Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups
🚀 Do you know how great it feels to be part of a highly functional team?
Most of us recognize the feeling when we experience it, and we’ve felt the opposite pain of being part of a dysfunctional team more than we’d like. How do we address dysfunction when we see it?
Getting from dysfunction to function at the team level takes more than up-skilling individual members. Often the spark that is needed to create a highly functional team is group emotional intelligence (EQ). If that spark is missing, as leaders we are responsible for helping the team recognize and manage emotions and become a team with high EQ.
Recently I saw EQ in action when I facilitated a strategy session for a leadership team. Going in, I recognized that my job as a facilitator would be very much influenced by the team’s emotional intelligence level. For example, I’m less concerned about whether everyone will agree on the topics, but how they disagree. . . . less about how well they speak, and more about how well they listen. . . . not expecting everyone to arrive in perfect mindset or mood, but curious how the group will recognize and deal with everyone as they are.
For a framework to assess and build team emotional intelligence, I turned to an older HBR article: Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, published in March 2011.
The authors propose norms of group emotional intelligence at three levels: individual, group and cross boundary. Emotional awareness emerges from activities such as taking time away from group tasks to get to know one another or assuming that undesirable behavior takes place for a reason (and being curious about that reason). Approaches to help the group regulate emotion involve creating an affirmative environment and taking time to recognize, accept and discuss emotions that surround difficult issues.
It is not sufficient to require each team member to “take care” of their own emotions outside the group setting. Such an approach encourages members to stifle or disguise their emotions, paper over emotions with “logic,” and engage in unproductive group behavior like pretending to agree, failing to raise substantive concerns, or prioritizing individual over group needs.
I’m happy to report that the team I recently met at their strategy session demonstrated a solid level of team emotional intelligence. That made my job easy this time and shows me that the group has done the work to foster and maintain appropriate behavioral norms.
In leadership coaching, we work to advance a leader’s abilities to create self-awareness of and regulate their own emotions while at the same time establishing norms to facilitate a healthy EQ at their team level. To discuss more about how developing emotional intelligence for you and your team can help performance, connect with me here or at john@aconnectedcoach.com.