Much to their surprise, Google discovered that the behavior of the leader does significantly matter in both the productivity of the team and the well-being of the team members. Google found that leaders from the most successful, highly rated teams all shared three common behaviors:

• COACHING: A good leader takes the time to meet with each person on the team and act as a coach, which involves both building trust with and also challenging each team member. A good leader demonstrates real care for each person and for their career development.

• EMPOWERMENT: A good leader empowers the team and avoids micromanaging — guiding and supporting the team, trusting the team to do what’s required, and providing the team with a good deal of freedom. A good leader seeks the balance of providing what the team needs to succeed while being careful to not frustrate or get in the way of the team’s functioning by managing too closely.

• LISTENING: A good leader creates an inclusive environment and shows concern for both success and well-being by listening to each team member. A good leader brings awareness to any inherent tensions between the team’s success, the company’s success, and the individual’s well-being and finds ways to resolve them and support success on all levels.

Google’s final report stated that these positive norms include psychological safety, structure and clarity, dependability, meaning, and impact.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY: Team members developed a high level of trust and vulnerability. No one person dominated the discussions; everyone on the team spoke roughly the same amount of time during discussions. Team members showed a high level of emotional intelligence as measured by the ability to read facial expressions. In a sense, any and all mindfulness practice is a tool for developing greater psychological safety. At work, this means that each person on the team is open, curious, and vulnerable. They are engaged in the practices of not being an expert, connecting to their own pain, and connecting to the pain of others.

STRUCTURE AND CLARITY: High-performing teams exhibited clear goals and clear roles for team members. This was something that was done really well in the Zen monastery kitchen: we set clear goals and gave concrete assignments. It seems obvious but is often not given the attention it deserves — the importance of each person knowing exactly what success looks like for them, for their team, and for the organization.

DEPENDABILITY: Agreements were honored, and communication was clear about deadlines and expectations. My experience, such as with the open-leave policy at SIYLI, is that this requires putting regular systems into place regarding reports, measures, and feedback.

MEANING: The work the team was doing had some personal significance for each member. Identifying what’s meaningful is an ongoing process for the leader and for all team members, and it requires regular storytelling about aspirations and about successes and failures. For the leader, this means inspiring others, whether they are cooking meals or coding a search engine. It also means focusing on the personal growth and well-being of each member as part of the team’s mandate.

IMPACT: The work of the team was purposeful and seen as contributing to a positive impact. Impact can be experienced on a variety of levels: how working together improves the well-being of each team member and of the team as a whole, how the team is impacting the division or company, and how the organization impacts its customers and society.

And a Google internal study in 2008 (one that Bill loved) proved that teams with managers who regularly practiced a set of eight behaviors had lower turnover and higher satisfaction and performance. Topping the list of behaviors: “is a good coach.

We learned early on from Bill that when it came to creating teams, you have to put your bias blinders on (and that we all have biases). To him it was simple. Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women. A pair of 2010 studies bear Bill out on this point. They examined collective intelligence in teams: why are some teams “smarter” than the sum of their individual IQs? The answer is threefold: on the most effective teams everyone contributes rather than one or two people dominating discussions, people on those teams are better at reading complex emotional states, and...the teams have more women. This can be partly explained by the fact that women tend to be better at reading emotional states than men. So Bill always pushed us to consider women for any senior positions; he believed “you can always find a woman for a job, it may just take a little longer.” He helped recruit them when he could, such as when he got Ruth Porat to come on board as Google’s CFO in 2015.

Today, over a thousand research papers in fields ranging from education to business to medicine, have shown that teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine even lower patient mortality. Why might this be the case? Because physiological safety helps people take the interpersonal risks that are necessary for achieving excellence in a fast-changing, interdependent world. When people work in psychologically safe contexts, they know that questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable. In these environments, people can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong won’t be a fatal blow to their reputation. Psychological safety plays a powerful role in the science of failing well. It allows people to ask for help when they're in over their heads, which helps eliminate preventable failures. It helps them report -and hence catch and correct- errors to avoid worse outcomes, and it makes it possible to experiment in thoughtful ways to generate new discoveries. Think about the teams that you’ve been a part of at work, or at school, in sports, or in your community.