A successful team is made up of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group in action, you see professionals waiting for a topic to come up where they are experts, then talking at length, explaining what the group should do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is effective. There is no idle talk or long discussions. The meeting ends as scheduled and is canceled so everyone can go back to their desks.
The good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling
Psychological safety: Everyone feels safe in taking risks around their team members, and that they won’t be embarrassed or punished for doing so.
Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.
Structure and clarity: Everyone knows what their specific expectations are.
Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. … There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.