What makes teams great? — Choose To Thinq

(This is from Edition 44 of The Upleveler, our weekly smartletter)

Everyone in a team has a hypothesis on what makes good teams tick and why bad teams suck. A few years ago, a group at Google decided to study this topic in more detail.

They came up with five aspects. In the process they also noticed that aspects such as 'colocation of members', 'extroversion', 'tenure' were not as significant as some may have thought.

Here are the five most significant aspects below. If you are a leader of a team, or find yourself in a good/bad team, this will give you the right vocabulary and levers for analysis to think about it better.

Psychological safety: Does the team make it 'safe' for members to think differently, ask questions, make interesting mistakes, and take risks?
Dependability: Does the team consistently get stuff done in the right way on time?
Structure and clarity: Do members of the team understand where they should be headed, how to go about their work, and what's expected of them?
Meaning: Does the team know "why" it exists and why it does what it does?
Impact: Can you sense the impact of your work?

Being in the right team is important for one's future relevance, because, like in the Aristotle quote, the whole can be more powerful than the sum of its parts. Even if you are a freelancer or a tiny team, you work in collaboration with others - be it the same company or with extended teams of partners. These same ideas apply to those situations as well.

We encourage you to think about this. For further reading, check out Google's page on these results.

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