Original subtitles

technology companies encourage their

employees to work together because

studies show the teams tend to innovate

faster achieve higher productivity see

mistakes more quickly and find better

solutions to problems yet not every team

is successful so how do you build a

highly effective team that is capable of

delivering expected results

a study run by Google will shed some

light on this question and help us

identify trades that all successful

Google teams shared several years ago

who will launch an internal project

Aristotle which was a huge data study

focused on the teamwork the tech giant

spent millions of dollars tracking 180

separate teams for three years the goal

of the project was simple yet ambitious

to find out what are the traits of the

highest performing teams in other words

the company wanted to know why some

teams stumbled while others sort

initially the researchers hypothesis was

that maybe best teams had members who

liked each other a lot or there was a

healthy mix of personality types while

the team members were friends outside of

work

yet none of these seemed to matter

the researchers could not find any

meaningful patterns in the data

basically there was no evidence that a

mix of specific personality types or

skills or backgrounds

made any difference the whole part of

the equation didn't seem to matter as

the researchers continued to study the

group's

they noticed two behaviors that all of

the best teams shared first is that the

team members spoke in roughly the same

proportion a phenomenon the researchers

call inequality in distribution of

conversational turn-taking

on some teams everyone spoke during each

task while on others leadership shifted

among teammates from assignment to

assignment but in each case at the end

of the day everyone had spoken roughly

the same amount in other words as long

as everyone got a chance to talk the

team did well but if only one person or

a small group spoke all the time the

collective intelligence declined second

the good teams all had high average

social sensitivity a fancy way of saying

they were skilled at reading how others

felt based on their tone of voice their

expressions in other nonverbal cues one

of the easiest way to determine social

sensitivity is to show someone photos of

a person's eyes and ask to describe what

that person is feeling an exam known as

reading the mind in the eyes people on

successful teams scored about average on

this test they seemed to know when

someone was feeling upset or left out

people on less effective teams in

contrast scored below average they

seemed to be less sensitive towards

their colleagues by the end of the

project researchers came to conclusion

that it didn't matter who was on the

team what mattered was how team members

treated each other

teams were everybody talked and

everybody showed respect by listening

and paying attention created

psychologically safe atmosphere inside

the team and psychological safety of

each member in the group had a positive

effect on the team's ability to succeed