And some people wonder why so many other people think of HR as a complete waste of, well, human resources.
Lest I be mistaken for a troll, please let me elaborate.
I'm almost(?) certain that opening bit was tongue-in-cheek about just tossing a Rhodes Scholar, a couple extroverts, an engineer and a PhD into a team and expecting it to be a great team. But there is an uncomfortable truth hidden behind the exaggeration there. HR people can and do make those kinds of assumptions all the time. They do it when they are looking at resumes; they do it when they are setting up phone screens; they do it when they are setting up PIPs.
There's a deeply seated problem happening when you allow people with no subject matter experience be the gatekeepers of who does and doesn't get into a company. Externally, it manifests as bias or prejudice or racism. No amount of data analysis can get people to shunt a fundamentally flawed assumption though.
In my opinion, there's only one kind of person who could invent such a daft null hypothesis about what makes a good team: someone who's never worked on a team like that. I'm glad that the People Ops people at Google are making some progress. Perhaps other companies will follow suit, but the problem persists. There will still be the same people in HR making the same boneheaded assumptions about all kinds of things with little direct feedback.
I realize that any sizable company needs HR for at least some minimal amount of due diligence in the hiring process, and that HR employees are generally less expensive than Legal Counsel dept. employees. But we should stop giving HR the insane carte blanche it has in many large companies. We should stop letting it create policy. Because the policies created are so often antithetical to the needs of the company, and in some cases, to society.
Instead, we should embed HR workers in the teams they are working with. Perhaps every pod at Google doesn't need its own HR rep, but there is a level of management that would make sense to have one HR person to handle hiring/recruiting/necessary paperwork. You can argue that the HR person attached to a unit will be biased and perhaps not handle things appropriately when a complaint comes up. But you're wrong because in any situation where a complaint happens, HR is just a proxy for Legal. Cut out the middle-people and just have the Legal team handle it directly. HR doesn't really add anything to those situations except a level of misdirection(some people think HR is there for them, not the company).
As a general trend, these 5 markers of success are probably pretty good. But I challenge you to find something in any of that which is concrete enough to be actionable. I guarantee you the HR people will find some action, and it will be for some manager to do some evaluation on how well some team performs on those metrics.
To go full circle here, the final issue I have with a blog like this is that it makes the mistake of finding that what they thought was the general case was "not true." The goal for a team is not to achieve some success in hazy, ill-defined (and probably some variation of survivor-biased) ideas about how to manage a team.
Some teams will absolutely thrive with the goofy composition that was first stated. Others will fail. If you define success or failure as shipping a viable product. If you define success as how well you implemented the latest directives from HR, well, that's different.
We need to rethink the way we handle HR and what it does. It should not, for example (as done in this blog post) tell managers how to manage their teams. Nor should it tell teams what their identity is or should be.