How The Best Teams Work Together

Teamwork has never been a more important reality in the world of work. We’ve known about the importance of teams for decades. We’ve known that individual performance actually flows out of a team’s ability to connect and work together. We know that talent flows from teams. We know that the best teams win, and we’ve had some pretty good theories about how the best teams work together.

But it wasn’t until about five years ago that we had really, really good data on how the best teams truly worked together. Most studies of teams at work involved organizational psychologists and other researchers looking from the outside into an organization, trying to identify what made those teams work the best.

But about five years ago, one of the largest organizations in the world, one of the most multinational organizations in the world partnered with a team of high-level organizational psychologists, and because of that, we got an inside look and an outside look together.

Of course, I am referring to the 2015 Google People Analytics team’s Project Aristotle.

Project Aristotle was Google’s effort to answer the question “What do the best performing teams have in common?” And in collecting data for Project Aristotle, Google and the team looked at a variety of different factors around teams. They tried to figure out what the right…