof, socially awkward, proud, and jealous, and that when he decides to fire someone, he’ll cut them completely adrift. You might not want Michaels as a friend. But as the leader of Saturday Night Live, what he’s created is extraordinary: one of the longest-running shows in history, built on the talent of egomaniacal comedians who, twenty times a year for four decades, have put their craziness aside just long enough to make a live television program with only a week’s preparation.
Michaels himself, still the show’s executive producer, says the reason why Saturday Night Live has succeeded is because he works hard to force people to become a team. The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another.
“Lorne was deliberate about making sure everyone got a chance to pitch their ideas,” the writer Marilyn Miller told me. “He would say, ‘Do we have pieces for the girls this week?’ ‘Who hasn’t been on in a while?’ ”
“He has this kind of psychic ability to draw in everyone,” said Alan Zweibel. “I honestly believe that’s why the show has existed for forty years. At the top of each script, there’s a list of the initials of everyone who worked on that sketch and Lorne has always said he’s happiest the more initials he sees.”
Michaels is almost ostentatious in his demonstrations of social sensitivity—and he expects the cast and writers to mimic him. During the early years of the show, he was the one who appeared with a soothing word when an exhausted writer was crying in his office. He has been known to interrupt a rehearsal or table read and quietly take an actor aside to ask if they need to talk about something going on in their personal life. Once, when the writer Michael O’Donoghue was inordinately proud of an obscene commercial parody, Michaels ordered it read at eighteen different rehearsals—even though everyone knew the network’s censors would never let it on the air.
“I remember walking up to Lorne once and saying, ‘Okay, here’s my idea, it’s a bunch of girls at their first slumber party and they are telling each other how sex works.’ And Lorne said, ‘Write it up,’ just like that, no questions asked. Then he took an index card and put it on the board for the next show.” That sketch—which appeared on Saturday Night Live on May 8, 1976—became one of the show’s most famous pieces. “I was on top of the world,” said Miller. “He’s got this social ESP. Sometimes he knows exactly what will make you feel like the most important person on earth.”
Many of the original actors and writers on Saturday Night Live weren’t particularly easy to get along with. They freely admit that, even today, they are combative and gossipy and sometimes downright mean. But when they worked together, they were careful with one another’s feelings. Michael O’Donoghue might have dropped Garrett Morris’s script into a trash can, but he made a point, afterward, to tell Morris he was joking, and when Morris suggested an idea about a depressing children’s story, O’Donoghue came up with “The Little Train That Died.” (“I know I can! I know I can! Heart attack! Heart attack! Oh, my God, the pain!”) The SNL team avoided picking fights with one another. (“When I made that Hitler joke, Marilyn wouldn’t speak to me,” Beatts told me. “But that’s the point. She didn’t speak. She didn’t escalate it into a whole big thing.”) People might have criticized one another’s ideas, but they were careful about how far they let their critiques go. They disagreed and clashed, but everyone still had a voice at each table read, and despite the sniping and competition, they were oddly protective of one another. “Everyone liked everyone else, or at least worked hard to pretend like they liked everyone,” said Don Novello, a writer on the show in the 1970s and ’80s and the actor who played Father Guido Sarducci. “We genuinely trusted each other, as crazy as that sounds.”
For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. “The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,” as Amy Edmondson, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. “It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.”
In Edmondson’s hospital studies, the teams with the highest levels of psychological safety were also the ones with leaders most likely to model listening and social sensitivity. They invited people to speak up. They talked about their own emotions. They didn’t interrupt other people. When someone was concerned or upset, they showed the group that it was okay to intervene. They tried to anticipate how people would react and then worked to accommodate those reactions. This is how teams encourage people to disagree while still being honest with one another and occasionally clashing. This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.
Michaels himself says the job of modeling norms is his most important duty. “Everyone who comes through this show is different, and I have to show each of them that I’m treating them different, and show everyone else I’m treating them different, if we want to draw the unique brilliance out of everyone,” Michaels told me.
“SNL only works when we have different writing and performing styles all bumping into and meshing with each other,” he said. “That’s my job: To protect people’s distinct voices, but also to get them to work together. I want to preserve whatever made each person special before they came to the show, but also help everyone be sensitive enough to make the rough edges fit. That’s the only way we can do a new show every week without everyone wanting to kill each othe
r as soon as we’re done.”
IV.
By the summer of 2015, the Google researchers working on Project Aristotle had been collecting surveys, conducting interviews, running regressions, and analyzing statistics for two years. They had scrutinized tens of thousands of pieces of data and had written dozens of software programs to analyze trends. Finally, they were ready to reveal their conclusions to the company’s employees.
They scheduled a meeting at the headquarters in Mountain View. Thousands of employees showed up, and many more watched via video stream. Laszlo Bock, the head of the People Operations department at Google, walked onto the stage and thanked everyone for coming. “The biggest thing you should take away from this work is that how teams work matters, in a lot of ways, more than who is on them,” he said.
He had spoken to me before he went onstage. “There’s a myth we all carry inside our head,” Bock said. “We think we need superstars. But that’s not what our research found. You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish. And there’s other myths, like sales teams should be run differently than engineering teams, or the best teams need to achieve consensus around everything, or high-performing teams need a high volume of work to stay engaged, or teams need to be physically located together.
