MYTH #4: “Psychological safety depends on the personalities in the team.”
Google did a study on this one. They called it “Project Aristotle”.
Crunched massive amounts of people data from 180 teams across the globe.
Hundreds of double-blind interviews.
Over 35 different statistical models.
Loads of data from past academic studies.
2 years in duration.
A sampling of the people elements they looked at:
Similar interests, frequency of socialisation outside the office, similar hobbies, educational backgrounds, personality traits, membership in professional bodies, length of team continuity, colocation, workload size, seniority, team size, skill sets, demographics, tenure of team members.
No matter how they cut the data..
“The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
-Abeer Dubey, Google People Analytics Director
The factor that cut across all of these in determining team performance was a foundation of Psychological Safety.
Psych Safety was on a different plane.
With the right conditions it can be cultivated no matter who is on your team!