Yale hosted about a dozen different case competition teams. The one Julia joined included a former army officer, a think tank researcher, the director of a health education nonprofit, and a refugee program manager. Unlike her study group, everyone was from different backgrounds. From the start, though, they all clicked. Each time a new case arrived, the team would gather in the library and dive into action, spending hours brainstorming options, assigning research duties, and divvying up writing assignments. Then they would meet again and again and again. “One of the best cases we did was about Yale itself,” Julia said. “There had always been a student-run snack store, but the university was taking over food sales, and so the business school sponsored a contest to overhaul the shop.
“We met every night for a week. I thought we should fill the shop with nap pods, and someone else said it should become a game room, and there was also some kind of clothing swap idea. We had lots of crazy ideas.” No one ever shot down a suggestion, not even the nap pods. Julia’s study group, as part of their class assignments, had also engaged in a fair amount of brainstorming, “but if I had ever mentioned something like a nap pod, somebody would have rolled their eyes and come up with fifteen reasons why it was a dumb idea. And it was a dumb idea. But my case team loved it. We always loved each other’s dumb ideas. We spent an hour figuring out how nap pods could make money by selling accessories like earplugs.”
Eventually, Julia’s case team settled on the idea of converting the student shop into a micro-gym with a handful of exercise classes and a few workout machines. They spent weeks researching pricing models and contacting equipment manufacturers. They won the competition and the micro-gym exists today. That same year, Julia’s case team spent another month studying ways for a chain of eco-friendly convenience stores to expand into North Carolina. “We must have analyzed two dozen plans,” she said. “A lot of them turned out not to make any sense.” When the team traveled to Portland, Oregon, to present their final suggestion—a slow-growth approach that emphasized the chain’s healthy food options—they placed first in the nation.
Julia’s study group dissolved sometime in her second semester after one person, and then another, and then everyone stopped showing up. The case competition team grew as new students asked if they could join. The core group of five teammates, including Julia, remained involved the entire time they were at Yale. Today, these people are some of her closest friends. They attend one another’s weddings and visit each other when traveling. They call each other for career advice and pass along job leads.
It always struck Julia as odd that those two teams felt so different. Her study group felt stressful because everyone was always jousting for leadership and critiquing each other’s ideas. Her case competition team felt exciting because everyone was so supportive and enthusiastic. Both groups, however, were composed of basically the same kinds of people. They were all bright, and everyone was friendly outside of the team settings. There was no reason why the dynamic inside Julia’s study group needed to become so competitive, while the culture of the case team was so easygoing.
“I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,” Julia told me. “It didn’t seem like it had to happen that way.”
After graduation, Julia went to work at Google and joined its People Analytics group, which was tasked with studying nearly every aspect of how employees spent their time. What she was supposed to do with her life, it turned out, was use data to figure out why people behave in certain ways.
For six years running, Google had been ranked by Fortune as one of America’s top workplaces. The company’s executives believed that was because, even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity. The People Analytics group, part of Google’s human resources division, helped examine if employees were satisfied with their bosses and coworkers, whether they felt overworked, intellectually challenged, and fairly paid, whether their work-life balance was actually balancing out, as well as hundreds of other variables. The division helped with hiring and firing decisions, and its analysts provided insights into who should be promoted and who, perhaps, had risen too fast. In the years before Julia joined the group, People Analytics had determined that Google needed to interview a job applicant only four times to predict, with 86 percent confidence, if they would be a good hire. The division had successfully pushed to increase paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks because computer models indicated that would reduce the frequency of new mothers quitting by 50 percent. At the most basic level, the division’s goal was to make life at Google a little bit better and a lot more productive. With enough data, People Analytics believed, almost any behavioral puzzle could be solved.
People Analytics’ biggest undertaking in recent years had been a study—code-named Project Oxygen before it was revealed—that examined why some managers were more effective than others. Ultimately, researchers had identified eight critical management skills.*1 “Oxygen was a huge success for us,” said Abeer Dubey, a People Analytics manager. “It helped clarify what differentiated good managers from everyone else and how we could help people improve.” The project was so useful, in fact, that at about the same time Julia was hired, Google began another massive effort, this one code-named Project Aristotle.
Dubey and his colleagues had noticed that many Google employees, in company surveys, had consistently mentioned the importance of their teams. “Googlers would say things like ‘I have a great manager, but my team has never clicked’ or ‘My manager isn’t fantastic, but the team is so strong it doesn’t matter,’?” said Dubey. “And that was kind of eye opening, because Project Oxygen had looked at leadership, but it hadn’t focused on how teams function, or if there’s an optimal mix of different kinds of people or backgrounds.” Dubey and his colleagues wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team. Julia became one of the effort’s researchers.
The project started with a sweeping review of academic literature. Some scientists had found that teams functioned best when they contained a concentration of people with similar levels of extroversion and introversion, while others had found that a balance of personalities was key. There were studies about the importance of teammates having similar tastes and hobbies, and others lauding diversity within groups. Some research suggested that teams needed people who like to collaborate; others said groups were more successful when individuals had healthy rivalries. The literature, in other words, was all over the place.
So Project Aristotle spent more than 150 hours asking Google employees what they thought made a team effective. “We learned that teams are somewhat in the eye of the beholder,” said Dubey. “One group might appear like it’s working really well from the outside, but, inside, everyone is miserable.” Eventually, they established criteria for measuring teams’ effectiveness based on external factors, such as whether a group hit their sales targets, as well as internal variables, such as how productive team members felt. Then the Aristotle group began measuring everything they could. Researchers examined how often teammates socialized outside of work and how members divided up tasks. They drew complicated diagrams to show teams’ overlapping memberships, and then compared those against statistics of which groups had exceeded their department’s goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance had an impact on effectiveness.