Before this study, like many other organizations, Google execs believed that building the best teams meant compiling the best people. It makes sense. The best engineer plus an MBA, throw in a PhD, and there you have it. The perfect team, right? In the words of Julia Rozovsky, Google’s people analytics manager, “We were dead wrong.”
Michael Schneider
Summary: Google tries to reinvent the wheel on studying group performance by analyzing big data for patterns. They find nothing. After consulting psychologists who do this stuff for a living, they realize they weren’t measuring the right variables, so the bigness of their data was irrelevant. They take the loss, learn from it, and move forward with a better plan. Curious to hear what scholars who study teams have to say about these findings. – Ben
Read Google Spent 2 Years Studying 180 Teams. The Most Successful Ones Shared These 5 Traits in Inc.