“There is a collective emotional intelligence that emerges from a group’s ability to be resilient in times of stress, manage disruptive emotions, and build constructive relationships with important groups of stakeholders.”
We tend to think of Emotional Intelligence, or the lack thereof, as a characteristic of individuals. Indeed, leaders do have a reponsibility to help individual team members develop their emotional intelligence either through coaching or by directing them to trainings and resources that can help them. But just as there is a collective intelligence that emerges when team members put their heads together to analyze data, develop strategies, and innovate, so there is a collective emotional intelligence that emerges from a group's ability to be resilient in times of stress, manage disruptive emotions, and build constructive relationships with important groups of stakeholders. Here are five tips you can use to increase the collective emotional intelligence of your team.
1. Encourage constructive expression of emotions
As Fred Rogers said, "Whatever is mentionable is manageable." Many of us are used to seeing emotions expressed with a lot of drama that would be inappropriate in the workplace. But emotional expression is actually much more genuine and productive when it is done matter of factly, almost neutrally. Example: "When the customer yelled at me on the phone, I felt irritated." Now, was that so hard? When group members can name their emotions, even their difficult ones, it makes it much easier for the group to support each other and find constructive solutions.
2. Set a tone for empathic curiosity
When the Accounts Payable department starts badmouthing the Accounts Receivable department, it usually doesn't end well. Before the group starts to villainize either an individual or a group, the leader should try to encourage the group to walk in their shoes, with questions like:
What might they be thinking or feeling about this situation?
What could they be going through that is causing them to behave in this way?
What more could we do to help them understand what we've been trying to communicate to them?
When the group applies itself to empathizing rather than judging outside individuals and groups, it leads to more group learning, and better, more human-centric design of business processes, communications, and services.
3. Use group humor and play to relieve stress
When a group's stress level gets past a certain threshold it can cause irritability and begin a downward spiral of negative reactions. Give the floor to group members who use humor to see the light side of the situation. Create opportunitites for the group to engage socially in play, allowing them to bond and blow off steam. By promoting these kinds of behaviors, your team will see each other as supports and the team will begin to regulate its own stress level.
4. Use liberating structures to ensure that every voice is heard
A number of factors influence who gets to have a voice at a team meeting, including race, gender, status, culture, and level of extraversion. When people feel that their voice is less wanted or valued by others, it causes distress and alienation, and the group can never be at its best. To counteract these forces, I recommend using Liberating Structures, a menu of team activities that can be applied to a variety of business problems, and are explicitly designed to include everyone.
5. Maintain the group's optimism by cultivating a learning mindset.
Marilee Adams of the Inquiry Institute focuses on the questions that we ask as leading to either learning mindset or a judging mindset. The learning mindset is more optimistic, because it creates new possibilities, while the judging mindset leads to dead end thinking characterized by despair and hopelessness. Here are some questions you can ask a group to encourage optimism in your team:
What's the best outcome we can create?
What do we really want out of this situation? What do our customers want?
What can we try that might lead to better results?
As you steer your team towards the learning mindset, your group will develop a habit of optimism that will keep it open to new and hopeful possibilities.
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