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.

Leading Emotionally Intelligent Teams

The world has changed. Once we thought that an MBA and wireless technology would secure the future. It won’t. Reams of data and our work at Collaborative Growth all point to the need to work together in teams and that the strategy for sustained team success is emotional and social intelligence, or ESI, at the team level. The most influential individual in this dynamic is the team leader – and it can be a daunting job at times. That challenge is enhanced by good data, such as from the Team Emotional Social Intelligence^® Survey (TESI^®) for a 360 report by team members on the team functioning, an individual report on emotional intelligence skills from the EQ-I 2.0^® or EQ 360^® and on leadership performance from the LPI^®. These 3 assessments bring a powerful level of data together to support strategic leadership by the team leader. Pre – post measurement of success also will support good data and focused leadership.

Leaders need to learn strategies for building their effectiveness in expanding the emotional and social intelligence of their teams. Discovering how to measure and strategically develop a team’s skills enhances success and sustainability. A leader’s greatest challenges in building ESI are to:

1. Develop him or herself personally and as a leader – be honest, hold oneself accountable
2. Learn to coach team members individually
3. Vision the team as a whole unit and lead / coach the whole team

Let’s consider each of these.

First, individual coaching supported by EQ 360 and LPI reports will give the leader and his or her coach the opportunity to be sure strengths are recognized and used and that weaknesses are addressed. Emotional and social intelligence is built on recognition of core skills that lead to success in meeting the environmental challenges that face a leader in every part of life. The key term is skills as these can be developed. If an area is important and the leader isn’t good at the skill, he or she can enhance that skill if they truly want to. Making sustainable behavioral change takes time, attention and commitment. The pay-off is rich and a coach and good assessment data will be valuable support along the way.

Second, coaching individual team members can be a real stretch. By taking on the responsibility to be a team leader, the leader’s challenge grew significantly from just working personally to coaching members of the team individually to support their best engagement and development opportunities. Many leaders come from fields such as engineering or sales that haven’t included training in human development. If a leader is challenged with self-regard or optimism or empathy, for example, how can he or she effectively coach the team members in developing their own skills? The answer is that the leader must engage in building his or her own capacities and also seek training and coaching or mentoring on how to support staff development. Their well-being and the organization’s productivity are directly linked to the leader’s guidance. The leader should keep focusing on learning to pass on skills he or she develops. Expanding communication skills will help the leader listen effectively and notice what is truly being requested. Consciously building his or her own skills will help the leader understand specific strategies to pass on. This is a continuous learning opportunity. If treated as a central way to enrich life for the leader and the staff, it can be fun and one of the best motivational strategies possible.

Third, have your team gain from solid date on their performance. Have the team take the TESI then work with them beginning with visioning the team as a whole unit and leading / coaching the whole team to a unified sense of purposeful engagement. This means the leader needs to view the team in two ways – paying attention to the individual and to the team as a whole. By working with TESI^® information, everyone gains a sense of what’s working and what needs to be strengthened. When the team as a whole experiences that the leader is seeing the team as a discrete operating system – and one that he or she can be proud of – the team will rise to the occasion. This visioning is a powerful invitation to develop a cohesive unit that operates with what we call Collaborative Intelligence™.

Building Skills with the TESI, EQ-i or EQ 360 and LPI

The scales of the three instruments we’ve discussed, the TESI, EQi and LPI, all complement one another. We see them fitting together as demonstrated by this table.

TESI®	EQ-i® or EQ 360®	LPI®
Identity	Self-regardIndependenceInterpersonal relationships	Model the way
Motivation	OptimismAssertivenessSelf-actualization	Inspire a shared vision
Emotional Awareness	Emotional self-awarenessEmpathyAssertiveness	Enable others to act
Communication	EmpathySelf-regardEmotional self-awareness	Model the way
Stress Tolerance	Stress toleranceImpulse controlSelf-actualization	Challenge the process
Conflict Resolution	EmpathyImpulse controlSelf-actualization	Challenge the process
Positive Mood	HappinessOptimism	Encourage the heart

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!

Teams Getting Beyond Doing More with Less

Teams are encountering the request or demand to do more with less all too frequently. How do they respectfully re-direct expectations to gain more success in meeting productivity expectations while building their own team emotional and social intelligence? We’re the first to acknowledge that it isn’t easy. However there are strategies to support success. We discussed many in our recent webinar and will review many here.

First, as Dick Thompson, the publisher of the TESI® noted, teams under stress start focusing more individually and less on the team as a whole, which negatively affects the team’s ability to process information. Interpersonal issues between team members are often heightened, conflict is more likely to arise and can be harder to resolve and the sense of well-being is reduced. Working with the seven team skills measured by the TESI (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey®) provides teams and their leaders with a powerful model to support their success. Each skill is identified together with a tip or tips for building team strength in addressing the stress of being asked to do more with less.

