Biglaw, Law Schools, Minority Issues, Small Law Firms

What Lawyers Can Learn From Google's Quest To Build The Perfect Team

How is your law firm’s group culture, and how can it be improved?

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happy diverse team lawyers partner with associates“Now I know that’s contradiction, wants and needs in competition / But it’s hard to stay on point with such extremes in opposition / While we waiting on that compromise, proceed with that conscious eye.” – Lupe Fiasco

The New York Times Magazine recently published an article, What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, by Charles Duhigg. In his article, Duhigg writes that Google started “Project Aristotle” in 2012 to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.

Despite mountains of data, Abeer Dubey, a leader of the project, stated that it was near impossible to find patterns. But his team kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms,’’ as Duhigg notes:

Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound. Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

So which norms were the ones that successful teams shared? The researchers observed 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. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ the study’s lead author Anita Woolley said. ‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’

2. 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 — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

These traits are part of what’s known as psychological safety — “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,” as Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson put it in a 1999 study. Psychological safety fosters a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” and creates “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

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According to Duhigg, the Google researchers found that although factors like having clear goals and fostering a culture of dependability also mattered, the data showed “that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.”

Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last twenty years. No doubt, in today’s increasingly interconnected world, lawyers are required to collaborate with each other on an ever-increasing basis. And with extremely high attrition rates continuing to plague law firms, it is more important than ever to focus on teamwork.

How is your law firm’s group culture? Do Asian-American women feel more pressure to act “feminine” — demure and passive — and receive more pushback if they don’t? Are Latinas at risk of being seen as “angry” or “too emotional” when they assert themselves? Are black women perceived as “angry black women” when they express emotion? Does your firm even have any Asian-American, Latina, or black women?

So what can lawyers and law firms take away from Project Aristotle? Teamwork is essential to success. And psychological safety is pivotal to making a team work. If your law firm is suffering from high attrition rates or a combative culture, it may be time to review your “group norms.”

After all, as many of you already know: teamwork makes the dream work.

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Renwei Chung attends SMU Dedman School of Law. He has an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and a MBA from the University of Chicago. He is passionate about writing, technology, psychology, and economics. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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