High-performing teams: what really explains them, and one simple tool among many

For years, many companies have put their teams together the way one completes a jigsaw puzzle. The most solid research shows that a team's performance depends on who is on it, on how it is led and on how it works together. The MBTI has a role in that conversation, as long as it is used for what it does well.

The question comes back every time a company grows: how do you build a team that performs? In a large corporation, a poorly composed team is diluted among forty others. In a company of twenty or thirty people, the leadership team and the two or three key teams are the company, and a poor combination shows within weeks, in results and in staff turnover.

The intuitive answer tends to focus on the people: bring together talent, track records and goodwill. The studies with the most data point to something less eye-catching and far more useful to whoever is in charge: the conditions in which that talent works.

What Google found when it studied 180 teams

Google analysed 180 of its own teams, 115 in engineering and 65 in sales, in the study it called Project Aristotle. It was looking for the ideal combination of profiles. Its conclusion was that who was on the team mattered less than how its members worked together.

Five dynamics explained the difference, in this order of weight:

• Psychological safety. Being able to take risks in front of the rest of the team without feeling exposed.
• Dependability. Everyone delivers on time and to the agreed standard.
• Structure and clarity. Goals, roles and plans that everyone knows.
• Meaning. The work matters to the person doing it.
• Impact. The team sees that its work changes something.

Just as revealing is what was left out. The extraversion of team members, their individual performance, their seniority, their tenure in the company and the size of the team had no significant link to effectiveness. Extraversion, it is worth stressing, is one of the four MBTI scales.

What makes a work team high-performing? According to Google's study of 180 teams, how a team works matters more than who is on it. Psychological safety is the main factor, followed by dependability, clear goals and roles, meaning in the work and a sense of impact. Team members' personalities and individual performance showed no significant link to effectiveness.

Psychological safety, the foundation of everything else

The concept was formulated by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, in 1999, after studying 51 teams at an office furniture manufacturer. She defined it as a belief shared by the members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Teams that hold that belief ask more questions, ask for help, admit mistakes and flag problems before they grow. In a word, they learn.

Psychological safety means being able to say "I got that wrong" or "this is going to go badly" without paying a personal price for it. It sits perfectly well alongside high standards, and in fact makes them possible. When an organisation identifies each person with their performance, a mistake stops being a fact and becomes a judgement on who they are. In a team like that, nobody risks failing, and a team that avoids failure at all costs stops learning precisely when it needs to most.

What is psychological safety in a team? It is the belief, shared by the members of a team, that they can take interpersonal risks, such as asking a question, disagreeing or admitting a mistake, without harm to their image or their standing. Amy Edmondson defined it in 1999, and Google's study found it to be the factor that weighs most in team effectiveness.

A team's intelligence depends on how its members relate

In 2010, a team led by researcher Anita Woolley published a study in the journal Science with 699 people divided into groups of two to five. They found a collective intelligence factor that explained around 40% of the variation in the groups' performance across very different tasks. That factor bore little relation to the average intelligence of the members or to that of the brightest one.

What did explain it was the way the group talked. Groups with greater social sensitivity, the ability to read how others are feeling, performed better, as did groups in which speaking time was shared. When one person dominated the conversation, the group lost intelligence. The proportion of women also had an effect, which the authors attributed to their higher average social sensitivity.

For anyone running a small or mid-sized company, the lesson is direct: a leadership committee of five brilliant people in which the same one always does the talking performs below its talent.

What the MBTI brings to a team

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was created in the 1940s, based on Carl Jung's theory of psychological types. It places each person on four pairs of preferences, which produce sixteen types. It is one of the most widely used personality questionnaires in business, and its appeal is well founded: it offers a simple language to talk about how each person recharges, takes in information, makes decisions and organises their time.

Its practical value lies in the four dimensions it describes. Each one captures two opposite ways of functioning, and everyone uses both, even if they feel more comfortable with one of them. The questionnaire sorts preferences, and leaves out ability, skill and character.

