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Group-Level Emotional Intelligence
One of the more interesting emotional intelligence researchers is Vanessa Druskat. She’s at the University of New Hampshire, and for decades now, she studied high-performing teams. And what she finds is that a high performance on a team indicates that the team itself has what you might call group-level emotional intelligence.
Teams have a kind of group self-awareness. For example, the members know each other well as people, not just as people on the team that I see once in a while. They know how they feel, they know each other’s strengths and limitations. They feel trust, a high level of a sense of belonging, that I can be myself in this team because I’m welcomed here. I have safety here, psychological safety. This is very important, so that they can take risks. They’re able to be open. They can be candid with each other. They can bring up creative ideas. They can bring up perspectives from maybe a group that’s a minority. They can speak to the group from that perspective, trusting that they’ll be okay. This is very important to maximize the effectiveness of any group.
Also, groups self-manage. They have what you call norms, which are agreed-on ways of interacting, and they enforce those norms. So, for example, at Ideo, which is a creativity consultancy, if you break the norm that you shouldn’t interrupt someone who’s speaking and speak over them, people in the group will pelt you with small stuffed animals, which is a kind of fun way of reminding you of what the norm is. Teams also empathize with other parts of the organization, not just among themselves, but with other teams, teams they may depend on for their success. What is it that that team needs? How can we help them? And that has to do with relationship management. So the abilities of self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship management manifest at the group level on a high- performing team.
Group Culture
What’s interesting about teams that have high group emotional intelligence is that they may have that even if the overall organization is kind of low in emotional intelligence because they create their own group culture. They create their own reality as a team amongst each other. They may be very supportive, so someone on the team may have an awful interaction with someone else somewhere in the organization who’s a kind of emotional Neanderthal, but they can come back to the team and process it, say, you know, this happened to me, and they’ll be very supported by those team members. So I think that an emotionally intelligent team in an organization with low emotional intelligence is a kind of emotional oasis for team members. And in general, I think that having teams that are high in emotional intelligence helps the organization because those teams will be highly productive in whatever matters there.