
Keys to a successful Google team - rajathagasthya
https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
======
OneMoreGoogler
Speaking as a former member of more than one low-performing team at Google,
none of the exercises would have helped our performance very much. What would
have helped:

1\. Being co-located. We would have been more effective sitting and working
together, but instead we were distributed across multiple time zones and
countries.

2\. Working on a project with a future, instead of one that was winding down.
It's difficult to "harness the power of diverse ideas" or be "rated as
effective" when our team's charter is maintaining a project to its EOL date,
with no plans for a successor.

3\. Avoiding morale-sapping demotions in responsibility. One of my teams had
its responsibilities changed from supporting the system we built and deployed,
to assisting one of Google's "partners" deploy an inferior replacement. More
than one member left when that happened.

4\. Reducing the technology churn. When our leadership changes the product
every six months, which forces us to switch to a different technology, we're
stuck coming up to speed instead of contributing out of our expertise.

5\. Reducing the team member churn. Constantly leaving and replacing team
members is both a symptom and a cause of low performance. Here Google's
internal mobility works against it.

(These events were due to leadership shifts at the VP level, and had nothing
to do with our team's output, which I think was better than it ought to be
given our circumstances.)

The point is that a team's performance has more to do with the larger
organization than the team's internals. Frankly this article feels like blame-
shifting: if we teach them some exercises to do at meetings, maybe they won't
notice all these institutional issues.

~~~
dunkelheit
Could you elaborate on point 4? I thought google prides itself on having a
very coherent technology stack without unnecessary choice and variety.

~~~
martincmartin
The joke inside Google is that there are always two systems for any given
task: the one that's deprecated, and the one that isn't ready yet.

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lifeisstillgood
In glad to see that top of the list is "psychological safety". It's a great
term for something I have always found desperately important. Being secure
enough to say "I don't know", is vital. I have promised myself "never lie",
simply as that gives me the best psychological safety - it's horrific having
lied about something (yeah that's ready, yes I know about X) and just waiting
for the axe to fall.

A great term for a vital concept. How to _create_ that? Dunno.

~~~
daveguy
They mention a technique to improve these items:

"So we created a tool called the gTeams exercise: a 10-minute pulse-check on
the five dynamics, a report that summarizes how the team is doing, a live in-
person conversation to discuss the results, and tailored developmental
resources to help teams improve."

And they had some metrics for a specific improvement:

"... ones that adopted a new group norm -- like kicking off every team meeting
by sharing a risk taken in the previous week -- improved 6% on psychological
safety ratings and 10% on structure and clarity ratings.

And generally:

"Teams said that having a framework around team effectiveness and a forcing
function to talk about these dynamics was missing previously and by far the
most impactful part of the experience."

So it sounds like simply discussing the importance of these aspects and how
they influence your team from within the team itself might help foster a
better environment.

~~~
ianamartin
This is totally meaningless.

Let me try to explain a different way.

I'm going to invent something we are going to call "personal happiness." Right
now.

I'm not going to define it in any way at all. We are all just going to assume
that this is a good thing that we all want. I'm not going to tell you how to
measure it or how to quantify it or anything like that. This is simply an
objective thing that we all want.

Now I am going to tell you that there are 5 key components to personal
happiness. And I am not going to tell you how to measure those either. Because
who would do that?

But I am going to tell you that if you do x, you can score higher on one of
those components.

I am not going to tell you if these numbers are statistically meaningful
because I can't be arsed to actually talk about my methodology.

If you engage in one of these behaviors, you will increase your score on one
of these metrics, and ultimately increase your personal happiness.

Does that help clear up my problem with the original blog post?

In my opinion, it's worthless at best and possibly damaging at worst.

We have an undefined goal, supporting goals that are also undefined, and we
get sub-metrics that are measured without specific sample sizes or anything
else that would let you know that there is actually something interesting
happening.

This is complete and total bs until we get more details. And we won't.

It's probably not worth posting here, but worth mentioning that this really
boils down to a psychological experiment tested on employees without their
consent.

I hope that works out for those of you who think that HR is a valuable entity
for preventing legal actions.

------
CGamesPlay
This article was a great introduction. When can I expect the rest of the
analysis? Feels like it just ends very abruptly.

------
achow
While reading it, I was constantly thinking how far this can be applied to an
organization as well (Ex. a Startup). Quite a lot I would imagine, would love
to have a startup (my own or otherwise) which has following culture.
Paraphrasing the original text..

