The 7 R’s to Team Motivation

Motivation is your team’s commitment to mobilize its three primary resources: time, energy and intelligence. We guide you through understanding how to motivate your team in Chapter Four of The Emotionally Intelligent Team. There’s no cookie cutter approach for creating motivation – the right strategies need to connect with your team. There are tools for success! As a team, focus on the values supporting your work, the relationships and the rewards available.

Our last article on Motivating Hospital Teams pointed out the research by Daniel Pink that three critical elements support individual motivation:  autonomy, mastery and purpose.  These are all essential for team as well and you’ll see these principles included in the 7 R’s below.  Autonomy includes the chance to operate with independence and to influence your work.  Mastery gives the team as a whole as well as individual team members the opportunity to be great at their work.  Purpose is unquestionably the driving force for why we do what we do.  It’s the source of pride in our work, the core of authentic motivation.

Leaders use their influence and behaviors to motivate teams through the 7 R’s.

Reason – match team members’ WIIFM – help them answer the questions of “What’s in it for me?” and “What’s in it for our team?” Create a reason to engage. Tie the reason for the team’s existence to their purpose and help them develop mastery in their skills.

Respect – take time to get to know the members of the team and demonstrate that you value each and every member. Deliberately share respect between team members.  Autonomy is a key component of respect and can unfold in multiple ways by giving the full team some creative time as well as providing the time to individual team members or to sub-groups.  Google is one of the best known companies that have gained great results by giving teams autonomy, yet the teams are also expected to collaborate intensely.  This requires integrity and real engagement – and leads to powerful productivity.  Respect for the team and team members is an integral component of an overarching purpose that everyone is excited about.

Relationships – you can’t bend on this one – compromises are costly. Lead your team to connect with one another and to consistently demonstrate regard.  When teams are focused on accomplishing a powerful purpose, there is a natural inclination to build strong relationships to accomplish the common good.

Resilience – let the team know you are committed to engaging with them and that you’ll help gain the resources needed to the best extent possible. Resilience is supported by optimism, which is best experienced as a contagious sense of hopefulness around the team. Resilience is a big concept and casts a powerful web to support success. When all three components of autonomy, mastery and purpose are actively present team resilience expands.

Responsibility – hold people consistently accountable. Let them know their responsibilities are tied to the team accomplishing its mission and providing value. Thus when autonomy is provided, ask the team to then come back and report on what they learned.  It’s fine if the creative project wasn’t a huge success, what’s important is that they learned and that the learning is shared in a collaborative spirit.

Rewards & Reinforcement – notice daily positive accomplishments and say something positive right away. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking money is the way to motivate your team. Surprisingly money can demotivate a team. What team members need in addition to respectful pay is to be treated with respect, included in the discussions on why the mission/purpose is valuable, and acknowledged for work done well – promptly. Supporting their ability to develop mastery so they can do their job well is one of the strongest rewards available.

Role Model – like it or not “monkey see, monkey do” holds a lot of truth for human behavior.  Researchers have found that our mirror neurons are one of our most powerful sources for learning.  Develop your mastery and hold yourself accountable to act the way you would like your team members to behave.

This is the stuff of motivation and results in team productivity accomplished by a team that is experiencing emotional and social well-being.

Motivating Hospital Teams

What happens when it’s the end of the 3^rd quarter and it becomes obvious to the team that they can’t reach the year end goal?  For example, in a hospital critical care team, what happens if their patient satisfaction goals are just off enough so they know they can’t meet the year end goals?  The results aren’t bad, but they can’t reach their year-end goal.  So what does leadership do?  What does the team do?

If there is a motivational financial reward that only occurs if they meet their year-end goal, a team in this bind is likely to reduce their striving to improve months before year-end.  Not a good thing!  Team members are at some level of “no” or discouragement and that leads to diminished creativity and engagement.  The demons of de-motivation are likely to set in.

So what does a leader do?  Follow the wisdom of intrinsic motivation, especially if you are working with smart, creative thinkers.  Intrinsic motivation occurs when people are internally motivated to do something – perhaps because they feel it’s important, it matches their values or it gives them pleasure. Financial rewards are a form of extrinsic or external motivation.  Daniel Pink’s books, A Whole New Mind and Drive, powerfully demonstrates the “what” and “how” of engaging knowledge workers with intrinsic motivation.  He has a great youtube summary at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc. Pink emphasizes that motivational success requires that knowledge workers be given:

1.    Autonomy

2.    Mastery

3.    Purpose

Depending on your workplace you are likely to be able to emphasize more of one or two of these components than all three, but remember that all three matter.

