Ingredients for Growing Thriving Teams

I was delighted to read the recent New York Times article, "What Google Learned From its Quest to Build the Perfect Team".

Here's a summary of my key takeaways with a link to the article at the end.

Relevance and shared motivation:

• It helps to understand the role of the team you’re in.

• Do the things that have significance in the context of your organization and understand the impact of your actions.

• Align shared actions with personal motivation - fulfilment

• See how the work of the team contributes to the whole.

Empathy and emotional sensitivity:

• Build empathy - social sensitivity. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

• Psychological safety and emotional conversation are related. Talk about life, feelings, experiences, beyond the scope of the work at hand.

• Dissolve work/life barriers in order to comfortable express more of yourself, wherever you are.

Equivalence and communication:

• Everyone contributes to conversations. (Consider taking turns and balance quantity of contribution).

• "In order to be psychologically safe we must know that we can be free enough some times to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy."

• Encourage emotional openness and be open.

Behavioural alignment:

• Discuss norms – choose principles that build relationship and align action.

• Develop a “common platform and operating language”.

• Give and be open to receive feedback – (suggestions about how to improve things are usually easier to digest that suggestions about the “problem”).

You can read the article here.