Google’s ‘Aristotle Project’ is a study exploring the secrets of top-performing teams and leadership. We learn about the importance of psychological safety and teamwork.

Google’s Aristotle (The Secrets of High-Performing Teams and Team Leaders)

Respected business leaders like Kazuo Inamori, the honorary chairman of Kyocera and often called the living god of management, demand strict morality and constant personal cultivation from leaders. This is because as one’s position within the company rises, the negative impact of an individual’s misconduct on the organization and its members grows significantly. Therefore, global companies invest considerable money and time not only in developing top executives and senior management but also in cultivating mid-level managers at the team leader level. The curricula prepared for this purpose do not stop at the specialized knowledge necessary for corporate management, such as finance, accounting, sales, marketing, and organizational management. The more elite the company, the more attention it pays to developing managers with sound character, cultivating them into talent capable of seamless collaboration. Google is a prime example. While Google might seem like an organization where engineers armed with cutting-edge engineering knowledge drive success through individual brilliance, the reality is different.

Google’s Internal Organizational Culture Improvement Project

The results of Google’s ‘Aristotle Project’—an internal organizational culture improvement initiative conducted over four years from 2012 to 2016—reveal why. This project takes its name from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who famously stated, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Google’s goal through this long-term project was to solve the puzzle: why do some teams, despite being composed of world-class talent, achieve significantly better results than others, while conversely, some teams consistently underperform? Google aimed to understand why teams with seemingly similar members could have such vastly different outcomes. A diverse team of experts—engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and folklorists—was assembled for the research. They were tasked with thoroughly investigating over 180 teams within Google, a process that took four years of research and analysis.
What did Google discover over four years about the secrets of high-performing teams? Given that these were the top-performing teams within the world’s leading IT company, were their secrets exceptionally unique? Not at all. In fact, the Aristotle Project’s conclusions were things we already knew. The key to high-performing teams identified by the Aristotle Project can be summed up in one phrase: ‘teams with high psychological safety’. Simply put, it means the belief that no matter what opinion you voice in a meeting, the team leader and members won’t dismiss it as ‘weird,’ look down on it, or think it’s ridiculous. The belief that any opinion can be freely shared without being judged was the biggest secret to boosting the entire team’s productivity. Google explains that this principle is the foundation for the other four principles discovered in the Aristotle Project.
The four secrets were ‘Trustworthiness’, ‘Organizational Structure and Transparency’, ‘Meaning of Work’, and ‘Impact of Work’. Trustworthiness refers to the belief in a colleague’s ability to deliver high-quality results on time. Organizational Structure and Transparency means the team has clear goals and well-defined roles among members. Meaning of work means team members clearly understand that their work matters to others on the team. Finally, impact of work signifies that team members are aware their work brings about positive change for the company and society.
Google had conducted similar research back in 2009. The Aristotle Project can be seen as an expansion of this earlier initiative, known as the ‘Oxygen Project,’ which primarily focused on studying team leaders within the company. The name ‘Oxygen Project’ was chosen because good leaders are like the oxygen of an organization. At that time, the research subjects were team leaders only, not the entire team. The goal was to identify what common traits leaders of high-performing teams shared. The intent was to pinpoint the qualities of successful leaders at Google and spread this “success DNA” throughout the entire organization. Google identified eight common characteristics then as well.
Unlike the somewhat predictable results of the Aristotle Project, the Oxygen Project yielded a slightly more surprising outcome. Despite Google being a cutting-edge IT company, the research found that expertise in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) was identified as the least influential trait among those necessary for success as a leader. Of course, anyone promoted to mid-level management or above at Google possesses more than sufficient expertise, so it could also be interpreted that specialized engineering knowledge doesn’t serve as a particularly differentiating factor.
The conditions for good leadership identified by the Oxygen Project, listed in order of importance, are as follows. The first condition is ‘being a good coach to team members’. The subsequent conditions, in order, were: ‘listening to team members’ opinions’, ‘striving to understand people with different perspectives and values’, ‘helping colleagues and showing empathy towards them’, ‘thinking critically and solving problems’, and ‘connecting complex ideas into a cohesive whole’.
We have now examined the common traits of high-performing teams and the qualities of successful leaders discovered through Google’s large-scale research project. While reading, you likely naturally envisioned the opposite traits of a bad leader. Under a leader who undermines team members’ psychological safety, constantly keeps organizational members in fear, and fosters a climate of dread, outstanding performance cannot be consistently achieved.
GE underwent a very difficult restructuring process in the past, including being removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2018 after 111 years. Through extensive restructuring, GE completed its division into three independent companies—Healthcare, Aviation, and Energy—to reorganize its business. GE was once a leading American company, cited as a model for systematic leadership development. Founded by inventor Thomas Edison over a century ago, GE typically spends about six years selecting its CEO. This timeline is incomparable to companies where CEO appointments are usually finalized within a month or two.
GE identified potential CEO candidates from among its executives, then assigned them new businesses to assess their practical management capabilities. This approach also supported the development of leadership and capabilities through diverse experiences. After narrowing down the pool of over 20 potential candidates to about five over several years, the incumbent CEO would meet regularly with the CEO candidates, providing one-on-one coaching on leadership and business acumen. Thanks to this meticulous succession system, GE was once renowned as a veritable CEO academy. The average tenure of its CEOs reached approximately 14 years, enabling the company to be steered with a long-term perspective.
Yet even GE, despite this legacy, has recently undergone a grueling restructuring bordering on group dissolution. While multiple factors contributed to the company’s difficulties, local media pointed out that GE’s top executives preferred to hear only good news and failed to make a concerted effort to objectively confront the company’s realities. Even GE, once renowned for its systematic leadership training programs, became entrenched in a rigid organizational culture, preventing its leaders from steering the company in the right direction.
As we saw earlier with Google’s case, the qualities needed to be a good leader are already well-known to all of us. Yet, despite this common knowledge, it’s rare to find leaders who earn the praise of being good leaders from their subordinates. This is because the gap between knowing something intellectually and putting it into practice is that wide. Google, upon concluding the Aristotle Project and the Oxygen Project, released a checklist outlining several principles leaders should consistently uphold. The very first principle stated: ‘A leader should not interrupt team members while they are speaking.’