The case is about a project named Aristotle which Google has created to identify the patterns of

the team which has shwoed consistently good performance. The objective behind the study and
analysis is to replicate a similar work group and same patterns to increase the performance of
the entire organization.

To study this, the firm has spend lot of money and gathered huge amount of data from around
180 teams. Then it sliced and diced the data to find patterns that led to effective team
performance.The initial expectation was to find a composition of team members, a combination
of the characteristics, profiles, hobbies, networking, leadership styles etc. to identify similarities
and differences.

The initial findings were completely unepected as it couldn't find the reasons for the effective
team performance as two very similar teams in terms of composition and combination of
characteristics has widely differed in terms of the performance.

The firm actually invested in who was in the group rather than how the group functioned or
operated which is the main reason for the difference in performance. Google finally was able to
identify that it is the norms of the group which made the difference but identifying the norms is
the key to replicate the same. After intense analysis, it found that high performance teams
allowed members to speak roughly in the same proportion though they did it in various ways.
Second, the team members are aware of one another's emotions and acted accordingly.

The final challenge with the firm is on how to instill the norms in the teams at Google.

Below are the three problems identified in the case -

1. How to instill the norms in the teams at Google?

2. What are the appropriate communication practices to build empathy into the teams' dynamics?

3. How to sustain the implementation of the norms in the firm?

Below are the recommendations to the problems -

1. Identify the team leaders in each of the teams and communicate the norms by providing
examples to them so that they can communicate internally with their team members and start
implementing the norms.

2. Clearly providing various cases and corresponding examples is a good way to communicate
the importance and application of empathy in the team's dynamics.

3. The norms can be sustained by creating a work culture through various initiatives, road shows
etc. The performance of the teams can be compared to their own past performances to ensure
they continuously follow the norms.
Synopsis:
 Google's short and long-term success depend on the performance of its work teams.
Realizing this, Google applied its immense human, technological, and financial resources to
finding out what makes top-performing teams so effective. The company knew that teams
vary in terms of their performance, member satisfaction, and level of cohesion and conflict.
 Google sliced and diced the team data looking for patterns that would distinguish the most
successful from the less successful teams. It expected that some combination of team member
characteristics would reveal the optimal team profile. Such a profile or pattern never
emerged.
 It also tested the belief that the best teams were made up of the best individual contributors,
or that they paired introverts with introverts and friends with friends. To the researchers’
amazement, these assumptions were simply popular wisdom.
 Now Google needed to identify the operative norms. Members of the Project Aristotle team
began looking for team member data referring to factors such as unwritten rules, treatment
of fellow team members, ways they communicated in meetings, and ways they expressed
value and concern for one another. Dozens of potential norms emerged, but unfortunately
the norms of one successful team often conflicted with those of another.
 To help explain this finding, the Project Aristotle team reviewed existing research on teams
and learned that work teams that showed success on one task often succeed at most. Those
that performed poorly on one task typically performed poorly on others. This helped
confirm their conclusion that norms were the key. However, they still couldn’t identify the
particular norms that boosted performance or explain the seemingly conflicting norms of
similarly successful teams.
 Then came a breakthrough. After intense analysis, two behaviors emerged. First, all high-
functioning teams allowed members to speak in roughly the same proportion. Granted, they
did this in many different ways, from taking turns to having a moderator orchestrate
discussions, but the end result was the same—everybody got a turn. Second, the members of
successful teams seemed to be good at sensing other team members’ emotions, through
either their tone of voice, their expressions, or other nonverbal cues.
The case deals with Google’s quest to figure out what makes teams successful and how do
members in a team behave, interact with each other to make their teams effective. To better
understand these concepts, Google established Project Aristotle which sought to find answers to
these questions by collecting data from teams across Google, across products and across
geographies.

One of the problems with this approach was that there was no clear objective that they sought to
achieve as they began collecting data. Most of the notions that led the research during the initial
stages came from opinions and stereotypes that people held with regards to behavior and its
impact on performance.

Secondly, the study was focused solely on Google, while the problem to be solved lay within but
it never hurts to look at others to learn from their problems and challenges; the entire research
centered on Google, which made the project a classic case of missing out on the woods for the
trees. The blinkered approach went against them in the initial stages and a look at other firms of
similar scale would have helped them in arriving at a solution earlier.

Thirdly, the results of the project did not throw up anything new that were not known earlier. As
the closing stages of the case study reveal, teams that were the most successful were
empathetic to their team members as well as lent a shoulder to one another and basically helped
themselves as well as others. As Sherlock Holmes would tell his assistant “It is Elementary,
Watson!”