Google's Aristotle Realized

The unit of measure in coaching individuals or teams is behavior.  Sometimes a behavior needs to increase—demonstrate more affirmation; sometimes a behavior needs to decrease—stop being 10 minutes late to your own meetings.  The question of what behaviors made the difference between those teams at Google who were successful and those who were not drove Julia Rozovsky, a manager at Google, to intensely study the issue.  She looked at just about every variable you could name and her effort, labeled Project Aristotle, produce the finding that five behaviors made the difference:

• providing structure and clarity in goals and project plans so each team member understood
• clarifying how the work makes a difference for the organization and its customers
• holding each other accountable to do what was promised
• identifying how the team and the work of the team is personally important
• providing a risk free environment by having rules that maintain psychological safety

Those of us who have made our life’s work helping individuals and teams be more successful and effective can only shout “Halleluiah!!” to Rozovsky’s findings.  She found what organizational psychologists have been reporting on for many years.  Teams need certain conditions if the team is going to learn and achieve its goals.

But if all it took is a report, then everyone would be doing it.  Recently, I worked with a team using the Pearman Personality Integrator (PPI) to help the team look at the demonstrated behaviors that team members bring to the team so we could evaluate strengths and blindspots.  The PPI provides scores on Demonstrated behaviors, Naturally inclined behaviors, and dimensions of Flexibility.  Using the demonstrated scores, I had team members put their initials on their relative scores on all eight of the dimensions of the assessment (image above). 

Using an ease and newsprint, I simply drew eight lines indicating what each dimension represented to the team.  For example:

• Action view—Sensing that is Extraverted (Se)
• Possibilities view—Intuiting that is Extraverted (Ne)
• Critiquing voice—Thinking that is Extraverted (Te)
• Affirming voice—Feeling that is Extraverted (Fe)
• Detail view—Sensing that is Introverted (Si)
• Scenarios insights—Intuiting that is Introverted (Ni)
• Logical model—Thinking that is Introverted (Ti)
• Ideal’s aligned—Feeling that is Introverted (Fi)

With a simple set of circles to sort low, medium, and high scores, team members put their initials on the spokes so everyone could see where team members put their energy. 

The team immediately began to discuss how their internal pressure to take action action and relentlessly critique was evident in the way the team works.  Recognizing that they don’t spend too much time exploring alternatives or affirming and celebrating what has been achieved, team members began to understand why others didn’t want to work with them too often.  For the first time, the team had a portrait of behavior they could “own” and link to those things that go well and those things that don’t go so well.

The team began to explore how their urge to act short circuited paying attention to outcomes and team accountability for how they treat each other.  In fact, they realized that their team culture was essentially risk free—no one was willing to step outside the comfort zone and this was costly.

We did a deeper dive on degrees of flexibility, identifying which factors need attention to increase flexibility.  Team members all had low scores on Connectivity and Variety Seeking (two of five flexibility dimensions measured by the PPI).  The team realized that the lack of connectivity and variety seeking were the shadow side of their overly action (non-possibility) oriented and hyper-critical team environment.   It is hard to explore possibilities if you don’t pause long enough to examine alternative experiences (variety) or to connect with the larger network in the organization if you are hyper-critical of everything and everyone.

The team decided to create a feedback process and turned the Project Aristotle findings into ten specific behaviors which they will monitor at least once each month during team meetings.

A start.  A shift. A hope that this team will take their insights into a more productive and fulfilling way to work.  Stay tuned—I’ll let you know how it goes.