Team Identity is a skill that supports a sense of connection instead of the isolation stress can bring and that in turn helps teams better respond to management pressure effectively. Teams can build their skills by taking charge of some of their time together and have fun. When they get to know each other better, they can work on the same wave length, resolve challenges quicker and be more relaxed. So go to lunch together, go for a walk, or have a regular celebration for birthdays of the month. If your team ever is challenged by management for taking the time, respond that neuroscience shows that taking some breaks supports much more productivity.

Team Motivation gets the team geared up to meet the challenge they face. However, challenges must be reasonably designed so the team has a chance to be successful. If too much is asked the team becomes demotivated because they’re set up to fail. Part of the answer comes from the team finding their bigger “yes”. When they find what is more important they gain strategic perspective, it’s easier to communicate to one another and to management.

Team Emotional Awareness helps team members recognize what’s happening so they can respond to one another and to the situation. When they learn to name the stress and pressures out loud, team members can then discuss their feelings, hopes and worries. They become aware of how to support one another and do so more effectively with the opportunity to release at least some of the tension.
Team Communication is essential in so many ways, for example in applying their reality testing skills. When team members communicate they can discuss how many expectations are on their plate, lay out a strategic plan and propose direction to management to guide their mutual work. This can mean realizing there just aren’t enough resources to tackle all the tasks on their plate. They can show why and suggest the best course of action. Teams often lump everything they need to do under the concept of communications. This clouds the clarity that comes from recognizing communication touches all their skills, but can be separated from the other six TESI skills.
Team Stress Tolerance skills are central to addressing the challenge of being asked to do more with less. One core set of strategies comes with managing their physiology. For example, they can practice exhaling as long as they can, which shifts their conscious attention away from their overheated cognitive circuits. This easy strategy “refreshes their mental screens”. They can practice stair therapy – go climb one or more sets of stairs if possible before making a key decision or confronting someone. They can take a walk together, which is a great way to get to know one another and supports quicker team work when back at the office.
Team Conflict Resolution calls for teams to develop more collaborative solutions that strengthen their productivity and persuasive ability with management. Teams might perform a SWOT analysis on key activities, brainstorm how to make one or two meaningful changes, implement and then check back in in a few weeks. Incremental change is more sustainable and empowering than extreme makeovers!
Team Positive Mood gives the team energy, enhances happiness and better decision making. It’s at the center of developing real team agility. This brings us full circle by connecting with the idea under team identity of taking time to play. It can feel highly counterintuitive when the team is under pressure. Nevertheless, taking time out provides perspective and supports well-being at all levels.
How are your teams managing their challenges of being asked to do more with less? Let us know!

Emotional & Social Well-Being Supports Employee Engagement

The good news about our 2.0 world is organizations are finally getting it – that is they are recognizing that if they place their top value on building emotional and social well being for their employees and teams, they will gain the business and financial values of increased and sustainable productivity, better decisions, loyalty and best of all trust among their workforce. Ok, they get it, but how do they DO it? It isn’t hard, yet it does require intentional commitment and follow through. Fortunately there is a road map, the powerful tools of the EQi 2.0® for individuals and the TESI® for teams are well researched assessments designed to measure and provide the path to building emotional and social well-being. These provide the data to implement a specific plan of action for individuals and teams.

Let’s take the case of Teresa (not her real name) who recently joined a mid-size successful law firm as a paralegal in the Environmental Division (ED). The ED has a managing partner, administrative partner, 10 attorneys and 5 paralegals. Teresa is excited, hopeful, apprehensive, and cautious. She is experiencing a normal set of mixed emotions as she starts this new position that could become a rewarding long-term career or a really difficult chapter in her life. It is very much in her best interest and that of the firm for this to work. Recognizing the investment they are making, the law firm has established a process to welcome and support Teresa’s success.

First, they used the EQi 2.0 as a part of the hiring process to hire a person who would have high potential for success in this position. Once Teresa joined the firm she was given her EQi results with a coaching session by Abigail, an external consultant to their OD team. Teresa was guided to explore all skills of the EQi and to focus on a few that would be most helpful for her. Teresa’s happiness (scored at 90) is lower than she would prefer and she recognizes that her happiness has a global effect on her life, it affects the energy she has to do her job, her ability to connect with others, and how she feels about herself. Teresa and Abigail dug in to explore the well-being indicator in her report and seek useful strategies that Teresa could put into action. Happiness was originally described by Dr. Reuven Bar-On, the creator of the original EQi, as a barometer of emotional health and well-being and as an indicator of one’s entire emotional and social intelligence. The EQi well-being indicator emphasizes that four of the sixteen EQi skills are particularly interconnected to the dimension of happiness. Teresa’s found:

