Emotional Intelligence In Teams and Beyond

I’m glad to share with you stimulating ideas, tips and leads you might find useful, all having to do in some way with emotional intelligence – and beyond. Think of this as news to use.

Let's dive in...

Tune Up Your Team

• If a team member behaves in a way that feels unfair, do you let him or her know?
• Do team members openly acknowledge each others’ strengths and weaknesses?
• Does your team act to solve problems proactively, before they occur?

These are the types of questions that help assess how well a team has created the norms (ground rules for interacting) that typify high-performing groups.??

To summarize the norms these tap:

• Calling out unhelpful actions by a team member – high-performing teams enforce a norm of speaking up when someone on the team acts in a way that harms team effectiveness. This both holds members accountable for what they do, and builds a shared sense of psychological safety.?
• Understanding each other – team members know what each other feels, does best, needs and how they see the world. This connects members in a healthy way, reinforces team identity and adds to a sense of psychological safety.?
• Solve problems before they become crises – top teams anticipate problems work to prevent them worsening. They foresee challenges and prepare for them. If a crisis occurs, they take quick action to handle it. This norm encourages constructive conversations and keeps the team from being torpedoed by surprises.?

These questions and norms are taken from a much more thorough team assessment developed by Vanessa Druskat , a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, who for decades has studied what makes a team high-performing.

Her research has shown that in organizations of all kinds high-performing teams operate in ways that parallel at the group level the elements of emotional intelligence.

For each of the TeamEI norms, Druskat finds particular action steps move a team in the right direction.? For example, for the first norm, calling out unhelpful actions, she has the team find “safe, non-judgmental and blame-free” ways to help a team member see they are breaking a norm. It’s important this be done in ways that the targeted person won’t feel personally attacked.

In a Harvard Business Review article about her work there’s an example of this I love.? At a branch of Ideo, the creativity consultancy, if someone on a team starts talking over someone else (a violation of a norm to hear everyone out before speaking), they get pelted with toy stuffed animals! In other words, calling attention to the violation of a norm can be fun.

That’s just one of the many ways teams can learn to get better together.

I’ve long respected and admired Druskat’s work with teams, and I’m honored to offer this team tune-up – called TeamEI - through the Goleman Consulting Group . Interested organizations can have hands-on team tune-ups, or send someone to be certified in Druskat’s team improvement methods.

For more information, just look here.

P.S. Druskat’s more recent work puts a sense of belonging at the heart of team performance. I see that feeling of belonging in a group as a more natural, ground up way to achieve the goals of inclusion and diversity, without having to impose a top-down mandate.

And now...

Family Business? Read this.

A study of over one hundred next generation family business leaders finds that how other executives in the business see that leader’s emotional and social intelligence predicts that person’s effectiveness as a leader. This is crucial information for a family business and its leadership succession to the next generation.

In essence, this means the emotional intelligence of that next gen leader, as seen by those who will be working with them, matters greatly for their success as a leader.

But how that person rates him or herself on those same EI indicators predicts how engaged that next gen person will actually be as a leader.?

The best pattern, of course: when the person and other executives give outstanding ratings. The test used in this research was the ESCI , a 360 developed by myself and Richard Boyatzis , who is at the Weatherhead School of business at Case Western University.

The research was done by a family business expert, Steve Miller, PhD, who teaches on the topic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Onward...

Want to up your emotional intelligence skill set? Join the next online course on the ingredients of high emotional intelligence, September 25th. Register here.

Coaches: this is the most-needed skill set for executives and for anyone in life. Get CCEU credits in EI here.

Next up...

Do you drive yourself too hard – that is, despite your work success, your personal life or health suffers?

In your closest relationships, do you feel no one really care enough to tune into your needs or feelings?

Do you find that you are always the one to make sacrifices in your relationships?

These are some of the deeply ingrained emotional habits we’ll explore when my wife Tara Bennettt-Goleman and I give a workshop on September 30 just outside New York City.?

And on October 1 we’ll be joined by international mediator Aaron Wolf, to explore the Chemistry of Connection – what makes a great relationship. In these post-lockdown days this essential social skill has suffered. Come join us to see what makes connection work best.

To close...

Working with legendary workplace competency and performance researcher David McClelland, GCG Advisor Dr. Vanessa Druskat conducted field work with 300 teams to observe and measure what the best teams do that others don’t.

Her research showed those with specific habits or norms produced significantly more value for their employer - $9.8 million more per team in the early 1990s.

It also showed that high performing individuals did not create high performing teams.