• Extraversion or Introversion (E or I). Where each person directs their energy: to the outer world of people and activity, or to the inner world of ideas and reflection. In a team it explains why some people think out loud and others need time before giving an opinion. The practical consequence is to send the agenda in advance and make room for written contributions.
• Sensing or Intuition (S or N). How information is taken in: from concrete facts and details, or from the big picture and the possibilities. It explains why the same proposal convinces some people through data and others through a vision of where it leads. A team that combines both grounds its ideas and, at the same time, looks beyond the immediate.
• Thinking or Feeling (T or F). How decisions are made: with objective, logical criteria, or with attention to values and to the effect on people. Both perspectives are needed in a difficult decision, such as a reorganisation or a promotion. Naming them stops one from being read as coldness and the other as softness.
• Judging or Perceiving (J or P). How each person deals with the outside world: seeking closure and planning, or staying open to new information. It explains a good deal of the friction over deadlines and changes of plan. Agreeing from the outset what gets closed and what stays open saves a great deal of friction.

Combined, the four letters give one of the sixteen types. In a workshop, each member learns their own, and the team draws its map and sees which preferences are plentiful and which are scarce. A committee in which everyone wants to close quickly, for example, gains a great deal from someone who asks for one more look at the information. That map leads to concrete working agreements: how meetings are prepared, how proposals are presented and how decisions are made.

Worth bearing in mind:

• Soundness of the theory. A review published in 2019 concludes that the idea of a "true type" split into four dichotomies fits poorly with the available data on personality and is hard to test. What matters, therefore, is to plant the seeds of difference and complementarity, rather than to pigeonhole people.
• Ability to predict performance. The Myers & Briggs Foundation warns that the questionnaire is designed for purposes other than hiring, that it measures preferences and leaves out ability, competence and skill, and that its results must never be used to limit anyone.

Its place, then, is in the conversation. In a team workshop, the MBTI helps people understand why one person needs to think before speaking while another thinks as they talk, or why a fixed plan reassures one person and stifles another. Used well, it broadens mutual understanding. Used as a label, or as a criterion for deciding who joins a team, it narrows it.

Is the MBTI useful for building work teams? Yes, and above all as a conversation tool, so that a team understands each member's preferences when communicating, deciding and organising their work.

Complementary in what they do, and also in their type

The complementarity that drives results lies in what each person knows how to do and in the role they take on within the team. A balanced leadership team combines knowledge of the customer, the product, the finances and the people. And within each conversation it needs someone who brings order, someone who challenges and someone who closes.

Diversity of thought comes from who we are, and therefore largely from different backgrounds: sectors, functions, company sizes and ways of having solved problems before. That diversity only pays off when the other two conditions of Google's study are in place: a clear structure, in which everyone knows who decides what, and the dependability of each member on what they commit to.

Five decisions for this quarter

1. Measure the team climate with three simple, anonymous questions: whether a problem can be raised without fear, whether mistakes are admitted and whether people ask for help naturally. The answer tells you more than any personality profile.
2. Write down the roles and decision areas of each member of the key team, and share them. Clarity is the condition that can be fixed fastest.
3. Share out speaking time in meetings. Whoever leads speaks last, and each person gives their view before the debate opens.
4. Keep personality questionnaires for team development. To hire or to decide who joins a team, the criteria are competencies and evidence of what each person has done.
5. Look at what happens after a mistake. If getting something wrong in public carries a personal cost, the team will learn to stay quiet, and the first symptom is usually that problems surface late.

Performing over time

A high-performing team bears little resemblance to a collection of excellent individuals. It is more like a space in which competent people can say what they see, make mistakes in time and correct them together. That is also why the best people stay: companies that care about how their teams work retain their talent more easily than those that are merely good at selecting it. For a smaller company competing for people with larger ones, building those conditions costs little money and a great deal of attention from whoever leads it.

Judith Ruiz de Esquide Fernández is the founder of DO'IN TALENT, a people leadership firm based in Madrid. She brings 26 years in people leadership and general management: 17 years of HR at L'Oréal and Air France/KLM, 9 years as General Manager of technology startups and scaleups, 6 years teaching digital transformation at IE Business School and 11 years as an executive coach and leadership speaker. Law and Psychology graduate, PADE from IESE and board education from ESADE. Full professional profile.

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