Improving team performance through social intelligence
Increased team social intelligence is central to team performance. As a leader you can facilitate team engagements to foster social intelligence, building cooperation and resilience — through connection and positivity.
The Choose Your Focus model
By using David Rock’s ‘Choose Your Focus’ model, you can steer a team conversation into positive and creative territory and away from negative sticky areas.
What is social intelligence?
Social intelligence goes hand-in-hand with emotional awareness. It’s a team’s social sensitivity, which translates to the quality and distribution of conversation: watching for social cues, taking turns to speak and share their thinking, being heard, acknowledged, not being spoken over. These are all products of social intelligence.
These behaviours also relate to a person’s ability to empathise, which translates directly to a person’s ability to cooperate with others. We empathise when a person is ‘like us’, when we feel we can relate to them. In contrast we won’t recognise a good idea if it has come from someone we see as ‘not like us’ or not part of the ‘in-group’. Being able to relate to and therefore cooperate with team members is critical to team performance.
Leaders can improve team performance by creating opportunities for team members to connect over things they have in common, increasing empathy and cooperation between team members.
Increasing social intelligence
As a leader you can improve social intelligence by creating opportunities for team members to connect; through where they were raised, where and what they studied, their family set-up, through similar roles or a sense of shared purpose, goals and challenges.
It is also your role to find ways for you yourself to relate to each of your team members. Also to advocate for those not yet part of the ‘in-group’ by acknowledging and crediting them with contributions to team discussions — ensuring their voice is heard.
Interesting fact: Research has shown that having one woman in the ‘room’, who is an equal contributor to the conversation raises social intelligence by 40%, which is credited to increased empathy.
Improving performance with positivity
If a team is looking to positively change the way they work, the level the group think and communicate from is important. Thinking positively, building on other’s ideas and giving positive feedback and encouragement will enhance creativity and cooperation within a team — reinforcing an individuals’ ‘Status’ within the team, explained by the SCARF model. When in a positive mindset, team members will see challenges as just that, a problem within their capabilities to solve.
Leaders can facilitate team meetings to maintain a positive tone. David Rock’s ‘Choose Your Focus’ model from his book “Quiet Leadership” identifies five levels of thinking and communicating. The first three are seen as positive and forward-looking, supporting positive change. The latter two are more problem focussed or negative, and harder to move forward from. In a group setting it can help to be explicit about the level of conversation expected for a meeting or agenda item.
The Choose Your Focus model
- Vision — where we are going?
- Planning — how do we get there?
- Action — what are the next steps?
- Problem
- Drama
Exploring the vision, challenging norms and boundaries and experimenting with novel pathways to achieving goals and objectives can act as ‘stretch’ or growth opportunities for the team, encouraging creative thinking and creating connection between team members.
Staying out of problem and drama, getting too much into the detail of who did what or justifying the situation can stall a team. Once the conversation goes into this space it is contagious and the mind cannot switch back into creative problem-solving, vision and planning again quickly. If the conversation goes there -acknowledge it, “that sounds challenging” and re-focus on the future, “How can we use this information to inform what we do next?”
A connected team who think and communicate at a positive level will work more effectively together to achieve objectives, solve problems and be more resilient when faced with challenges. As a leader you can facilitate and structure meetings to create these conditions or bring in a team coach such as Aata’s Jennifer Clamp.
Further reading on team performance and neuroscience
- ‘SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others’ by David Rock
- ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’ by Bruce Tuckman Psychological Bulletin (Known as the ‘storming, norming, forming’ model)
- ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ by Patrick Lencioni
- ‘Time to Think’ by Nancy Klein
- ‘Group and Team Coaching: The Secret Life of Groups’ by Christine Thornton
Source of inspiration: NeuroLeadership Institute Webinar ‘Coaching Your Team Virtually: Coronavirus and Beyond’.
Hi, I’m Jennifer Clamp, a Founder Coach who works with purpose-driven female founders who are ambitious for the future and wish to bring their vision into reality 💫 ↓
Learn more about how Founder Coaching can be a liberating experience for you at withaata.com