Pink shows that the traditional approach of extrinsic motivation, which is based in if – then scenarios, can result in motivational harm.  The “if- then” framework is presented as “if you meet this result then you will get a reward such as money or time off.” The harm that can occur could be:

• Diminished intrinsic motivation
• Lower performance
• Less creativity
• Crowding out of good behavior
• Unethical behavior
• Short-term, narrowed, thinking (tunnel vision).

These are serious negative consequences but many organizations and leaders are deeply embedded in a system of extrinsic rewards.  To change this leadership habitual approach requires: 1) knowledge that the habit doesn’t work, 2) commitment to learn a new way and 3) practice and experimentation to make it a fully owned new skill.

So to bring about change first the hospital management must be convinced that a different way is better and then the three steps of expanding intrinsic motivation need to be intentionally followed. The hospital in the beginning example needs the critical care team’s work to result in higher patient satisfaction as customer (patient) future care choices are increasingly based on patient evaluations and financial reimbursement by insurance companies and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare are tied to patient satisfaction.  Thus we have the certainty and knowledge that patient satisfaction is very important.  Recognizing at the third quarter mark that success won’t happen, together with reviewing work such as Pink’s, should help support leadership change.  The next organizational step is to offer and reinforce the three steps for building employee motivation.  In the sample hospital team motivation can be built by guiding the team to recognize and build skills thus:

Purpose is so strongly available in healthcare that a good leader can hit a home run when the goal is presented well. The team can feel alignment with their core purpose and values in meeting the goal of expanding patient satisfaction, first of all because satisfied patients are likely to have better health outcomes and that’s a value match.

Mastery is readily supported by education, mentoring and encouragement.

Autonomy can be harder to provide as many procedures have very specific and highly measured steps that must be taken where variation isn’t available, yet autonomy means the staff has independence or freedom.  Increased requirements for documentation and use of electronic health records reduce time available to serve patients as well as autonomy. The challenge is to find aspects of autonomy that are available and these can be a combination of special projects, such as a research study, as well as tapping into emotional intelligence. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl brilliantly demonstrated that one’s attitude is a foundational personal resource and strength.  Teams schooled to be individually and collectively responsible for their attitudes and well as to cultivate relationship building and other emotional intelligence skills such as empathy, optimism and impulse control find numerous opportunities for exercising autonomy.  In fact EI is a primary source of autonomy in a highly structured environment, such as staff in hospital units, experience.

Training and intentional leadership to build intrinsic motivation and emotional intelligence can make significant difference in meeting the positive outcomes required to support the massive reform underway in healthcare.

HOW TO LEAD TEAMS: The Relationship Between Team Skills and Human Development

The Emotionally Intelligent Team model proceeds from the archetypal process of human work itself. The seven scales measured by the TESI® (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence® Survey) are core skills for teams as they reflect specific needs that have arisen over the course of human evolution.

1.  Stress Happens — we arrived as infants desperately needing a breath of fresh air, then warmth, then food, and the whole range of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Everything that interrupts the satisfaction of these needs is experienced as some degree of stress, and yet a certain amount of stress is necessary to keep us from sinking into complacency. Developing the awareness and focus necessary to successfully meeting these needs gives us our concrete task orientation skills. Successful teams need the resilience that comes from Stress Tolerance skills.

2.  Life is hard, but we are naturally motivated to relieve instinctual drive states in order to improve our life conditions. Successful team leaders help their staff connect with and utilize this natural motivation rather than employing the command and control strategies that disrespect the individuality that gives rise to motivation. A major component of successfully modeling this understanding lies in the leader being able to distinguish between what the team members move towards, what they move away from, and what we move against. Building Motivation, for example, calls for the leader to move the team towards the reward of being acknowledged for a job well done. The leader realizes they will move away from embracing a new task if the necessary resources aren’t provided and that the team will become oppositional if they see team members being treated disrespectfully by the team leader.

3.  Because it is too hard to hunt effectively alone, we learn to Communicate in order to coordinate and maximize group efforts. We learn to develop our trust and relationship skills from the model communicators we encounter in our early world. the key lies in how well we send and receive meaningful signals from one another.

