Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

by Rand Fishkin

Project Aristotle, an internal Google research project, looked at thousands of teams at the company with years of empirical data on performance and concluded that empathy between team members and a group norm of emotional support was the best, most consistent predictor of a team’s success. A 2012 North Dakota State University study found that social sensitivity, “the ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others,” was strongly correlated with high-performing teams. A 2008 Carnegie Mellon University study uncovered much the same in their analysis of 699 individuals broken into small groups for five-hour-long projects. The New York Times wrote about its results: What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the “good” teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.