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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

• Our data-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits and office quirks with a scrutiny that our cubicle-bound forebears could only dream of.
• project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked.
• Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’
  
  

• the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues
• We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘‘People here are really busy,’’ she said. ‘‘We needed clear guidelines.
• There was one senior engineer who would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’ Sakaguchi said