4.  Communicating effectively is a difficult process in itself, and there are many opportunities for misunderstanding which give rise to conflict. Then our challenge becomes a matter of how we get people to change: from no to yes; from “I” matter to “we” matter, from “I want to be right” to “I want to be happy.” These are core skills for Conflict Resolution.

5.  In order to resolve conflicts we need to be sensitive to what others desire and value and expect for their efforts as well as how they actually achieve those goals. This is where the team tunes in with Emotional Awareness.  To really be able to hear and appreciate their various positions requires the empathy, respect, and active listening that enable others to perceive us as trustworthy. Only then can we be open enough to achieve the atmosphere of spontaneous mutual influence that yields maximum benefits.

6.  Communicating effectively in the avenues of both task and relationship builds a powerful sense of Team Identity  in which teams feel free to risk and experiment, repeat what works and celebrate the results and build traditions and innovative new solutions. The value of belonging to such a team is the source of the leader’s ability to hold members accountable.

7.  Positive  Mood is the evidence of our collective success in satisfying individual and group life conditions. This is an important time and space of reaffirmation, rest, and recharging, because new stressors are no doubt just around the corner.

Acting with Collaborative Intelligence: Your 10 Step Guide

Collaboration is a result of people working together to reach a mutual answer to a challenge or opportunity.  As our world becomes more integrated and boundaries become more blurred the need and desire to collaborate is heightened.  We see this on the internet, such as with Wikipedia, in organizations of all sizes and shapes, such as the better efforts at the United Nations and in performance goals for individuals and leaders, such as the Executive Core Qualifications (ECQ’s) that leaders in the federal senior executive service are to meet.

Organizations frequently list collaboration as part of their mission or vision statement or as one of their values.  With all of these forms of embracing collaboration, we know it’s something good, the key question is how do we collaborate and when is it useful? We’ll answer this question for individuals by exploring 10 steps for individuals to follow in order to act collaboratively and briefly review how teams build collaboration.

Collaborative Intelligence™ is a key outcome teams can reach as they build their skills.  Collaborative intelligence is a result teams profit from when using the seven skills measured by the TESI^® (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey.  When teams build their skills in forming a strong team identity, engaging with motivation, building emotional awareness, enhancing communications, supporting one another in work life balance to manage stress, growing their conflict resolution skills so they can benefit when conflict occurs and act with positive mood they will be engaging multiple strengths and acting collaboratively.  Developing these seven skills helps team members learn how to be collaborative and to use this outcome wisely.

Collaboration is a communication and problem solving process that is based on a structured engagement style and process.  Those who collaborate well pay attention to personality styles, behavioral engagement strategies, and timing of the decision making as well as who is invited into the discussion, often referred to a stakeholders.  Individuals and organizations can act in a collaboratively style informally and accomplish a great deal.  More formal collaborative process can be deliberately engaged in more challenging situations and may benefit from engaging a facilitator.  Because the process can be slow and deliberative it may be the wrong formal process to use in an emergency, when a quick decision is needed or when the stakes are low, such as choosing where to have lunch.  Even in these circumstances when individuals act with a demonstration of inclusivity and intentionally listen to others and incorporate their suggestions as appropriate, they can build buy-in and loyalty that expands their base of support. The following 10 steps will help individuals and leaders be successful in their collaborations.  These skills can be integrated into one’s natural behaviors so the benefits of collaboration abound with minimal effort.

10 Steps to Act with Collaborative Intelligence

1.     Be aware.  Notice what is happening so you can choose how you are involved.  Breathe deeply to benefit from adding oxygen to your brain, to your heart and to feel calm and resilient.

2.     Apply Intention and Attention.  Form your intention so you know specifically what you want to accomplish and how.  Then decide what steps in the process you will pay attention to in order to keep yourself on track.  Intend to collaborate, which means intend to work together, to listen and to respond in order to accomplish your goal together.  Clarify your own purpose and goals; this is not a process you can accomplish on auto-pilot.

3.     Commit to the process.  Collaboration takes time, energy and patience. If you’re hesitant about using the process you’ll hold back, be protective of “your” information or rush through the process.  One way or another without commitment you are most likely to minimize the potential for success.  You may end up feeling annoyed or antagonizing others or both.

4.     Attend to others.  Create a foundation for engagement by creating a personal connection.  It’s out of little personal discussions where you find you have things in common that form the basis for trusting one another.  You might find you both have daughters who sell Girl Scout cookies or you might both climb 14,000 foot mountains. Continue paying attention to other participants throughout the process.  Often there is a valuable message behind the specific words someone is using; paying attention will help you discern the real message.

