Using Project Aristotle To Build Highly Effective Teams

What Is Project Aristotle?

In 2014, Google published research on a prioritised list of factors contributing to an effective team. A key conclusion in their research was that who was in the team mattered less than how they worked together. Their conclusion would resonate strongly with anyone who has studied systems thinking with a popular quote attributed to Aristotle, “The whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

The Five Key Factors to Highly Effective Teams

The five factors they discovered, in priority order, were:

  1. Psychological safety –  This is the belief that team members can express ideas, take risks, and ask questions without fear of judgment or retaliation. When employees feel safe, they are more likely to contribute their perspectives, admit mistakes, and learn from failures. When psychological safety is low, people are likely to self-censor, hold opinions or ideas back, or rely on the person with the most authority to make decisions.
  2. Dependability—The essence of teamwork is trusting other team members to complete high-quality work in a timely manner. When team members cannot depend on the quality or timeliness of others’ work, you might notice resentment brewing or a drop in overall team quality standards.
  3. Structure and clarity – Individuals cannot perform well if they don’t know what is expected of them. Clearly defined roles, plans, and goals frame expectations and enable individuals to contribute towards the team’s purpose. Shared team expectations also enable individuals to ask for help and receive support in a timely fashion. A lack of structure and clarity can lead to frustration of unmet expectations and unnecessary conflict from different expectations within the team.
  4. Meaning – Meaning is a sense of purpose. This purpose could be in the work itself, the output or the outcome…. but meaning differs from person to person and can change over time. For example, I’ve seen individuals find meaning in their work because they are learning a new technique and growing. Or they can find meaning in mentoring and growing others on the team.
  5. Impact – Individuals want to see that their work makes a difference in the workplace.

I also find it fascinating that they found several factors that did not contribute to team effectiveness (at least in Google), including colocation of team members, consensus-based decision-making, extraversion of team members, individual performance of team members, workload size, seniority, team size, and tenure.

Using Project Aristotle’s Insights

Many leaders can use Project Aristotle’s findings by sensing where a team state might be in each factor and organising activities that boost each one.

Kickstart a new team with chartering activities that allow team members to share individual preferences and establish shared ways of working. Use resources like Atlassian’s Team Playbook or look for activities on places like Miro such as the Team Charter. Establishing shared team ground rules and expectations can build psychological safety, establish how team members should depend on each other and improve structure and clarity.

Make an assessment by conducting a survey for an existing team to understand their current state. Be sure not to use the results for individual performance. Instead, use the results to identify gaps or opportunities to boost a particular factor. For example, after running a team survey, I might sense a feeling of low impact. To boost this, I might introduce a Kudo Box, ensure individuals receive more timely feedback or find a weekly mechanism where the team can review their work on key product or business key performance indicators (KPIs).

Ideas To Boost the Five Factors

What can you do once you’ve decided which of the five factors to improve? Here are some ideas you can use.

  1. Psychological safety – Establish ground rules to explicitly encourage participation. Prefer brainwriting over brainstorming by writing ideas down before discussing. Use team-building activities to build trust and empathy between team members. Use mistakes as a learning opportunity and, as a leader, admit your mistakes or worries in front of your team. Finally, call out undesirable behaviour in front of the team that threatens psychological safety. Remember that culture is not only what you encourage but also tolerate.
  2. Dependability – Agree on what “good” looks like by defining your team’s definition of done. Create team mechanisms that encourage people to ask for and get help from each other promptly. I prefer pairing, even if you’re not doing pair programming, to ensure individuals know who to turn to when they need help. Consider establishing a mentoring system within the team that formally allows senior members to support less experienced members.
  3. Structure and clarity – Is your team process agreed upon and documented? Documentation not only helps your current team to have clarity over shared expectations of each other, but it will also help future team members with great reference material for their onboarding. Use retrospectives to fine-tune the structure and encourage people to share what confuses them. I like the use of a “Puzzles” exercise at least once a quarter to encourage people to share what is unclear. Other things worth defining or revisiting include role responsibilities, team rituals, workflow, decision-making processes, and communication channels.
  4. Meaning – Since meaning is personal, ask individuals what is important to them and revisit this regularly, as this can change over time. For example, a person might want to work in an area where they learn a new tool or framework. But if that person is going through a significant life event such as having a first child, might want to know they are doing a solid job as a dependable team member. Somebody can find meaning connecting with a customer problem or an organisational or department goal. Or use delegation and giving more ownership to increase autonomy and meaningfulness. Work can be especially meaningful when people work closely together towards an ambitious goal, so consider ways people can pair or work in smaller groups.
  5. Impact – Connect people’s work to business or customer outcomes. Sharing customer or business feedback or reviewing business metrics/outcomes with the team are great ways to do this. Create or use ways the team can celebrate their success through company updates like a town hall or newsletter. Give specific feedback about individuals’ work and help them connect their actions to results.

Common Traps With Project Aristotle

Be careful not to fall into some common traps while using the lessons learned from Project Aristotle. Some of these include:

  • Misinterpreting Psychological Safety – Many people mistake psychological safety for a lack of accountability, comfort, never-ending challenge, or harmony. To better understand this, explore Amy Edmondson’s foundation work, and you’ll soon realise that psychological safety is none of these.
  • Ignoring individual contributions – Although individual performance didn’t affect team effectiveness, it still makes sense to understand individual strengths and find ways people can apply these and complement each other.
  • Once and done – You might have built a highly effective team, but many factors can atrophy or drastically change over time. Applying the insights of Project Aristotle requires leaders to continually monitor and adapt as team dynamics change.
  • Not investing in leaders – Leadership roles are multipliers and are key to creating (or preventing) psychological safety.

10 Years Old And Still Useful

It’s been more than 10 years since Google published its research on highly effective teams, yet many leaders still ask how to build them. While Project Aristotle won’t tell you which factor(s) you need to work on, it gives leaders a great framework to sense and prioritise the factors that will impact team effectiveness.

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