"The Reality Group" is a team with an excellent (working) culture: effective, empathetic, grounded in reality, making good decisions.

The Reality Group is a concept described by Robert Greene. The ideas are closely related to the ideas in Dynamics of effective teams, Westrum organizational culture, Features of a great engineering culture, and ‣.

These are the necessary, but not sufficient ingredients for creating The Reality Group culture (per Greene):

Shared purpose

It's obviously good that everyone in the team shares a common purpose. The "Purpose" section in ‣ provides elaborate ideas about how to cultivate it.

A clear shared purpose makes it less attractive for the team members to form smaller subgroups ("factions") to "draw a narcissistic boost from the inner circle of validation".

Members rely upon and trust each other

This is particularly important that the group leader(s) can delegate the work and trust it will be done properly, freeing mental space for more strategic thinking.

This corresponds to the second most important of the Dynamics of effective teams: ‣.

The key principles for selecting group members

• Members should be trustworthy: diligent and competent. (See above)
• They should have complementary skills.
• They should have diverse temperaments, opinions, and backgrounds. (Diversity)
• They should be willing to speak up and to take initiative.

Treat everyone equally

Equal treatment of team members reduces envy and politics.

Equal treatment of people's ideas is also important: the team members are less likely to waste their energy in Status Management if they trust that good ideas and decisions prevail regardless of the status of the person who expresses them.

Let the information flow freely

When group leaders are transparent, members don't seek status to get access to the "secret information".

Encourage Thoughtful disagreement and learning from mistakes.