In a world like tech, where everything is grounded in numbers and logic, it's easy to assume that assembling a team of super-smart, top-tier employees is the key to success. You only need a hand full of 10X ninja rockstar developers and everything will be great, right? Turns out, this assumption is further from reality than you might think. Research shows that simply putting together an all-star cast of brainiacs won't lead to greatness - at least not necessarily. The key to success rather lies in traits that are often overlooked.

Enter "Project Aristotle," a multi-year research initiative launched by Google in 2012. They analysed data from more than 180 teams within the company to identify patterns that could predict team success. Their findings were surprising: the primary factors for success weren't the intelligence of the individual members of the team nor its structure or composition. Instead, it was the way team members treated each other that made the biggest difference.

The researchers at Google found two key characteristics shared by each of their high-performing teams: they distributed conversational turn-taking equally, and they demonstrated a high level of social sensitivity. These teams provided a safe space for its members, with sufficient opportunities to speak and share their thoughts. At the same time, members of these teams managed to pick up on nonverbal cues and had a sense of how others were feeling. Teams that embodied these qualities consistently performed well, regardless of their task.

Although psychological safety is the key to a team's success, other factors also play a part, such as reliability or a sense of common purpose. Teams need decision-making power and control over their product focus, problem-solving methods and schedules. They need cognitive freedom to think about project challenges, test their ideas, and adapt solutions. Achieving this level of autonomy isn't possible without clear project goals and internal alignment with the company's values. Team members be in a position to understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture to ensure long-term success. Alignment is essential for turning an autonomous team into a winning squad. Yet it is only with a supportive psychological framework, that people are likely to attain these goals.

That is why we at Hivemind have been using agile methods such as XP (Extreme Programming) and DevOps for years. By promoting psychological safety and values like autonomy, fast feedback, and team collaboration, we aim to create the ideal conditions for high-performance teams to thrive. We also empower our teams with a categorical "team-first" approach: our developers decide how to develop a project and which technologies they want to implement. Utilising fast feedback cycles, they need to be able to react quickly to emerging problems as they arise. This ability to gather and respond to feedback while developing with testing and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) has become the cornerstone of fast, safe, and reliable software delivery.

Tl;dr: The secret to highly effective teams lies in creating a safe space for team members to take risks and openly share their thoughts, all the while empowering them to make decisions and collaborate effectively.