Psychological safety: Does it have open culture where people are humble,
unpretentious and open to other people’s ideas and thoughts.

Dependability: Does it have A team which is smart and reliable (delivers on
time and can be counted upon to gather around in crisis and firefights).

Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans of our startup
clear?

Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for
each of us?

Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
Or, is there enough upside for a great exit, which frees us to do whatever we
wish to do later in our life.

~~~
automentum
You sum up everything that is required in a modern organization. I believe all
modern organizations will be smaller units thriving on similar units, not
required to be owned by them.

------
ericjang
I liked how they put the entirety of the infographic text in the alt text -
really shows that they care about accessibility!

I would have definitely liked their thoughts on (2)-(5), and perhaps release
some anonymized case studies from their 200 data points.

~~~
deathanatos
> I liked how they put the entirety of the infographic text in the alt text -
> really shows that they care about accessibility!

The alt text for the image is just "5 Keys to Google Teams"; if you open the
image in a text-based browser (e.g., links), that is what you'll see.

What they've set, the "title" attribute, is used for tooltips in graphical
browsers; the replacement text comes not from title, but from alt. (And alt
and title can be different.)

From an accessibility standpoint, I'm not sure it really matters. The
infographic's text is also above, in the bullet point, just in question form.
(I actually question if the "info"graphic really adds anything. These seem
like five independent things, not that 2 depends really on 1, which if the
infographic implies anything, it would be that. 3 (goals are clear) certainly
doesn't depend on 2 (get things done)…; if anything, having clear goals will
lead to getting things done, but not the other way around.)

------
sprice
This is a great tool to have for anyone on a team. I feel quite fortunate to
be on a small team that, at first glance, does quite well in each of these
five areas.

That being said it would be nice if Google shared more information about the
gTeams exercise they do.

------
cmdkeen
The give away is the use of "high performing team" which makes me sad that
they've essentially identified Tuckman's stages of group development without
referencing it (because I really hope they've heard of it).

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing (and the addition of Mourning) aren't
particularly hard concepts to grasp yet all too often in the technology space
get ignored. Many of the examples mentioned here of not sorting out how people
are going to work together, throwing new tech or people into the team, all
impact this concept and push you back down the ladder.

In 6+ years of professional development I've only ever been in one truly high
performing team, plenty of people never have. That leadership and management,
and they are two distinct things, is so bad about enabling their creation is
something that doesn't get nearly enough attention.

------
dunkelheit
The article strikes me as phony and light on substance. The author talks about
five traits that everyone will agree are important and states that they are
working on improving it. So far so good.

But take dependability for example. Improving it might take some boring things
like improving employees' competence (ok, maybe not so relevant for google).
Or some unpleasant things like holding people accountable. It is in odds with
psychological safety (if risky behavior is encouraged the number of errors
will inevitably increase and thus dependability will decrease). How is this
tension resolved? The article says nothing.

Or take meaning and impact. Improving it might require working on a really
important project and not some low-grade maintenance which big companies are
full of. How is 10-minute pre-meeting talk going to help?

"improved 6% on psychological safety ratings" \- seriously? What does it mean
to feel 6% more safe? Please at least share how this rating is calculated and
ideally also its impact on less ethereal metrics.

------
dlss
Does anyone have links to the original study(ies?) rather than just this
summary? Some of these claims seem pretty hard to swallow. For example:

 _> Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact,
structure their work, and view their contributions._

This result appears to be strongly at odds with Google's thorough
interviewing. Perhaps they are saying that the data doesn't show a difference
based on individual history _given the employee was good enough to be hired at
Google, and assigned to the team in question by some other HR team_?