“But now we can say those aren’t right. The data shows there’s a universality to how good teams succeed. It’s important that everyone on a team feels like they have a voice, but whether they actually get to vote on things or make decisions turns out not to matter much. Neither does the volume of work or physical co-location. What matters is having a voice and social sensitivity.”
Onstage, Bock brought up a series of slides. “What matters are five key norms,” he told the audience.
Teams need to believe that their work is important.
Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
To create psychological safety, Bock said, team leaders needed to model the right behaviors. There were Google-designed checklists they could use: Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.
There were dozens of tactics on the checklist. All of them, however, came back to two general principles: Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
“There are lots of small things a leader can do,” Abeer Dubey told me. “In meetings, does the leader cut people off by saying ‘Let me ask a question there,’ or does she wait until someone is done speaking? How does the leader act when someone’s upset? These things are so subtle, but they can have a huge impact. Every team is different, and it’s not uncommon in a company like Google for engineers or salespeople to be taught to fight for what they believe in. But you need the right norms to make arguments productive rather than destructive. Otherwise, a team never becomes stronger.”
For three months, Project Aristotle traveled from division to division explaining their findings and coaching team leaders. Google’s top executives released tools that any team could use to evaluate if members felt psychologically safe and worksheets to help leaders and teammates improve their scores.
“I come from a quantitative background. If I’m going to believe something, you need to give me data to back it up,” said Sagnik Nandy, who as chief of Google Analytics Engineering heads one of the company’s biggest teams. “So seeing this data has been a game changer for me. Engineers love debugging software because we know we can get 10 percent more efficiency by just making a few tweaks. But we never focus on debugging human interactions. We put great people together and hope it will work, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and most of the time we don’t know why. Aristotle let us debug our people. It’s totally changed how I run meetings. I’m so much more conscious of how I model listening now, or whether I interrupt, or how I encourage everyone to speak.”
The project has had an impact on the Aristotle team, as well. “A couple of months ago, we were in a meeting where I made a mistake,” Julia Rozovsky told me. “Not a huge mistake, but an embarrassing one, and afterward, I sent out a note explaining what had gone wrong, why it had happened, and what we were doing to resolve it. Right afterward, I got an email back from a team member that just said, ‘Ouch.’
“It was like a punch to the gut. I was already upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities. But because of all the work we’ve done, I pinged the person back and said, ‘Nothing like a good Ouch to destroy psychological safety in the morning!’ And he wrote back and said, ‘I’m just testing your resilience.’ That could have been the wrong thing to say to someone else, but he knew it was exactly what I needed to hear. With one thirty-second interaction, we diffused the tension.
“It’s funny to do a project on team effectiveness while working on a team, because we get to test everything we’re learning as we go along. What I’ve realized is that as long as everyone feels like they can talk and we’re really demonstrating that we want to hear each other, you feel like everyone’s got your back.”
Over the last two decades, the American workplace has become much more team focused. The average worker today might belong to a sales team, as well as a group of unit managers, a special team planning future products, and the team overseeing the holiday party. Executives belong to groups that oversee compensation and strategy and hiring and firing and approving HR policies and figuring out how to cut costs. These teams might meet every day in person or correspond via email or telecommute from all over the world. Teams are important. Within companies and conglomerates, government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of self-organization.
And the unwritten rules that make teams succeed or fail, it turns out, are the same from place to place. The way investment bankers coordinate their efforts might seem different from how orthopedic nurses divvy up tasks. And the specific norms, in those different settings, will likely vary. But one thing will remain true if those teams work well: In both places, the groups will feel a sense of psychological safety. They will succeed because teammates feel they can trust each other, and that honest discussion can occur without fear of retribution. Their members will have roughly equal voices. Teammates will show they are sensitive to one another’s emotions and needs.
In general, the route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—be it a group of coworkers or a sports team, a church gathering, or your family dinner table—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?
There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.
If motivation comes from giving individuals a greater sense of control, then psychological safety is the caveat
we must remember when individuals come together in a group. Establishing control requires more than just seizing self-determination. Being a subversive works, unless you’re leading a team.
When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.
As a team leader, then, it’s important to give people control. Some team leaders at Google make checkmarks next to people’s names each time they speak, and won’t end a meeting until those checks are all roughly equivalent. And as a team member, we share control by demonstrating that we are genuinely listening—by repeating what someone just said, by responding to their comments, by showing we care by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered, rather than acting as if nothing is wrong. When we defer to others’ judgment, when we vocally treat others’ concerns as our own, we give control to the group and psychological safety takes hold.
“The thing I love most is when I see a sketch performed and the actors are really killing it onstage, and the sketch’s writers are high-fiving each other by the monitor, and whoever is waiting in the wings is laughing, and there’s another team already figuring how to make the characters funnier next time,” Lorne Michaels told me.
“When I see the entire team drawing some kind of inspiration from the same thing, I know everything is working,” he said. “At that moment, the whole team is rooting for each other, and each person feels like the star.”
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*1 Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.
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