Building Great Teams

To Promote Inclusivity, Stay Away from Personality Assessments

Quinisha Jackson-Wright for the New York Times. 22 August 2019. 

Do personality tests like the Myers-Briggs help managers learn their teams' working styles, or just encourage them to hire and promote people like them? How does this relate to the context of VIP teams?

 

In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

Adam Bryant for The New York Times. 19 June 2013. Interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google.

"GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless - no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation."

"After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently."

 

New Science of Building Great Teams

Alex "Sandy" Pentland for the Harvard Business Review. April 2012.

"At MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identified the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams - those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them."

 

The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

Jason Dana for The New York Times. 8 April 2017.

"Research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance: They can be harmful, undercutting the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees."

". . . interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates."