Culture Is the Way

CHAPTER 7Winning Hearts and Minds for Impactful Culture‐Building

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team.

—Reid Hoffman

In 2012, Google was pursuing a determined path to study and analyze the hundreds of different teams within the organization and get to the bottom of why some teams succeeded and why others fell short. The company‐wide initiative was dubbed Project Aristotle in honor of Aristotle's quote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”¹

Researchers at Google figured that employees would be more productive if they collaborated rather than worked alone. “What makes a team effective at Google?” was the ultimate question they wanted to answer. They decided to assess the performance of their most successful teams and replicate their success by forming similar teams throughout the organization. After years of extensive research and analyzing the data gathered from nearly 200 interviews with different teams at Google, they discovered multiple key characteristics that make a great team, but psychological safety was the most important.²

Psychological safety can mean different things to different people. Amy Edmonson, the author of The Fearless Organization and Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, says: “Psychological safety isn't about being nice. It's about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other.”³

There has been ...