Code 201 Class 14b Reading Notes
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
The Work Issue: Reimagining the office
1) How to beuild a Perfect Team
2) The War on Meetings
3) The Case for Blind Hiring
4) Failure to Lunch
5) The ‘Good Jobs’ Gamble
6) Rethinking the Work-Life Equation
7) The Rise of White-Collar Automation
8) The Post-Cubicle Office
9) The New Dream Jobs
Todays most valueable firms are realizing that ‘employee performance optimization’ isn’t enough. More than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
Google found the most porductive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions and best traits for managers are good communication and avoiding micromanaging.
Google found no strong patterns in the search of finding the most effictive teams. From friends who socialized outside of work, or strangers way from the conference room, or groups that sought out strong managers.
TWO Behaviors that all the good teams generally shared.
1) On the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. If everyone got a chance to speak the team did well , if one person or small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”
2) Good teams all had high “average social sensitivity” - skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. THIS IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
If I can't be open and honest at work, then I'm not really living, am I?
We ultimately just want to feel "psychologically safe"
The “employee performance optimization” movement has given us a method for talking about our insecurities, fears, and aspirations in more constructive ways.
Personal Note
As a project manager, I had worked with several different types of teams with different personalities traits and I had to evolve my management style to each project in order to make it successful. I found that it was always varied to who the team was and what the customer ask is. The skeleton structure, however, was always driven the same, what was the customers requirements and what was the customers wishes. Wishes being, if they had a magical genie that could grant any wish, what was it? But the most important thing we followed was deadlines. When myself or the customer set a deadline and budget, you follow it. If it starts going out of skew, raise a flag right away and determine what is happening and see what you need to do to shift the ship back to course.