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“In order to have a winning team, the team must have a feeling of unity; every player must put the team first – ahead of personal glory.”
Paul “Bear” Bryant
More than ever, we need to work together as teams – real teams – to accomplish results. Work has become interdependent at almost every level and position so it is critical that we not only get along with each other but interact positively to leverage performance.
The ability to inspire collaboration is the number one leadership skill that executives site as most needed to be successful in the next five years – and the least developed now.
Yet, despite the importance of working together effectively, studies show that most teams do not really work as teams. They work more as a group of people in the same area or department that have to talk to each other in meetings and then escape back to their individual tasks. Recent research indicates that only 21% - or one in five – teams actually are effective at using teamwork. Of all teams 37% were declared mediocre and a full 42% were assessed as poor or failing to use synergy and strengths to be a productive team.
The real question is why can’t a group of sophisticated, experienced, and intelligent professionals come together to create a solid, high-performing team? In most situations, smart people plus smart people do not equal a smart team.
How do we lead to build collaboration in teams? For most leaders, they have been looking in the wrong places. Collaboration is about social skills – plain and simple. You need to know how to get along together to succeed.
In today’s complex and competitive markets, organizations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves and leverage their assets for greater productivity. As people will always be the business’ greatest asset, teams should be the best avenue for improving output. To translate the potential of a team to real performance, leaders need to develop social skills and emotional intelligence.
Often we overlook the key factor that supports success as a team – social intelligence. Although technical abilities and intelligence are key attributes to being successful as an individual performer, working on a team requires the ability to interact well with others. Being able to manage the relationships with other people is estimated to be responsible for 70% of the reason a team will be a success or not. Success really is about knowing how to deal effectively with people.
Social intelligence is defined as the ability to accurately assess, interpret, manage, and express emotions and solve problems of a personal and interpersonal nature along the path toward realizing the pursuit of realistic and meaningful objectives. In simple terms, to get what you want, you need to know how to get along with people and be aware of the impact you have on others.
Distinct from our academic intelligence or personality traits, social intelligence is at the root of our ability to sharpen thinking, communicate effectively, form strong relationships, and perform to our best. Research shows that when social skills are used wisely we are more effective in our interactions with others and in the way we cope with life and work. Alternatively, when we are reactive or socially inept, our usable IQ actually becomes impaired. With poor social skills, we actually hurt our ability to achieve. However, the positive news is that social intelligence is elastic – if you don’t have it, you can acquire it; if you have it, you can expand it.
The importance of social intelligence as a foundation for successful teamwork is not a new concept. Charles Darwin’s work in the 1870s highlighted the need for effective social expression for adaption and survival. Howard Gardner, at Harvard University, published groundbreaking research on the impact of emotional and social intelligence on organizational success in the 1980s while Dan Goleman brought the concept into the mainstream in 1995.
For leaders, being socially skilled with emotional strengths provides the catalyst for facilitating better decision-making, connecting and engaging employees, communicating a vision, and building resilience for teams in challenging environments and changing times. For teams, collaboration is the result of people being able to master the application of social intelligence skills. That is, to use emotions to help each other achieve their goals and to manage their interactions with others in ways that maximize the chances of influencing others constructively.
‘I view emotions as organizing processes that enable individuals to think and behave adaptively.”
Peter Salovey
When you read the values statement of an organization or the competencies model needed for leaders, the wording is typically socially or emotionally based rather than an outline of technical skills or requirements. Our ability to socially get along with others is at the root of what makes an organization successful – or not. The level of social skills inherent in the senior leaders of an organization also greatly impacts the culture and what it will be like to work there.
To see the impact of social skills, simply think of examples of colleagues who used strong social skills to facilitate performance at work. Knowing how to get along with people, read them, and use influence effectively enabled them to leverage what was possible alone. Think again of intelligent people without strong social skills that impaired their performance – and even of those around them.
The bottom-line is that most organizations differentiate and define themselves on social or emotional factors rather than on technical issues.
Leading teams to build collaboration through social intelligence is comprised of the individual members’ capabilities in terms of seven skills.
- Motivation: considers the energy levels of and responsibility for action within the team and whether competition within the team is working for or against them. Developing team motivation requires people to clearly know and meet growth aspirations together, set stretch goals, reinforce success, and be persistent.
- Emotional Awareness: considers the amount of attention a team pays to noticing, understanding, and respecting feelings of team members. Being emotional aware is critical to build motivation, productivity, and a team’s overall ability to collaborate effectively together.
- Communication: provides feedback on how well team members listen, encourage participation, and discuss matters (and particularly sensitive matters). Effective team communication is central to every kind of team interaction.
- Stress Tolerance: gives the team a reflection of how well it’s doing in managing the pressures of workload, task and resource allocation, time constraints, and the real needs of work-life balance. This social skill is the closest to feedback on the physical health of the team.
- Conflict Resolution: addresses how constructively the team conducts the process of disagreement and whether the team is able to deal with adversity to enhance its functioning, rather than being caught up in the conflict. Being able to deal with conflict effectively is essential to providing an environment for creativity and innovation as well as general productivity.
- Positive Mood: highlights the level of encouragement, sense of humor and enjoyment, and how successful the team can expect to be. Working with a positive attitude is a major support to team flexibility and resilience.
- Identity: based on how well the team demonstrates belongingness, a desire to work together, and a sense of clarity around the role of each team member. Building a strong team identity supports high levels of loyalty to the team.
When individuals work together and cultivate these key skills, they achieve the four critical results that denote team effectiveness – empathy, trust, loyalty, and decision-making. Becoming competent in the seven skills of team social intelligence in turn leads to the two key benefits of ongoing success for a team – sustainable productivity and emotional and social well-being. The overall theme is collaboration.
The first step in understanding your team’s social intelligence is to measure those skills now and identify strengths and areas for development. Like all other aspects of business, the ability to manage emotions and interact socially can and should be measured. Only with measurement can we assess where we are and where we can focus for improvement.
Several psychometric assessments are available to measure team social intelligence, such as TESI© (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence) and EISA© (Emotional Intelligence Skills Assessment). These assessments provide an incredible opportunity to gain perspective on the team’s social intelligence (rather than just focusing on individual applications) which provides a uniquely valuable view on leading a team for success.
Investing in measuring your team’s social intelligence provides a window for you as a leader to know which social skills are strengths and also where there may be blind spots or areas for development. You gain clarity on how effectively your team actually functions and benefit from perspectives from all members. You can pinpoint the skill that if developed further would have the most positive impact on greater effectiveness and results.
When a team engages social intelligence to produce results from its work, individual members benefit from collaborative intelligence and build synergy to produce more than the sum of its parts.
A recent study (Elfenbein) showed that “the ability to understand one another’s emotional expressions explained 40% of the variance of team performance.”
Evaluating your team’s social intelligence assesses your performance potential together and should be an essential business function. After all, how often do teams perform to expectations? Intelligence, experience, education, and charisma are not enough. Social intelligence is at the root of team success and explains why one team will perform incredibly well and another team will be left behind.
Social skills when used effectively can make us smarter than intellect alone. The ability to be socially intelligent as a team will leverage results tremendously and can separate your team from the rest. Find out where your team stands – not knowing can limit your potential and hurt your bottom-line.
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