1. Her self-regard (95) was ok, but she would benefit by strengthening her sense of self-confidence. Teresa feels scared in her first position as a paralegal, but upon discussion she recognizes she has strengths to build on including her previous work experience.
2. Her optimism (110) was likely to be a healthy point of leverage in building her goals. However, she and her coach checked her reality testing (102) to make sure she maintained good perspective and didn’t just look at the world with rose colored glasses.
3. 3. Her interpersonal relationships (95) indicated that she longed to take time to develop more friendships. She’d focused on career and family and was truly feeling lonely for personal friends. Teresa recognized that a few close friends would make a big difference for her whole life, but she was worried that she just couldn’t invest the time. She was surprised that her coach would even suggest this was important, after all didn’t the law firm just want billable hours? It seemed like investing in friends would diminish her contribution at the firm. Teresa’s curiosity was definitely engaged.
4. Her self-actualization (104) was fairly strong and Teresa talked about how important it is to her to contribute to making the world a better place. This is why she chose to be a paralegal and work in environmental law. She would be supporting cases focused on water quality and hazardous waste management. She talked about her passion and excitement and demonstrated why this skill and her optimism are key components of her happiness.

Teresa and Abigail discussed a strategy, with Teresa taking the lead on changes she was going to work on. First she knew it had to be small focused steps because she was already busy. She decided to build her self-regard by: 1) giving herself positive messages at least 5 times a day, 2) noticing what was going right, and 3) taking at least 15 minutes each evening to reflect and write down how she felt with the positive messages and what she did right during the day. She committed to doing this for 28 days straight, as Abigail emphasized that she’s building new habits supported by new neuronal pathways. She also decided to have a least one personal lunch or coffee break a week that was just meeting with friends, not about business. Teresa will also do this for four weeks and then decide on next steps. She was intrigued with Abigail’s confirmation that the firm recognizes that people need connections and that folks who feel that they have a full whole life are better long term contributors to the firm and support their clients and co-workers more effectively.

Teresa was beginning to get the message that her new employer believed in her emotional and social well being and was really pleased to learn that the investment wouldn’t stop with just her individual needs as she and her teammates in the Environmental Division were also supported in being a strong and viable team. The team would be taking the TESI (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey) in a few months and she’d be a part of taking the Survey, evaluating the team’s performance in skills such as motivation, emotional awareness, conflict resolution and stress tolerance. Days were marked out on everyone’s calendars for once a month team building sessions where they would use the data from the TESI, connect it with their reflections on projects that were successful or challenged and intentionally keep building their skills to work together.

After the coaching session, Teresa felt hopeful and committed to being a productive member of the firm for a very long time.

Collaborative Intelligence™ For You and Your Team!

Collaborative Intelligence™ is a powerful result experienced by leaders, teams and organizations when they invest in the ground work it takes to reach this pinnacle of success.

Collaboration involves working with one or more people in order to achieve a resilient result. Intelligence is the ability to learn facts and skills and apply them well.

Our book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, sets forth the Collaborative Growth Team Model by identifying the seven core skills needed to understand and develop the behaviors of team success. Those seven are team identity, motivation, emotional awareness, communication, stress tolerance, conflict resolution and positive mood. These seven skills are the dimensions of team emotional and social effectiveness (ESE).
We define ESE as the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and to recognize and respond effectively to those of others. It includes understanding your social community from the “big picture” point of view and the ability to direct change and to adapt to that change.

When teams are doing well in applying many of these seven skills, they move to the middle level of operational success and experience the four highly desired results of empathy, trust, loyalty, and better decisions. A team that is highly engaged achieves the significant lasting benefits of sustainable productivity and emotional and social well-being.

As your team moves through the dimensions of this model, the synergy of Collaborative Intelligence™ is fired up. Collaboration is a composite skill that emerges from the masterful use of ESE skills. The members of a football team collaborate when they huddle and agree that they will each do their part to execute a particular play. In the middle of the play, except in the face of an unexpected opportunity, the fullback won’t decide to change the play because he’d prefer to run the ball rather than block! Team loyalty is unquestioned. When your team collaborates, team members take time to explore alternative answers and find a solution that integrates the wisdom of the team. It takes more time up front, because the team invests in listening to one another, to thinking things through, and to coordinating responses with genuine respect for one another.
Collaboration pays off big time as you and your team progress. Your self-discipline and collective intuition will make the future much easier to navigate because teams that coordinate their ESE skills naturally act with Collaborative Intelligence™ .

This set of blended competencies is the birthplace of synergy. Teams tap into their shared memory and individual capacities to maximize their knowledge, problem-solving capabilities, and resilience. They respond with agility to the fluctuating emotional and social contexts of the team and the organizational dynamics. The correct blend of ESE skills is the rocket fuel that propels your team to achieve its full collaborative capacity.

Your team exists in order to solve problems, to make decisions and get things done. When a team applies the seven ESE skills, your decisions are more long-lasting. This result occurs because the members communicate, have fun and engage in creative conflict sufficiently to test possible solutions and find the best answers. In fact, this result of better decisions is a natural consequence from the collaborative process that promotes the synergy of creative and tested decisions to occur. As this happens, we invite you and your team to notice that you are operating with Collaborative Intelligence™ .

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