As technology advances and our use of it becomes more prevalent, the type and size of problems we are asked to solve have become larger and more complex.

It's unusual for a single person to have all the necessary skills to complete the work, or have the time to do so. We, therefore, have to work in teams to get the job done.

When hiring, we often pay attention to the technical abilities of the candidates because we usually need a particular skill set, but we pay little attention to how an individual might work within a team. And hiring someone based on the words such as "is a good team player" in their CV or cover letter is not enough in this age of communication and close collaboration.

With an increasing emphasis on needing skills other than just technical abilities, we need to be able to recognize the characteristics of a good team player so that we can:

• Recognize them in others that are looking to join our team
• Treat them as skills that we need to cultivate

Google recently published the results coming out of its long-running Project Aristotle, research that they had been carrying out to study the phenomenon of what makes a group of individuals more likely to succeed at being a great team. 

Their not-so-surprising results show the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills, which include the following:

• Having a sense of equality and generosity
• Showing curiosity toward the ideas of teammates
• Having empathy and emotional intelligence
• Perhaps the most important, psychological safety

We first looked at the results of Project Aristotle and discussed how to create Psychological Safety back in Chapter 11, Improving Our Team Dynamics to Increase Our Agility, when looking at how time improves our team dynamics to increase our agility.

Just to recap, Psychological Safety is a term first coined by Amy Edmondson at Harvard University in her paper Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol 44, Issue 2, pp. 350 - 383, First Published June 1, 1999, https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999).

In essence, if a team has a feeling of psychological safety, then individuals:

• Are confident about speaking up
• Believe their ideas are being listened to
• Feel that the team environment is a safe place to try new ideas

While some of this might seem like essential hygiene factors for teams, it's surprising how anything less than this can cause feelings of fear and of being bullied. Bullying doesn't need to be blatant either; it can be as simple as just ignoring an idea, or dismissing it without justification.