5.     Mutually establish goals and other criteria. Be sure you are headed in the same direction!

6.     Express your opinions and share your knowledge.  If you keep what you know close to your vest you undermine the ability of everyone to make a good decision, you role model that the process isn’t fully trustworthy and neither are the people involved.  Remember your actions speak louder than your words.

7.     List commonalities and differences.  It’s amazing how often people struggle over principles they already all agree on because they didn’t take time to recognize the agreement. If you clarify where there are differences and where you agree then you can begin gathering information to move towards a mutual solution.

8.     Apply divergent thinking.  Be willing to listen to other people’s perspectives even though they may be very different from yours.  At attitude of curiosity will be helpful.

9.     Be appreciative.  Keep noticing what works and through this positive process explore what seems to be off-center, to just not work.  Explore these inconsistencies with curiosity to find points of agreement.

10.  Make decision(s).  At this point everyone comes to a convergent answer and agrees to support the one answer.  Before you sign off though, apply some hearty reality testing.  Future pace by imaging it’s sometime in the future and you’re observing how well the decision works.  Is anything askew?  Did you take on too much at once?  Does anything else need adjusting?  If so make the changes now.

The result of collaborative decisions is that you have tapped into everyone’s smarts, built trust and have gained mutual commitment to success.  What’s not to like about that scenario!

Avoiding Emotional Intelligence Pitfalls at Work

Frequently encountered emotional intelligence (EI) pitfalls that limit relationships and productivity at work are numerous. Ordering people to just “get it done” could well be the top pitfall of all. Do you agree? Several pitfalls and better EI Options are listed below. Listen to our recent webinar on these pitfalls and then comment with your thoughts and additional pitfalls.

Pitfall: Just tell your direct reports or others to do something.
Better EI Option: Use your EI skills in empathy and assertiveness to influence others to want to engage in your project.

Pitfalls sabotage your success. When you just tell people to do something and you don’t take a few minutes to acknowledge them, build buy-in and guide understanding, you often invite opposition and resistance. Ironically you might have been so directive because you felt you didn’t have time for more engagement, yet the resistance will cost you more time in the long run.

Pitfall: Order your direct reports or others to be happy and engaged.
Better EI Option: Create a culture that builds skills in optimism, self-regard and emotional expression and thus supports staff agility and buy in. These and other EI skills are central to building an engaged culture with a “can-do” attitude. Your leadership has a lot to do with the responses you get. If you want happy and engaged direct reports, use positive language that supports optimism. For example, express the belief that together all of you will meet the big challenge, you just don’t know how yet. That wonderful word “yet” establishes the presupposition of success, and that helps create the outcome you’re looking for.

Pitfall: Ignore the impact of reassigning employees who have become friends and are working effectively as team members.
Better EI Option: Respond to and acknowledge relationships, notice how they support or weaken team work. When you need to make new assignments, help people process and accept the change.

Pitfall: Insist that emotions be left at the door when it’s time to solve problems.
Better EI Option: Use all your smarts in solving problems; that is both your IQ and your EQ. As we described in an earlier article, people can’t think without using their emotions. So the question becomes whether you and your team want to be aware of your emotional responses, including your intuitive awareness, and factor in all your data when resolving the problem. We suspect people seek to avoid their emotions when they are afraid they don’t have the skills to manage the emotions successfully. However, this strategy frequently backfires as the emotions will leak out in some poorly managed format. It’s better to get training and coaching and be fully in charge of your responses.

Pitfall: Blast your stress on all in your path.
Better EI Option: Learn strategies to regain your equilibrium when your buttons are pushed, then talk to others. You can breathe, use stair therapy, count to 10, any number of strategies work. Just give yourself time to avoid the adverse consequences of getting all tied up in knots! The key point is get more oxygen to your brain and give yourself a few minutes before you respond. Stair therapy is one of our favorites. When you feel triggered, tired or cranky go climb a set of stairs then come back to your office or to the situation and respond. Your renewed resilience will invite more welcome responses.

