Google’s “Aristotle Project” is a study that explores the secrets of the best teams and leadership. Learn about the importance of psychological safety and teamwork.
Aristotle at Google (Secrets of Highly Effective Teams and Team Leaders)
Respected business figures such as Kazuo Inamori, the living god of management, and Chairman Emeritus Kyocera, demand strict morality and constant character cultivation from their leaders. This is because the higher up you go in a company, the greater the impact of your misbehavior on the organization and its people. That’s why the world’s leading companies spend a lot of money and time developing not only their CEOs and executives, but also their team leaders and middle managers. The curriculum is not limited to the specialized knowledge required to run a business, such as finance, accounting, sales, marketing, and organizational management. The best companies also make sure their executives have the right personality traits so they can work well together. A representative example of this is Google. When you think of Google, you might think that it’s an organization where engineers armed with all kinds of cutting-edge engineering knowledge are able to succeed on their own, but that’s not the case.
Google’s internal culture improvement project
The results of Google’s “Aristotle Project,” a four-year internal culture improvement project that took place from 2012 to 2016, show why. The project takes its name from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristoteles, who once said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” What Google wanted to find out with this long-term project was why some teams outperform others, despite having the world’s best talent, and why some teams are notably less successful than others. The goal was to understand why teams with seemingly similar team members perform so differently. For the study, a group of experts from a variety of backgrounds was assembled, including engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and folklorists. They scoured over 180 teams within Google, and the research and analysis took four years.
What did Google discover over the course of four years? Were they so special that they were also the best performing teams in the world’s leading IT companies? No, they were not. In fact, the conclusions of the Aristotle Project were familiar. The Aristotle Project summarized the secret of high-performing teams in one word: high psychological safety, which is the belief that no matter what you say in a meeting, your team leader and teammates won’t dismiss, belittle, or make fun of you for having a “weird” opinion. Trusting that you can say whatever you want and that it won’t be looked at as weird was the biggest key to productivity across the team. Google explains that this principle underpins the other four principles discovered in the Aristotle Project.
They were “trustworthiness,” “organizational structure and transparency,” “meaningfulness of work,” and “impact of work,” respectively. Credibility is the belief in the ability of coworkers to deliver on time and at a high level of performance that other team members trust. Organizational structure and transparency refers to the team having clear goals and clearly delineated roles among team members. Meaningfulness of work means that team members recognize that the work they’re doing is important to other team members. Finally, impact of work means that team members recognize that their work makes a positive difference to the company and society.
Google conducted a similar study in 2009. The Aristotle Project is an extension of the first one, which was called the Oxygen Project and focused primarily on team leaders within the company. It was called the Oxygen Project because good leaders are the oxygen of an organization. The goal was to understand what team leaders who lead high performing teams have in common with those who don’t, and what makes them successful. The intent was to identify the qualities of successful leaders at Google so that they could spread this DNA of success throughout the organization, and they found eight common traits.
Unlike the seemingly obvious results of the Aristotle Project, the Oxygen Project yielded something a little different. Even though Google is a high-tech company, the study found that expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math was the least influential of the qualities needed to succeed as a leader. Of course, it could be argued that anyone who has been promoted to a mid-level position at Google is an expert in more than enough things, so specialized engineering knowledge isn’t a discriminator.
In order of importance, here are the characteristics of a good leader that we found in the Oxygen project. The first one is “being a good coach of team members”. This was followed by “listening to team members,” “striving to understand people with different perspectives and values,” “helping coworkers and empathizing with them,” “thinking critically and solving problems,” and “connecting complex ideas together.
These are the commonalities of high-performing teams and the qualities of successful leaders that Google discovered through a large research project. As you’ve read, you’ve probably gotten a good idea of what the opposite of a good leader looks like: a bad leader. A team can’t consistently perform well under a leader who is always on edge and creates an atmosphere of fear, which shakes the team’s sense of psychological security.
GE has been through a very difficult restructuring process in the past, including being kicked off the New York Stock Exchange Dow after 111 years in June 2018. GE has undergone a major restructuring and reorganized its business by splitting into three separate companies: Healthcare, Aerospace, and Energy. GE was once an iconic American company that was considered a model for systematically developing leaders. Founded by inventor Thomas Edison, the 100+ year old company spends about six years searching for a CEO each time. That’s a long time for a company whose CEO search is often finalized in a month or two.
GE identifies potential CEO candidates from among its executives and then assigns them new businesses to evaluate their real-world management skills. In part, it was to help them develop their leadership skills and abilities through a variety of experiences. Over the course of several years, the company narrowed the pool of 20 potential candidates down to five or so, and then the current CEO met regularly with the CEO candidates to teach them leadership and business skills one-on-one. GE’s succession system is so rigorous that it was once called a CEO military academy. The average tenure of its CEOs has been about 14 years, which has allowed them to lead the company with a long-term perspective.
But even GE has been going through a tough restructuring lately, bordering on breaking up the group. While there are many reasons for the company’s difficulties, local media reports suggest that GE’s top executives have been too eager to hear good news and unwilling to take a hard look at the company’s reality. Even GE, which had a reputation for a rigorous leadership training program, had a rigid culture that prevented leaders from steering the company in the right direction.
As we’ve seen in the Google example, the qualities that make a good leader are something we all know enough about. However, it’s rare to find a leader who is recognized as a good leader by their subordinates. This is because the gap between what we know in our heads and what we practice in our bodies is so wide. At the end of the Aristotle Project and the Oxygen Project, Google came up with a checklist of principles that leaders should have in place, the first of which was “A leader should not interrupt team members while they are speaking.
