The #1 Factor That Makes Teams Win
Google Spent 2 Years and $2M to Find This
The smartest company in the world spent two years and countless resources studying their own teams, only to discover they'd been thinking about talent completely wrong.
Google's Project Aristotle examined 180 teams, 115 in engineering and 65 in sales, hunting for the secret sauce of high performance. They had statisticians, organizational psychologists, and engineers all convinced they'd crack the code.
The hypothesis seemed bulletproof: Stack a team with rock stars, add some complementary skills, throw in good chemistry, and boom - unstoppable team.
They were spectacularly wrong.
After analyzing over 250 different team attributes, there was no clear pattern of characteristics that could predict success. The "who" part of the equation barely moved the needle.
But here's where it gets interesting
The most significant factor was "psychological safety" — a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.
Think about the last meeting you were in.
Did you speak up when you disagreed?
Did you ask the "stupid" question?
Or did you stay quiet because it felt safer?
That split-second calculation, the one where you decide whether to risk looking foolish, turns out to be everything.
Teams with high psychological safety brought in 17% more revenue than their sales targets. Individuals on these teams were less likely to leave Google, more likely to harness diverse ideas, and were rated as effective twice as often by executives.
The math is brutal
Teams with high psychological safety showed 19% higher productivity, 31% more innovation, and 27% lower turnover rates.
But here's what makes this counterintuitive — psychological safety isn't about being nice or comfortable. It's about creating an environment where the hard conversations happen faster, not slower.
When people feel safe to admit mistakes, those mistakes get fixed quickly instead of hidden until they explode. When someone can say "I don't understand" without looking incompetent, the whole team learns faster.
Google found that the general intelligence of a team emerged as a poor indicator of effectiveness. Some of the smartest teams were also some of the weakest.
Why?
Because intelligence without trust is just a bunch of smart people
protecting their egos.
The other four factors that mattered were dependability (people do what they say), structure and clarity (everyone knows the plan), meaning (the work matters personally), and impact (it makes a difference).
But psychological safety was the foundation. Without it, the other four crumble.
This changes everything we think we know
We obsess over hiring the smartest people in the room, when we should obsess over creating rooms where people feel smart enough to speak up.
The best part? You don't need Google's resources to create psychological safety. You just need to model it.
Admit your mistakes first.
Ask genuine questions.
Thank people for bringing up problems instead of shooting the messenger.
Teams with psychological safety were more likely to admit to making mistakes and learn from them, leading to increased productivity and job satisfaction.
The irony is perfect: Google used all their data and algorithms to discover that the most important thing can't be coded. It has to be felt.
Turns out Aristotle was right — the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. But only when the parts feel safe enough to be vulnerable with each other.
You might want to read this next - it lays out the path: The Engineering Leader Roadmap