Can Virtual Teams Demonstrate Emotional & Social Intelligence?

by Marcia Hughes, Donna Dennis, James Terrell

When Manuel cut off Maria and implied her research was simplistic during the recent team webinar, most of the other team members checked out and started doing email.  Maria wiped a tear away and swore to herself that she wouldn’t risk participating again.  The Team Leader, who is a top notch engineer and is signed up for his first management training class next month, said nothing.  This interaction cost the team and the organization in terms of engagement, trust, and willingness to take risks with one another, yet nothing may ever be done about it.  Virtual teams face big challenges in being able to connect at an interpersonal level.  They are challenged with non-verbal communication, conflict resolution and forming a strong identity.  Virtual teams are likely to struggle more than other teams in using their brain biology support system of mirror neurons, spindle cells and oscillators, which Dan Goleman and Richard Boyatzis recently described as core to using social intelligence (Harvard Business Review OnPoint, Spring 2011).

Yet no matter how big the challenges virtual teams are proliferating. So what should a good leader and organization do?  Applying a team centered model to measure and build ESI (emotional and social intelligence) will provide the framework for understanding and proceeding successfully to build measurable team ESI skills.  First, let’s understand what we mean by ESI and by a virtual team.

ESI is a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way. 

 Another way to think about ESI is that it encompasses your ability to recognize and manage your own skills and to recognize and respond effectively to those of others. These skills, or their lack, are exhibited daily by individuals, leaders and teams.  The question is how well these engagement skills are demonstrated.  The answer is to have a deliberate process for expanding the skills the particular team needs.

Virtual teams are teams that are working from dispersed locations so that they do not have the opportunity to work together face to face frequently.

ESI challenges for virtual teams include:

• Developing emotional awareness of one another
• Resolving conflicts
• Developing trust
• Communications challenges prevail due to:
  • Confused or ignored commitments on response time to one another
  • Lack of visual and non-verbal cues
  • Often cultural and language differences
  • Lack of emotional and social tags that create a sense of connection
  • Relying on email to get work done

These challenges need to be taken seriously because they can cost the organization, team and individuals in many ways including through lessened engagement, decreased productivity, higher turnover, and missed creative opportunities.  Fortunately, these challenges can be addressed.  By using a solid model through which the team members are given a voice about their functioning as a team their ESI can measurably grow.

The model we explore using is the Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey® (TESI®), which is composed of seven scales that measure a team’s strengths or challenges.  The survey is an internal 360 on team performance as it results from team members responding confidentially to a survey about their team performance.  With the data in hand from the survey, the team can frankly discuss their strengths and opportunities as well as their different experiences of being on the team.  Best of all they can then create an action plan to support their development.  Later the team can retake the TESI and measure their progress, which will be depicted through a pre-post chart.

7 TESI Skills & Opportunities for Virtual Teams

Team Identity reflects how well the team connects with one another and demonstrates belongingness and pride in the team.  It also includes role and responsibility clarification. Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Making agreements and keeping them- trust builds through keeping commitments in virtual teams
• Establishing communication agreements, e.g.  response time
• Clarifying roles & responsibilities
• Creating a logo or motto
• Naming themselves

Communication reflects how accurately the team members send and receive emotional and cognitive information.  It indicates how well they listen, encourage participation, share information and discuss sensitive matters.  Communication indicates the extent to which team members acknowledge contributions and give feedback to one another.  Trust must be built faster in virtual teams and if key components are not attended to early, the team is not likely to have the foundation it needs to get work done at a distance. Trust is initially built by making and keeping agreements.  Thus strong communication strategies will support the team in moving forward to experiencing trust beginning with trusting the communication process.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Establishing a communication process with understood time commitments
• Practicing active listening virtually
• Setting up conversations in pairs – virtually have coffee or lunch
• Building reflective skills

Emotional awareness measures how sensitive and responsive team members are to each other’s feelings. Does the team value and respect negative as well as positive feelings? This scale measures the amount of attention the team pays to noticing, understanding, and respecting the feelings of its members.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Taking a personality assessment and use the information, such as the MBTI or Emergenetics. Understanding work preferences will facilitate smoother interactions with team members.
• Working with the TESI to build understanding of preferences.
• Matching technology to task
• Telling stories about something that happened when working alone
• Asking questions and listening, checking out the accuracy of what is understood

Motivation is the competency that shows the team’s level of internal resources for generating and sustaining the energy necessary to get the job done well and on time.  It gives feedback on whether creative thinking is promoted and whether competition is working for or against the team.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Setting stretch goals
• Intentionally reinforce what works
• Catch each other succeeding and talk about it- make sure team members know this is a part of what they need to do as well

