A Lesson On the Psychology of Meetings from SNL and Google, with Charles Duhigg | Big Think

A Lesson On the Psychology of Meetings from SNL and Google,

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It's incredible to think that Saturday Night Live and Google, given their very different goals, create teams of people similarly. But as reporter Charles Duhigg discovered, they very much do. For SNL, it was creator Lorne Michaels who managed a team of writers and comedians to produce a high-quality show under extremely rigid time constraints. At Google, the original hypothesis about teams — that the right combinations of personalities is what made them effective — proved false. What they found instead is that the coherency of group norms is the determining factor: in other words, is everyone on the same page about how the group works, and does everyone have a voice? If so, you can expect some good results.

Duhigg's latest book is Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.

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CHARLES DUHIGG:

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of The Power of Habit. He is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Charles Duhigg: About five years ago Google started this interesting experiment. They wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team. And so what they did is they started collecting huge amounts of data about all the teams within Google. And their initial hypothesis was you can make teams better by putting the right people together, right. If you have some introverts and some extraverts or maybe you have people who are friends away from the conference room or maybe you need strong leaders and followers. But who you put together they figured is the way to build the perfect team. That’s the thing you want to control. So they collected all their data. They spent millions of dollars and years looking at this stuff and they couldn’t find any correlation between who was on a team and whether that team was effective or not. So they decided to start looking at this question in a completely different way. They started focusing instead of who was on the team they started looking at how the team interacts. We’ve all felt this before that maybe away from a team setting we’re really outgoing. But then when we sit down we kind of are more sedate because that’s how the team behaves.

Or maybe there’s a group norm that it’s okay for people to interrupt each other. Or maybe it’s the alternative that the group norm is that everyone takes turns talking or you stay on the agenda or you start the meeting by gossiping. Groups develop these unwritten rules and that’s how they function. And it turns out those group norms that was the thing that determined whether a team was successful or not. In particular there were two norms that seemed to have a huge influence on whether a team could work together and really become productive. The first was what’s known as a quality and conversational turn taking. What this basically means is does everyone at the table get a chance to speak up. We’ve all been in team meetings where half the table is quiet, right. Maybe some expert is in the room and when a question comes up they just talk for 10 or 15 minutes and they tell everyone what they ought to do. That might be really efficient but that’s terrible for a team. The best teams it turns out are ones where everyone at the table regardless of whether they know what they’re talking about or not feels like they have an opportunity to make their voice heard. The second norm, the second behavior that makes groups more effective is what’s known as high social sensitivity. Essentially can I pick up on how you’re thinking and feeling based on nonverbal cues. If you’ve got your arms crossed do I say to you hey Jim, it looks like you’re kind of like not super into this idea. Can you tell us about that? Or if you look super enthusiastic do I say Susan, you look really like you like this idea. Like tell me what you think we should do next.

Teams in which people all speak up and where there’s high social sensitivity where people pick up on each other’s nonverbal cues, ........

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