Any references would be appreciated. I tried searching Google Scholar for the
author, but am finding nothing :/

~~~
Animats
That's a good point. Almost anybody who makes it through Google's hiring
process for technical employees should be capable of handling most routine
problems in computing. Given that, the team dynamics matter more than the
technical ability.

------
malkia
Postmortems are very important part of this, and I love that these are shared,
so one can watch&learn.

For example these external postmortems from the chromium team -
[https://www.chromium.org/developers/postmortems](https://www.chromium.org/developers/postmortems)

------
ianamartin
So: two years, hundreds of interviews, lots of data analysis, god knows how
many person-hours invested . . . to figure out what any competent human being
would think of as blindingly obvious.

And some people wonder why so many other people think of HR as a complete
waste of, well, human resources.

Lest I be mistaken for a troll, please let me elaborate.

I'm almost(?) certain that opening bit was tongue-in-cheek about just tossing
a Rhodes Scholar, a couple extroverts, an engineer and a PhD into a team and
expecting it to be a great team. But there is an uncomfortable truth hidden
behind the exaggeration there. HR people can and do make those kinds of
assumptions all the time. They do it when they are looking at resumes; they do
it when they are setting up phone screens; they do it when they are setting up
PIPs.

There's a deeply seated problem happening when you allow people with no
subject matter experience be the gatekeepers of who does and doesn't get into
a company. Externally, it manifests as bias or prejudice or racism. No amount
of data analysis can get people to shunt a fundamentally flawed assumption
though.

In my opinion, there's only one kind of person who could invent such a daft
null hypothesis about what makes a good team: someone who's never worked on a
team like that. I'm glad that the People Ops people at Google are making some
progress. Perhaps other companies will follow suit, but the problem persists.
There will still be the same people in HR making the same boneheaded
assumptions about all kinds of things with little direct feedback.

I realize that any sizable company needs HR for at least some minimal amount
of due diligence in the hiring process, and that HR employees are generally
less expensive than Legal Counsel dept. employees. But we should stop giving
HR the insane carte blanche it has in many large companies. We should stop
letting it create policy. Because the policies created are so often
antithetical to the needs of the company, and in some cases, to society.

Instead, we should embed HR workers in the teams they are working with.
Perhaps every pod at Google doesn't need its own HR rep, but there is a level
of management that would make sense to have one HR person to handle
hiring/recruiting/necessary paperwork. You can argue that the HR person
attached to a unit will be biased and perhaps not handle things appropriately
when a complaint comes up. But you're wrong because in any situation where a
complaint happens, HR is just a proxy for Legal. Cut out the middle-people and
just have the Legal team handle it directly. HR doesn't really add anything to
those situations except a level of misdirection(some people think HR is there
for them, not the company).

As a general trend, these 5 markers of success are probably pretty good. But I
challenge you to find something in any of that which is concrete enough to be
actionable. I guarantee you the HR people will find some action, and it will
be for some manager to do some evaluation on how well some team performs on
those metrics.

To go full circle here, the final issue I have with a blog like this is that
it makes the mistake of finding that what they thought was the general case
was "not true." The goal for a team is not to achieve some success in hazy,
ill-defined (and probably some variation of survivor-biased) ideas about how
to manage a team.

Some teams will absolutely thrive with the goofy composition that was first
stated. Others will fail. If you define success or failure as shipping a
viable product. If you define success as how well you implemented the latest
directives from HR, well, that's different.

We need to rethink the way we handle HR and what it does. It should not, for
example (as done in this blog post) tell managers how to manage their teams.
Nor should it tell teams what their identity is or should be.

~~~
melted
This comment is rife with fundamental misunderstanding of the main purpose
that HR serves in a company. That purpose is to protect the company from legal
action by employees, former and present. This is the overriding principle on
which HR operates, everything else it does is gravy.

~~~
sangnoir
I think that attitude is deeply cynical. I know HR is not allied to employees:
but to say that is the _main_ purpose is a bit over the top.

The cynical view sets a very low bar, it's like a comment on FinancialNews(tm)
saying the main role of Software Engineering is to rush out code that doesn't
crash. There are organizations where the statement is true, but you and I know
there's more to it than that. Yes, the we don't ship code that crashes, but we
can, and do a whole lot more

~~~
melted
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who
have not got it."

George Bernard Shaw

~~~
sangnoir
That reeks of emporor's-new-clothes-ism. The statement both redefines a word
and disparages those who disagree at once - two birds with one stone, I guess.

~~~
melted
Yes. But it's also true.

------
dang
Url changed from
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2015/11/23/why...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2015/11/23/why-
google-wants-to-stop-hiring-based-on-ivy-league-
credentials/?utm_campaign=ForbesTech&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Technology&linkId=18991814),
which points to [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-keys-successful-
google-t...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-keys-successful-google-team-
laszlo-bock?trk=pulse-det-nav_art) which points to this.

~~~
Mithaldu
At least they DID leave a trail of references. :D

