We announced a few weeks ago the launch of one of our features called the “Aristotle Score”. It’s one that is both optional and polarising. It is either met with unfamiliar shrugs or a loud cheer. The difference usually lies in whether the dialogue partners have ever come across Google’s Project Aristotle or not but it does always bedazzle me that the latter can be the case for anyone.
Mostly technologists, the ones who have read about it, are in awe of what is probably the largest data set in modern history to ask knowledge/technology/digital workers how they feel about their work, their relationships and their performance. If anyone reading this hasn’t come across it, then you can find the details in this article but in short, they asked themselves “What makes the perfect team?” or rather, “What makes Google teams high performing?”.
What they uncovered, through more data than anything else of its kind, is summarised in this visual I hope every team will come to hold dear one day. High performing teams all have:
This was the flip side study to one where they asked what makes Google leaders great – called Project Oxygen which, spoiler alert showed they have to be: a great coach; not a micromanager; empathic; productive and results-oriented; great communicator; supportive of people’s growth path; able to uphold vision for the team; have key tech skills; collaborate across the company; and not afraid to be courageous and strong with decision making. So in other words, a long drawn out definition which in 2008 may not have had a better word but we now know as “servant leadership”.
I suspect if they checked again today, with greater awareness towards what good versus bad leadership is, the top performers would also demonstrate a strong ability to be open and vulnerable with the team to promote truly blameless and learning and good proficiency in removing all types of blockers from their path. That every team member could, at a push, point to a moment when they had witnessed their leader been open enough to admit they didn’t know something or when shared something personal and that they can certainly remember a time when their manager made something that seemed stuck or impossible move whether it was obtaining info, resources or approval and allowed people to get on with their best work.
As there are many who roll their eyes when Google is mentioned and use their generalised sense of unease towards the company to dismiss some of the tremendous research they have done, some outfits have kindly worked on replicating some of their research to give it more of a double-blindness to appease the critics and if you look at the Accelerate State of DevOps Report from 2019, some of the same explorations are done on 3600 other companies and it absolutely holds true for them as well. This, of course, doesn’t really quiet the Google detractors as their objections are usually more to do with their unease towards untangling masses of HumanDebt than really the provenance of the data but it’s still good to know if you need to combat the same eye rolls at any point.
All of these findings are common sense and we all know that if we were to throw the excuses and the fear out the window, we’d have to use these 5 factors for teams and those 10 for managers and work really hard to dissect what they each mean and how we can improve on every one of them.
How to be more open, more courageous, more empathic, more EQed, more attentive, ultimate – more human.
In fact, HR could easily throw out everything else they’ve learned or said in the past 60 years with the exception of the admin and legal bits that is, all that is “retention”, “talent management”, “satisfaction”, with all their frameworks, their organisational theories, their decks and their cottage industries etc and instead keep only these two lists of must-haves and start comprehending how to get more of these very things and be wildly more successful.
Some places have. Smartly. I met a company last week who said their Aristotle Score is being calculated forensically and that keeping it at a certain level is their leadership team’s KPI. Yes, they were a scale-up and yes, they had a leadership team with any KPIs which in itself sets them ahead of the herd but they can’t be the only ones.
I asked why this was the exec team’s KPI, where was HR? They weren’t HR-less, on the contrary, their people-people had been restored to their former “business partner” glory and were in a real team with their leaders to make that happen. They were doing what they were best at. Understanding behavioural levers, needs of humans and ways to make dynamics work.
In fact, when I asked more and started speaking to them, it became clear they had systematically worked hard on many of them and focused on defining “Dependability”, un-training micromanagement out of their leaders, reinstating “Impact” and “Purpose” as important, and they were now truly tackling Psychological Safety and putting in place solid measurements. In fact, they were finding ways to measure each of these things with an open mind and a curiosity that had gotten them immensely far.
I’m not worried about them. Benchmarking against the Aristotle and Oxygen project all the time and constantly working on each component means their HumanDebt™will not only be low, but never even has a chance to grow.
As one of their execs said to me “This is our USP, our secret sauce, whatever you want to call it – that we’re doing this is our real competitive advantage over any of our competitors – the tech stack, the ways we work, the vision for the products -those are all shared and all too common but they don’t do this. Not as obsessively forensic and serious as we do.”
I asked if he weren’t worried if I shared this, others would then have the same secret sauce. He laughed “No! Everyone does know all this, they just can’t be bothered to ask the real hard questions, stop hiding behind antiquated conventions and put in the hard work”.
And of course, he’s right but let’s make him be wrong. Dare to “be bothered” to throw it all out and replace it with Oxygen and Aristotle if you want to see new life flowing through the whole and not just disparate parts being kept on life support.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let’s help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link