HBR Guide to Collaborative Teams (HBR Guide Series)

CHAPTER 4

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

by Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

At the start of 2016, Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team.¹ After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense (and is hardly counterintuitive).

Perhaps more surprising, Google’s research implies that the kinds of people in the team are not so relevant. While that may be true at Google, a company where people are preselected on the basis of their ...