
Google discovers the key to good teamwork is being nice - frostmatthew
http://qz.com/625870/after-years-of-intensive-analysis-google-discovers-the-key-to-good-teamwork-is-being-nice/
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tedyoung
Awful headline: "nice" != "psychological safety". Nice can be interpreted in
so many ways, such as "avoiding conflict", which is not a good way to provide
psychological safety.

But otherwise, while this isn't "news" anymore, psychological safety is one of
_the_ most important things needed for a team to perform well and it's
somewhat surprising that this isn't true in many places.

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m0llusk
But first reverse a linked list and FizzBizz on the white board.

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im3w1l
Is your point that the strategy works for Google employees but doesn't
generalize?

I could certainly see how telling people that it's OK to ask stupid questions
works differently in a selected-for group.

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m0llusk
You get what you measure, in this case clever whiteboard solutions to trivial
problems.

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jrfarina
In other news: the sky is blue.

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Analemma_
This result is not nearly as obvious as you think (or hope). Even here on
Hacker News you will constantly see people insisting that being an asshole is
the best way to get good results out of a team, and that people like Linus
Torvalds are the models we should emulate. It's helpful to have empirical
evidence from a respected company indicating this is not true.

