Psychological safety: Google’s project Aristotle (28 March 2024)

Summary

Project Aristotle was a project undertaken by Google to understand what makes teams successful. The project aimed to identify patterns and behaviours within teams that led to high performance. Starting in 2012, Google spent two years studying 250 attributes of their 180 teams. Initially, they thought that the recipe for a successful team would be a combination of high performers, an experienced manager and unlimited free resources. However, they would later find out they were wrong.

This blog by Bea Poyton describes how when the Project Aristotle team came across the idea of psychological safety, it filled the gaps in their understanding of what makes a successful team. They discovered that members of a team most needed to feel they could speak up and share ideas, challenges and concerns without fear of embarrassment or humiliation. These findings challenged conventional beliefs about team composition and management styles.

Content

You can also download The Psychological Safety Action Pack (there is a cost for this resource) written by the Psychological Safety team. It is designed to help managers, team members, leaders and people in training/people functions understand, measure, build and maintain psychological safety in teams and organisations.