A Lesson On the Psychology of Meetings from SNL and Google, with Charles Duhigg | Big Think

About five years ago, Google started this interesting experiment. They wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team. And so what they did is they started collecting huge amounts of data about all the teams within Google. Their initial hypothesis was you can make teams better by putting the right people together, right? If you have some introverts and some extraverts, or maybe you have people who are friends away from the conference room, or maybe you need strong leaders and followers. But who you put together, they figured, is the way to build the perfect team. That’s the thing you want to control.

So they collected all their data. They spent millions of dollars and years looking at this stuff, and they couldn’t find any correlation between who was on a team and whether that team was effective or not. So they decided to start looking at this question in a completely different way. They started focusing instead on who was on the team; they started looking at how the team interacts.

We’ve all felt this before—that maybe away from a team setting we’re really outgoing. But then when we sit down, we kind of are more sedate because that’s how the team behaves. Or maybe there’s a group norm that it’s okay for people to interrupt each other. Or maybe it’s the alternative, that the group norm is that everyone takes turns talking, or you stay on the agenda, or you start the meeting by gossiping. Groups develop these unwritten rules, and that’s how they function.

And it turns out those group norms—that was the thing that determined whether a team was successful or not. In particular, there were two norms that seemed to have a huge influence on whether a team could work together and really become productive. The first was what’s known as a quality in conversational turn-taking. What this basically means is does everyone at the table get a chance to speak up?

We’ve all been in team meetings where half the table is quiet, right? Maybe some expert is in the room, and when a question comes up, they just talk for 10 or 15 minutes, and they tell everyone what they ought to do. That might be really efficient, but that’s terrible for a team. The best teams, it turns out, are ones where everyone at the table, regardless of whether they know what they’re talking about or not, feels like they have an opportunity to make their voice heard.

The second norm, the second behavior that makes groups more effective, is what’s known as high social sensitivity. Essentially, can I pick up on how you’re thinking and feeling based on nonverbal cues? If you’ve got your arms crossed, do I say to you, “Hey Jim, it looks like you’re kind of not super into this idea. Can you tell us about that?” Or if you look super enthusiastic, do I say, “Susan, you look really like you like this idea. Tell me what you think we should do next?”

Teams in which people all speak up and where there’s high social sensitivity—where people pick up on each other’s nonverbal cues—those, according to the data, are the most effective teams. What’s really interesting about this, though, is that if you were an outside observer and you got to look at effective teams at a glance, they might not look like the most productive groups.

The way that we encourage equality in conversational turn-taking and high social sensitivity is sometimes by doing these things like gossiping with each other or allowing someone to talk even if maybe they’re not an expert on a topic. Or getting to know each other in a way that if someone takes the conversation off agenda, we say, “Hey, I understand this is important to you, go with it for a little while.”

In other words, the teams that at a glance look most productive oftentimes aren’t. But if you can create this conversational turn-taking, equality of voices, if you can convince people to really listen to each other and be sensitive to the nonverbal cues we’re giving off, then you create psychological safety.

And psychological safety is the single greatest determinant in whether a team comes together or whether it falls apart. One of my ...