Team chemistry 101

Good morning to everyone except the weatherman. While those in Western Europe brace for heatwaves, it’s pouring in Spain and Portugal — and torrential rain in the Nevada desert has left around 70,000 Burning Man attendees stranded in the mud. Maybe the tech elite in attendance should use this as a field test for their new ‘California Forever’ utopia and add stormwater drainage to wildfire protection plans.

In today’s Digest:

• Create a great company culture
• Record songs with AI versions of top artists
• Make AI artworks with legible text

What does it take to build a perfect team? In 2012, Google’s HR division decided to find out.

They’d already observed that folks who switched up their lunch crew often were more productive (top performers network a lot); and figured out which qualities make for a great manager (clear communication and not being all up in your business).

The problem? Their early research was built on the long held assumption that by combining the best people, you’d get the best team.

Top people ≠ top team: No matter how many teams they studied, Google couldn’t find any patterns in the data to explain why even teams made up exclusively of high performers could also fail — nor any evidence at all that the composition of a team made a difference.

To cut a long research story short, Google eventually figured out that success had more to do with the unspoken ‘norms’ held within a given team. Specifically, successful teams behave in ways that indicate a strong sense of psychological safety.

Safe to speak up: Psychological safety in organizations has been defined as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” — aka, “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.’’

Creating this kind of culture is no easy feat. It demands high levels of self-awareness, social sensitivity, inclusivity, and trust.

Enter Felix by moka.care: A new Slack integration designed to teach teams and managers skills like communication, stress management, and the behavioral and cognitive tools needed to foster a culture of psychological safety within an organization.

“Everyone needs to be trained in the basics of mental health,” says maker Alexis Colonna. “Doing this via Slack allows us to train a lot of people at the same time within a reasonable budget — and it takes only four minutes a week.”

• Singify lets you create AI song covers with your favorite artists.
• Papermark is an open-source alternative to DocSend.
• Snipo takes time-stamped notes in Notion while you watch videos.
• Audiosonic converts text to lifelike audio.

• Artvisio AI is an art generator that can generate legible text.
• Arvin uses GPT-4 to make coding, data analysis, visualization and problem solving more efficient.
• MyDataNinja helps makers create, track, manage and optimize online marketing campaigns.