Another mental model that we use to help teams think about good team process and guide them in working together is the research that Google did on high-performing teams. The research showed that the make-up of high-performing teams could not be boiled down to any specific number or combination of people - that high performing teams often looked quite different - but that across the board, teams fostered what psychologists call ‘psychological safety’ for their members. Practically, this can be boiled down to: Equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and High average social sensitivity among team members. Essentially, in teams where one or a few people dominant the conversation, the overall intelligence of the group diminishes. Similarly, in groups that are poor at intuiting how other members are feeling by reading tone and non-verbal cues, the overall intelligence of the group again declines. Psychological safety is a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ and ‘‘describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’ (What Google learned from its Quest to build the Perfect Team, New York Times, February 28, 2016).