the key to building a great team is giving your workers the freedom to speak out and letting them know that they are an important part of your organisation.

2. Team Building in Sydney
What Managers Can
Learn from Google

3. No one can argue how amazing
Google’s growth and development
for the last 20 years is. Starting from
a simple research project by Larry
Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, the
tech company has grown to become
one of the biggest and most well-
known brands in the world today.

4. This can be attributed in part to
Google’s knack for bringing creative
and innovative minds together. As
such, if you’re planning to
some team building in Sydney, it
would do you well to follow Google’s
example.

6. Like most companies, Google held
on to traditional beliefs about
building a team such as it’s best to
put people with similar
personalities together or a team will
produce better results if they are
friends outside of work.

7. However, it turns out that these
beliefs, according to Google’s
People Analytics manager
Abeer Dubey, are not really set
on stone.

8. n 2012, the tech giant launched an
initiative code-named Project
Aristotle to study hundreds of
Google’s teams and understand why
some of them are successful while
some are not.

9. Dubey gathered some of the
company’s best statisticians,
organisational psychologists,
sociologists and engineers for
this project.

10. What the research team found is
quite different from what they
have expected. According to
Dubey, there is no exact formula
for creating the best team. “

11. We had lots of data, but there was
nothing showing that a mix of
specific personality types or skills
or backgrounds made any
difference. The ‘who’ part of the
equation didn’t seem to matter,”
he said.

12. For instance, after studying 180
teams from all over the
company, Project Aristotle
discovered that some of
Google’s most effective teams
were composed of people who
are close friends in and outside
of work.

13. There are also well-performing
groups who are made up of people
who are basically strangers to each
other. Some have strong mangers,
while others have a less
hierarchical structure.

15. What’s most surprising of all is that
the researchers found teams with
nearly identical make-ups and
overlapping memberships, but these
teams couldn’t be more different
from each other as far as their
performance and effectiveness is
concerned.

16. Dubey said folks at Google are
known for being good at finding
patterns, but he and his team were
unable to find strong patterns.

17. However, Project Aristotle did
find something that contributes
to a team’s effectiveness: group
norms. Group norms, according
to the researchers, are basically
the traditions, behavioural
standards, and unwritten

18. rules that govern how people
function when they are together.
They said that understanding and
influencing group norms may be the
key to improving Google’s teams.

19. One of the most important group
norms is the ability to feel
“psychologically safe.” Project
Aristotle has discovered that a
team is more effective when its
members are allowed to share

20. the things that scare or bother
them without fear of
recriminations. They also
perform better when they know
that their work is valued.

21. Indeed, organising a Sydney
Amazing Race for your
employees is well and good.
However, what you can learn
from Google is that apart from
helping them develop good
relationships with other,

22. the key to building a great team is
giving your workers the freedom
to speak out and letting them
know that they are an important
part of your organisation.

23. For more details
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http://www.beyondtheboardroom.com.au/
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