<div class='bc_element' id='bc_element1' style='width:auto;padding:5px;max-height:100%;'><span>Marketing, advertising, analytics, and design teams are built around different kinds of specialists working together. A campaign may depend on strategists, researchers, designers, copywriters, media teams, analysts, and product leaders making dozens of connected decisions. Employers can hire excellent people in every one of those functions and still end up with a team that moves slowly, avoids difficult conversations, or produces inconsistent work. Google wanted to understand why. Its People Analytics team studied more than 200 teams in a research effort called <a href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness?utm_source=worktote">Project Aristotle</a>, looking for the conditions that separated its stronger teams from the rest. The question was useful for any employer: once you have hired capable people, what helps them actually perform well together? <b>Google Went Looking for the Right Mix of People </b> Google initially explored many of the things companies normally look at when building teams. Perhaps the strongest teams had more high performers. Maybe personality combinations mattered. Educational background, seniority, team size, and individual performance were all possible explanations. Google <a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-emea/future-of-marketing/management-and-culture/five-dynamics-effective-team/?utm_source=worktote">examined more than 250 variables, used more than 35 statistical models</a>, and studied teams across functions including engineering, product management, and sales. The result shifted the focus away from credentials and toward the environment in which people worked. Google found that how team members worked together was more useful in understanding team effectiveness than simply who was on the team. That matters for employers because hiring is only one part of performance. A strong designer still needs a clear brief. A talented analyst needs a business question worth answering. A researcher needs a team willing to hear findings that challenge an existing idea. A strategist needs people around them who can question assumptions before a campaign reaches the market. Once people are inside the organization, managers shape many of the conditions that determine whether those skills are fully used. Google identified five dynamics that appeared consistently in more effective teams: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Psychological safety was the strongest. It describes whether people feel comfortable asking questions, raising concerns, admitting mistakes, and disagreeing without worrying that speaking up will damage their standing in the team. Google found that sales teams with high psychological-safety scores exceeded their targets by 17%, while teams with low scores missed their targets by as much as 19%. Employees on psychologically safer teams were also less likely to leave and more likely to make use of ideas contributed by teammates. For an employer, that has practical consequences. If a junior analyst notices that a campaign is being built on weak data, the organization benefits when they feel able to say so. If a designer believes the brief will create accessibility problems, the team needs to hear that before launch. If customer research contradicts what leadership expected to find, the value of hiring a research team depends partly on whether those findings can actually influence the decision. The other four dynamics are just as operational. Dependability means people can rely on one another to deliver quality work on time. Structure and clarity means responsibilities, priorities, goals, and decision rights are understood. Meaning reflects whether employees see personal value in the work. Impact is whether they understand how their contribution affects the customer, business, or wider organization. None of these requires an elaborate culture program. They show up in everyday management decisions. <b>What Employers Can Actually Do With the Five Dynamics </b> Project Aristotle becomes more useful when employers turn the five ideas into things they can observe and improve. Start with psychological safety. Look at what happens when someone disagrees in a meeting. Do senior people immediately defend the existing direction, or does the team examine the concern? Managers can make this easier by asking for risks, opposing views, and missing information before a final decision is made. Leaders can also acknowledge their own mistakes and change course publicly when new evidence warrants it. That tells employees that changing your mind is part of doing good work. For dependability, look at where projects repeatedly stall. The problem may be workload, unclear ownership, unrealistic deadlines, or people failing to follow through. Employers can make responsibilities explicit and create visible handoffs between functions. In marketing, advertising, analytics, and design teams, that might mean clarifying who owns the brief, who approves the final creative, who signs off on the data, and when each decision needs to happen. Structure and clarity deserves particular attention in cross-functional work. A campaign can have ten talented people and still lose days because nobody knows who makes the final call. Managers should be able to answer three questions quickly: What are we trying to achieve? Who owns each part? Who decides when there is disagreement? Meaning and impact can also be managed more deliberately. Bring results back to the people who produced the work. Show designers what users did after a redesign. Tell researchers which recommendation changed the product. Let analysts see which decision came from their work. Share customer reactions with the team that created the campaign. People understand the importance of their contribution more clearly when they can see what happened after delivery. A useful employer exercise is to ask teams the same kinds of questions Google used after Project Aristotle: Do people feel safe raising mistakes or concerns? Can teammates rely on one another? Are roles and decision-making clear? Does the work feel worthwhile? Can employees see how their work contributes to the company’s goals? Run the conversation around a real project rather than turning it into a generic culture survey. The answers become much more actionable when people can point to specific meetings, handoffs, deadlines, and decisions. <b>The Bigger Lesson for Hiring and Team Design </b> Project Aristotle does not suggest that employers should care less about talent. Skill, judgment, experience, and specialist knowledge still matter enormously. It suggests that hiring great people and creating a high-performing team are two different management problems. That distinction is especially important in these industries because much of the output is collaborative. Employers frequently recruit by function: the best designer they can find, a strong researcher, an experienced marketer, a sharp analyst. The next question should be how those people will work together. A technically brilliant hire who struggles in an environment with ambiguous ownership may need a different team structure. Someone who consistently helps others clarify problems, connects research to decisions, or improves the quality of team discussions can create value that a conventional skills list may not capture. Employers can bring some of this thinking into hiring without turning interviews into personality tests. Ask candidates about situations where they disagreed with a team decision, worked through an unclear brief, coordinated across functions, or changed direction after receiving new evidence. Listen for how they approached the problem, how they involved others, and what happened afterward. Reference checks can also explore reliability, communication, and the kind of environment in which the person did their best work. The same thinking should continue after hiring. Onboarding can make roles and decision rights clear early. Managers can explain how the team works, how disagreement is handled, and what success looks like. Performance reviews can recognize contributions to team effectiveness alongside individual output. If someone consistently improves briefs, helps others make better decisions, or surfaces risks early, that is useful organizational performance even when it does not appear in a final campaign asset. <b>WorkTote Takeaway </b> Project Aristotle gives employers a reason to look more closely at what they ask a candidate profile to tell them. Skills and experience remain essential, but employers also need to understand the responsibilities someone has held, the range of work they have taken on and what they would bring to a team. That information gives hiring managers a more useful starting point for conversations about collaboration, judgment and working expectations. WorkTote’s strength is bringing more of a person’s professional experience into that starting point. Projects, technical and soft skills, tools, certifications, community work and achievements each add context to a candidate’s employment history. For employers in marketing, advertising, analytics and design, that breadth matters because relevant experience often extends beyond a job title. A marketer’s research project, an analyst’s community initiative or a designer’s experience leading a professional workshop may deserve a closer look. Making those contributions visible gives employers more to assess and more specific questions to ask. WorkTote’s role is to make a fuller understanding of talent central to hiring. A profile starts that process; interviews, work samples and conversations with candidates deepen it. Google’s research also makes the employer’s responsibility clear: once people join, they need clear roles, reliable colleagues and room to speak openly. Understanding what someone brings and creating the conditions for them to contribute are both part of building a stronger team.<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> <b>Sources </b> <b>Google re:Work</b>: <a href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness?utm_source=worktote">Understand Team Effectiveness</a> — Project Aristotle, the five team dynamics, and Google’s team-assessment approach. <b>Think with Google</b>: <a href="https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-emea/future-of-marketing/management-and-culture/five-dynamics-effective-team/?utm_source=worktote">Five Dynamics of Effective Teams</a> — Research methodology, psychological safety, and reported team-performance results</div><span></div>