8 Building Better Teams and Communities

From assembly lines to executive boards, teams do most of the work and make most of the decisions in contemporary organizations. How, then, can organizations build effective teams? With their company positioned as a leader in the technology sector, senior management at Google thought that they had a unique advantage in answering this question: data on their employees, and lots of it. With this goal, Google launched Project Aristotle in 2012. The project team gathered an enormous amount of data—down to who had lunch with whom—on 180 Google teams and conducted in-depth interviews with all of them. The original idea of the company's executives was that the best team would be formed by identifying the most capable people for a job and putting them together. Yet, no matter how the project team looked at the data, they found no evidence that the composition of a team matters. As summarized by the project leader Abeer Dubey, "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."