| Speaking as a former member of more than one low-performing team at Google, none of the exercises would have helped our performance very much. What would have helped: 1. Being co-located. We would have been more effective sitting and working together, but instead we were distributed across multiple time zones and countries. 2. Working on a project with a future, instead of one that was winding down. It's difficult to "harness the power of diverse ideas" or be "rated as effective" when our team's charter is maintaining a project to its EOL date, with no plans for a successor. 3. Avoiding morale-sapping demotions in responsibility. One of my teams had its responsibilities changed from supporting the system we built and deployed, to assisting one of Google's "partners" deploy an inferior replacement. More than one member left when that happened. 4. Reducing the technology churn. When our leadership changes the product every six months, which forces us to switch to a different technology, we're stuck coming up to speed instead of contributing out of our expertise. 5. Reducing the team member churn. Constantly leaving and replacing team members is both a symptom and a cause of low performance. Here Google's internal mobility works against it. (These events were due to leadership shifts at the VP level, and had nothing to do with our team's output, which I think was better than it ought to be given our circumstances.) The point is that a team's performance has more to do with the larger organization than the team's internals. Frankly this article feels like blame-shifting: if we teach them some exercises to do at meetings, maybe they won't notice all these institutional issues. |