Book Review: “Smarter Faster Better”

Teams

• Google’s People Analytics team undertook a study code-named Project Oxygen to determine why some managers were more effective than others. “Project Oxygen found that a good manager (1) is a good coach; (2) empowers and does not micromanage; (3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; (4) is results oriented; (5) listens and shares information; (6) helps with career development; (7) has a clear vision and strategy; (8) has key technical skills.”
• Another Google People Analytics’ project, Aristotle, investigated what makes high-performing teams. They found five key norms:
  1. Teams need to believe that their work is important.
  2. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
  3. Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
  4. Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
  5. Most importantly, teams need psychological safety.
• “There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study hows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.”
• "The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader. It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says, ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.” -Amy Edmondson
• Another research project—this one undertaken by psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT—reached similar results: “It was the norms, not the people, that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers.” Two behaviors were shared by all high-performing teams:
  1. “All the members of the team spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’”
  2. “The good team tested as having ‘high average social sensitivity’—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.”

Focus

• “In the age of automation, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.”
• "We aid our focus by building mental models—telling ourselves stories—about what we expect to see.”
• "Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.”
• A large research project conducted at a midsize recruiting firm found that “the firms’ most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits”: (1) “They tended to work on only five projects at once—a healthy load, but not extraordinary.” (2) “They were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities.” (3) They were “drawn to assignments that were in their early stages.” (4) “They loved to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees…The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models.”

Goal Setting

• GE helped initiate SMART goals as well as STRETCH goals.
• “Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best.’” -Edwin Locke and Gary Latham
• “Making yourself break a goal into its SMART components is the difference between hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it.” -Gary Latham
• SMART goals occasionally fail because they don’t evaluate whether the goal itself is important or trivial. Always make sure you’re doing the right things.
• “Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.”
• “The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims.”