Stress Tolerance is a measure of how well the team understands the types and intensity of the stress factors impacting its members and the team as a whole.  It addresses whether team members feel safe with one another, and if they will step in if someone on the team needs help. Stress tolerance reflects the level of work/life balance that the team is able to achieve including its ability to manage workload expectations.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Talking about a non-work joy
• Agreeing to all go for a walk at the same time
• Getting up and stretch during the virtual session

Conflict resolution scores show how willing the team is to engage in conflict openly and constructively without needing to get even.  It measures the ability to be flexible and to respond to challenging situations without blaming one another.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Expanding dispute resolution skills
• Pacing one another
• Practicing paying attention

Positive Mood reflects the positive attitude of the team in general as well as when the team is under pressure.  Positive mood scores indicate the members’ willingness to provide encouragement, their sense of humor, and how successful the team expects to be.  It is a major support for a team’s flexibility and resilience.  Virtual Teams can grow this skill by:

• Going to the movies together (in different cities)
• Supporting team members in setting up a time for two to use Skype or an equivalent and have a drink together, be it coffee or…
• Making a big and consistent deal of celebrating successes!

There are many resources that will support your ability to use these resources.  Attend or watch our webinar on this topic, our books Developing Emotional Intelligence:  Exercises for Leaders and Teams, The Handbook for Developing Emotional Intelligence, A Facilitator’s Guide to Team Emotional and Social Intelligence, A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, and Emotional Intelligence in Action, Second Edition.

We welcome your contacting us for more information.

Social Intelligence Strengths

Social Intelligence (SI) is gaining considerable play in today’s conversations but what is it?  Does it matter to you, your team, your organization?  Yes! Social Intelligence is measured by your ability to persuade, influence, connect – in short to lead a meaningful life connecting with others and applying your skills to match your values.  Social Intelligence matters from a soft skill, hard skill and every kind of skill perspective! Prove it you say?  Here goes ….

Defining Social Intelligence is tricky as it encompasses so much of what we express, of our world view, and our interpersonal values.  Yet we need a definition so that we (Marcia and James as the authors and you the reader) can operate from a similar perspective as we consider the concept of Social Intelligence. SI is definitely about people skills.  And it’s much bigger as it encompasses our capacity to understand and exude our values in all dimensions of living.

Our definition is inclusive:

Social Intelligence is the capacity to understand and respond effectively to the emotions, social cues and needs of others in a way that furthers our own values and demonstrates respect for others at the individual, team, organizational and global levels.

 Thorndike originally coined the term Social Intelligence in 1920 and was referring to a person’s ability to understand and manage other people and to engage in adaptive social interactions.

Kihlstrom and Cantor recently clarified the SI discussion by stating; “Social behavior is intelligent – mediated by cognitive processes of perception, memory, reasoning and problem solving, rather than being mediated by innate reflexes, conditioned responses evolved genetic programs, and the like.” (Kihlstrom/Cantor: Social Intelligence  p 14).  They argue that differences in social knowledge causes differences in social behavior; thus they state the question is not how much SI one has but what SI an individual possesses.  We are impressed with their clarifications, yet believe there are dimensions of both how much and what that are relevant as individuals build their capacities.

Goleman and Boyatzis add a powerful new dimension to the understanding of SI with their article, “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership,” HBR, Spring 2011.  They say that Social Intelligence is a relationship based construct for assessing leadership and define SI as “a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.” We highly recommend this informative article.  The authors discuss three critical aspects of brain future article we’ll discuss social intelligence as supported by individual assessments such as the EQi 2.0 and the ESCI.

Team Emotional and Social Intelligence (TESI)

The TESI Survey was developed specifically to measure social, as well as emotional, intelligence.  There’s no way to have effective team action without consistently tapping into social intelligence skills.  Social intelligence is demonstrated through behaviors such as:

1.     Paying attention to and responding to the needs of others

2.     Building positive mood

3.     Managing one’s own impulsive behavior in order to engage with others

4.     Making decisions that integrate objective facts with social needs and consequences

5.     And much more

The seven core team skills are based on demonstrable application of emotional intelligence as the following scale review demonstrates:

Team Identity is a reflection of team members bonding with one another.  Loyalty is strengthened with this skill as team members feel pride in the team.  Team identity is furthered when members understand roles and responsibilities and are committed to the purpose for which the team exists.

Motivation calls on team members having a common reason to move forward in tandem and results in the team getting their work done, exhibiting creativity, and acting with energy because they feel and act in consort with one another.

