At 25, Julia Rozovsky wanted a job that was more social. “I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,” she said later. In 2009, unsure what that job was, she applied to business schools and got into Yale.
The school put her in a study group designed to build tight bonds. Every day, between classes or after dinner, she and four teammates met to go over homework, compare spreadsheets and plan for exams. They had gone to similar colleges and worked at similar firms. She hoped that would make things easy.
It made things tense. “I always felt like I had to prove myself,” she told the journalist Charles Duhigg. Teammates sometimes jockeyed to lead or criticized each other’s ideas. They argued over who was in charge and who got to speak for the group in class. “People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,” she said. “I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.”
So she joined a second group, a team for case competitions, where students propose answers to real business problems and judges hand out trophies and cash. The work was much the same: research, financial analysis, reports, presentations. The people were not. One had been an Army officer, another a researcher at a think tank, another the director of a health-education nonprofit, another a consultant to a refugee program.
They emailed each other dumb jokes and usually spent the first ten minutes of a meeting chatting. When one contest asked for a business to replace a student-run snack store, Rozovsky suggested a nap room that would sell earplugs and eyeshades. Someone else wanted old video games. Most of the ideas were impractical. “We all felt like we could say anything to each other,” she said. “No one worried that the rest of the team was judging them.” They settled on a micro-gym and won.
The study group dissolved in her second semester. The case team stayed together for both her years at Yale.
What nagged at her was that the people in the study group were not unpleasant. One on one, they were friendly and warm. Things only turned fraught when they met as a team. “I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,” she said. “It didn’t seem like it had to happen that way.”
After Yale, Google hired her and assigned her to Project Aristotle, the company’s study of what made some of its teams work and others stumble.