Erik: Hi, guys. It’s Erik here from Basic Bananas Canada. Today, I want to share with you a little bit about teams and team building and what makes an effective team. At first I thought I could share with you a little bit about maybe Basic Bananas and our team or maybe teams that I’ve had in previous companies that I ran. I think what will illustrate this point better than anything that I can share from a personal perspective is taking it to a macro view of teams and a study that was done a few years ago.

Back in 2012, there’s this little company that some of you guys might have heard of named Google. Google wanted to take a look at their teams and find out what made their teams super effective. They actually got together a little team, and they put together this project code name Project Aristotle. Project Aristotle, the main objective was to find out what were the unifying elements that created teams that were highly productive, highly effective.

This team of researchers that came together on Project Aristotle, they stuttered, stuttered? They studied over 180 teams within Google over a period of years. Within the first three years of the study, they compiled thousands of data points. They’ve looked at teams from every angle that they could think of, and they came to a surprising conclusion. There was no conclusion. They had put all that data together and they couldn’t find any correlations in the teams. They were looking at is one management structure better than another management structure? Is it better if the employees hang together outside of work or within work, and they don’t hang together outside of work at all? Is it better whether there are clear incentives for the employees or whether there are no clear incentives? Is it better whether you have one individual leading the team or whether you have the team working together without a clear leader? There was no correlation between any of those points and hundreds, if not thousands of other points.

They decided to take a deeper look, and they actually started sitting in on the meetings that were happening. They had to sit on the meetings to find the human interactions that were going on to find the unifying factor that their data couldn’t show on paper. That’s the same unifying element that I found true in all the companies I’ve worked with, I definitely found true with our team at Basic Bananas.

This is what the Google team conclusion came to. The unifying element for everybody that made an effective team was trust, and that’s awesome, because with trust, it’s not something where you have to have a complicated management structure. It’s not something where you have to have a complicated incentive structure. All this means is that you’re open about yourself with your teammates, and your teammates are open about themselves with you. They can share their stresses, their challenges with you and the rest of the team and vice versa. There’s just those open lines of communication. You know those individuals have your back at the end of the day. This is the one unifying element that created an effective team.

I like to say, too, we have trust. I know this is not a must-have in teams. I also like to throw humor in there, too. I like to have trust and I like to have a little bit of humor. It’s good to release the tension sometimes. At the end of the day, it comes down to trust and this is the most important element. Create a team for yourselves, create a team for the company where you can trust the other members in your team, your employees or your management level execs to get things done, and they can trust you as well. What that means, Patrick, if you’re watching this from Basic Bananas, is that your secret about bringing the mouse into the office as a cuddle buddy for lunchtime, I’ll never tell anybody that. That secret is safe with me. It’ll never get out.

Thanks for watching, guys. Hopefully you can implement that into your teams and takeaway, and it’ll create a dynamic that’s healthy for your company and for the employees that you’re interacting with. All right. We’ll see you in the next video.