Emotional Awareness must always begin with personal awareness at the individual level.  To be effective in a team the members then add awareness of others to their individual knowledge. This knowledge includes awareness and responsiveness to verbal and non-verbal communications.  Goleman and Boyatzis make a powerful statement that should guide all consultants who are seeking to build ESI skills.  They emphasize that being good leaders, and we’ll add effective teammates, is less about mastering situations or developing specific skill sets and more about leveraging the interconnectedness between one’s individual brain and the brains of the others they are engaging with. This is accomplished in large part through emotional awareness.

Communication is where the “rubber meets the road” for the team.  Application of this skill demonstrates how well teammates use their emotional awareness, their motivation for success and other skills to engage effectively.  The social intelligence aspects of integrating empathy, listening, and responding to the whole message communicated by teammates will directly influence the quality and sustainability of their productivity. Communication skills are demonstrated with SI when teammates practice their knowledge that the way in which a message is delivered is often more important and influential than the specific message itself.

Stress Tolerance is demonstrated through using Social Intelligence by teammates when they support one another in practicing work life balance.  It’s shown when team members ask one another about how their families or community projects or other personal parts of their lives are going.  Stress tolerance is demonstrated when team members delay a project delivery due date because they notice that meeting a particular deadline could cost too much for certain members of the team.  Social Intelligence is a combination of noticing how others are feeling and why and then responding.

Conflict Resolution is the most complex of all the seven skills as it requires the application of divergent thinking by individual teammates as they exercise patience and willingness to perceive the points of view of others and then participate as a whole group to develop an answer all will embrace.  When team members resolve problems collaboratively they are applying complex processes of systemic social intelligence.  They are concurrently paying attention to how they feel, how others feel, what objective data demonstrates and many other factors as they work together to find an answer that goes beyond their individual needs.

Positive Mood can be a point of early power for a team.  Positive moods are contagious so when a team leader and team members have the skill to foster positive feelings in one another and toward the team mission, they will be building success by using their social intelligence.

A team that uses these seven skills well is using many social intelligence skills and demonstrates the Collaborative Growth Team Model, of these seven skills resulting in the benefits of better decisions, increased loyalty, integrated empathy and the much sought after trust result.   As the target in the inner circle demonstrates, high functioning teams ultimately have the core power of operating with emotional and social well-being for the team, which results in sustainable productivity for the team and the organization.

 

 

Emotional Sustainability Practices

To develop the truly effective solutions that today’s complex world demands, our emotional strength and resourcefulness has to be sustainable! Because right now as we are just about to resolve the current crisis, new problems are germinating, others are sprouting up and some tricky challenge has matured to the point it is just about to tap us on the shoulder and insist, “What about me??”

Emotional sustainability is achieved through developing (or redeveloping) both our individual and our social skills. It requires personal practices to hone our own adaptability, centeredness, and growth, and it also requires maintaining physical and social support systems that keep us sensitive to our environment and integrated with our community. Ecologically speaking we know that sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, that concept also fits well for leaders and teams.

We can understand and develop emotional sustainability to produce powerful demonstrations of leadership and team strength that result in continuous growth and development. Sustainability is similar to resilience, another term used frequently to describe leadership goals.  Both indicate the capacity for long lasting endurance and responsive engagement.

With the underpinning of emotional sustainability, leaders and teams experience many benefits including:

• They are more able to benefit from conflict
• Leaders and team members are more likely to stay consistently engaged and positive
• They know how to ride the waves of change
• Leaders and team members have courage to regularly listen internally to themselves and externally to others, reflect on what they hear and be responsive because they value relationships and communications skills
• They demonstrate the benefits of reduced stress because they confront unrealistic expectations and maximize their strengths.

Emotional sustainability is exhibited by leaders and teams when they demonstrate the following practices:

• Awareness:  They are aware of their feelings and actions and attuned to those of others.
• Responsiveness:  Having recognized emotional and other forms of communication, they respond in a timely and sensitive manner.
• Ability and Willingness to Change Perception:  While often holding well developed views, leaders and team members are able to open their minds, listen and fully consider the perceptions of others.  This skill includes the ability to change their minds and perceptions when appropriate.
• Stress Management:  Leaders and team members act with emotional sustainability when they adjust their stress dials to the right tempo.  They need enough stress to be creatively engaged while not overdoing it to the point they lose physical or emotional stamina.
• Positive Attitude:  They look at events with curiosity and a sense of possibility and begin with the presupposition that positive results will unfold even in challenging situations.

