Top Teams Are Built on Psychological Safety
A vast enterprise like Google has countless teams, each with its own personality and culture. Keeping such a wildly diverse set of teams consistently high-performing is one of Google's keys to success, which is why Google spares no effort in studying what makes a great team culture.
What do you think is the key to a high-performing team? You might assume that the leader of a top team has to be extraordinarily charismatic, that every member is a graduate of a prestigious school, deeply knowledgeable and endlessly eloquent.
In fact, that's not the case. According to Google's detailed study of more than 180 of its internal teams, psychological safety is the single most important factor in top teams[1]. It allows team members to be candid with one another about their weaknesses and to share the challenges they face. Psychological safety makes members willing to take risks and push for breakthroughs, because they know their companions will understand and accept their failures. Put differently, the elite who change the world are not those who never fail; in fact, they fail often — but psychological safety acts like a safety net, bouncing them back to fresh heights again and again.
We may not be able to control the psychological safety of the group we're in straight away, but through empathic listening we can offer the people around us a sense of psychological safety. Empathy provides the foundation for building genuine connection, while listening is the act that builds the relationship.
The Science of Empathy
Empathy is the ability to feel what another person feels — to share in their joys and their sorrows. To have empathy is, in a sense, to walk through someone else's circumstances alongside them, sharing the bitter and the sweet. This isn't merely a flattering way to describe empathy; from the perspective of neuroscience, there is solid evidence to support it.
Why are people able to feel what others feel? It turns out the answer lies in the mirror neurons in our brains. When someone is in pain, the neurons responsible for the sensation of pain are activated. Mirror neurons are a special group of cells: when we watch another person suffer, the mirror neurons in the same part of our brain are activated too. Although we are not personally experiencing the pain, what we feel is comparable to what the person in pain feels — and this is the bedrock of empathy.
So is empathy just heaping more suffering on ourselves? Absolutely not. First, empathy is a kind of shared feeling, and it isn't confined to positive or negative emotions, because whether it is joy or pain, there are corresponding mirror neurons at work.
What's more, empathy is indispensable if we want to build genuine connection with others, because the quality of the connections between people has a markedly significant effect on happiness — so empathy and happiness are closely intertwined.
The Closest Thing to a Mind-Reading Superpower
On top of that, the mirror neurons behind empathy serve another practical purpose: they help us understand other people's motives and emotional states[2]. Picture the following scene: a friend who has just returned from Taiwan meets up with you, holding a box of pineapple cakes and smiling at you. Quite naturally, you'll know that the box of pineapple cakes is a gift for you. Psychologists once believed this was rational deduction: you know the social custom of giving gifts, you also know the way you and this friend usually interact, and you know on top of that that pineapple cakes are a classic Taiwanese gift — putting all of this information together, you can deduce that the pineapple cakes are very likely a present.
Yet to say this is rational deduction runs counter to our actual experience. Usually, we judge other people's intentions automatically, in an instant, and effortlessly. As we "think" about whether that box of pineapple cakes is a gift, it's as though we directly perceive that it is one, rather than going through a thinking process akin to solving a maths problem.
How is this done? When we see a friend holding a gift, the mirror neurons in our brain to do with "giving a gift" are activated in turn, letting us put ourselves in the other person's place and directly sense their state of mind. In this way, we come to know that the other person means to give us a present. There is no mind-reading in this world, but the thing that comes closest to mind-reading is empathy.
All in all, cultivating empathy can make us happier, and help us grasp other people's intentions more accurately. Since empathy, like a great many states of mind, has its foundation at the level of the neurons, we can also practise meditation and thereby increase our empathy. Friends who are interested in learning a little more can read our article "What Is Meditation?", or refer to the book below.
This article is adapted from Mind Training: An Evidence-Based Method for Mastering Your Mind Through Meditation.
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[1] https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five–keys–to–a–successful–google–team/
[2] Iacoboni, M., Molnar–Szakacs, I., Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta, J. C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005). Grasping the intentions of others with one’s own mirror neuron system. PLoS biology, 3(3), e79.
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