Practices for Building Emotional Sustainability with Individuals and Teams include the following five active forms of engagement.

• Active reflection – Take time regularly to stop and breathe and do what Marcia refers to in Life’s 2% Solution, do the triple T – Think Things Through.  It’s taking time to notice what you are doing, why and to change as you believe is best.  Reflective self awareness is a powerful strength.
• Give feedback individually and to teams – Leadership assessments reflect a large reluctance to give feedback.  This creates loss of power that could result from the creative flow of ideas and has a secondary impact of frequently resulting in a buildup of resentment because people don’t respond to the unexpressed thoughts or concerns (big surprise!).
• Yoga or other forms of movement – Keep a physical flow moving in your body whether it is with yoga, walking, running, or qigong.
• Be actively aware of something bigger than yourself – Why do you do what you do? Connecting with something bigger than you and following that path provides meaning and purpose to your life.  A life of intentional service in accord with your values provides perspective and zest.
• Intend to live a meaningful life – Self-actualization is one of the key skills measured by the EQi 2.0 and one of the key questions is based on the belief that you intend to live a meaningful life. When leaders and teams incorporate the first four skills we’ve just discussed with this intention, they have the opportunity to deliberately manage their commitments and activities in order to live purposeful lives that are robust without leading to burnout.  That’s not an easy achievement; it requires conscious and deliberate living.

Top 10 Reasons for Playing!

1. It feels good and makes you happy!
2. Happy is good!  Good for your health, for your decision-making, for your relationships….. Heck, what isn’t it good for?
3. It’s good for our world economy – a stretch?  Maybe, but what about the recreation dollars we spend even if we’re just driving to a great hike in the forest and taking a picnic.  And happy people have more capacity to slug through the difficult conversations to get to good collaborative decisions.  Tell that to the G-20 – or even the G-8 leaders!
4. We build resilience, defined as the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and elasticity, as in the ability to spring back after things are bent out of shape. Resilience is enhanced through play, through relaxing and through nourishing reflecting.  Play regularly to be prepared for life’s twists and turns.
5. It makes other people happy.
6. You can get good exercise and increase your cardio vascular functioning.
7. Brain health and well-being.
8. We satisfy our own developmental need to be creative and feel competent.
9. We can be more creative while playing with novel possibilities in an environment where we can be flexible and relaxed.

10. To interact and be reflective without it seeming so serious – “Hey, why did we miss that grounder when Holly hit it?”  “What shall our team do next time?”

Play has been described as unplanned behavior, in other words activity that emerges and evolves spontaneously from within its own context. It occurs in a climate that facilitates creativity and innovation. Young children accomplish the majority of their most critical early learning through play. But guess what, adults learn best in the same sort of attitude — relaxed curiosity.  We just don’t emphasize play nearly as much as can serve us. For children play is considered valuable because it develops their social relationship skills, helps build positive interactions between the child and their classmates, and provides the chance to let off a bit of steam (reduce or prevent anger). It also builds on their skills of sharing and taking turns.  Isn’t this what we want for ourselves, our families and our teams?  Of course it is! 

At Collaborative Growth we’re declaring July as a great month for playing.  We hope you take time to enjoy this beautiful month whether it’s quite sunny for you in the northern part of our globe or snow is whitening your world in the southern hemisphere.

We also want to express our gratitude for Freedom.  In the United States where we live, July 4^th is the day we celebrate our nation’s Independence.  Let us all embrace freedom with our intentions that really includes liberty and justice for all to help build a world that.  Neurologists assure us that seeing requires believing so let’s join our combined vision in seeing a world that works for all!

Blessings and our thanks to all of you!

Teambuilding with Emotional Intelligence Competencies

Team Emotional Intelligence Competencies are implemented through a complement of skills, attitudes, behaviors and information.

When we are talking about team competencies, we are speaking of the skills or abilities needed to perform the specific tasks or functions assigned to the team. Accomplishing the competency is based upon their attitudes and behaviors as well as having the skills and knowledge needed.  To be successful, teams need strength in emotional intelligence competencies such as trusting, risk taking, communicating, conflict resolution and being respectful and productive.  We consider each of these areas as their own competency domain, and each competency domain is implemented through a complement of skills, attitudes, behaviors and information that are called for in a particular setting.