Individual Versus Collective EQ in Teams

If you’ve read me for a while, you may have noticed that my tone used to be (even more?) caustic, ironic, indignant and grandiose - it made me think - have I progressed or regressed to sound less up-in-arms these days? Is my outlook wiser or more impression managing as I don’t want to look naive and wide-eyed? Does that make me less courageous? Would I still shake execs by the lapel to have them wake-up to Agile? 

I certainly would. Maybe I’ve just learned whom I am talking to in this team of ours and that the choir needs no more preaching but instead - hands-on help. And that the choir needs to reach out to the other choirs. That having choir silos is only increasing the debt. And that indignant as I may be about the amount of HumanDebt we’ve amassed, we probably can never reduce it by pointing fingers but instead, by reminding everyone of the art of the amazingly possible when we are Agile from the heart and experience magic in the team. 

Let’s face it, Agile is addictive (like I keep saying, you’ll never find anyone who has accomplished something once they took it to heart who all of a sudden turns around and drops it) and Psychological Safety FEELS good. They both make us better humans. The intense “a-ha!” moments we have when we truly relate to the concept are due to how moments of running fast with Agile in teams that feel just right and where the sky feels like the only limit, are few and far between, and that when they do occur, they leave an immense imprint on our emotional memory. We feel we are stronger emotionally thanks to them and we would have learned a lot about our own feelings and the feelings of others thanks to them which is yes, the loose definition of EQ. 

We’re still compiling data about this and one day I would like to have had a conclusive study to demonstrate it, but my hypothesis is that Psychologically Safe Agile teams have team members with higher individual EQs than the rest of everyone. 

The other week we were wrapping up a demo call with the COO of a bank and they say:

“So this is going to improve EQ, right?”

“Well yes, that too but it will mainly raise your levels of Psychological Safety and therefore increase performance”

“I get that, but it would result in a higher EQ, correct?”

“Sure, but we no longer focus on the leader of the team and their EQ, as we don’t believe the onus is on them but the entire team and that servant leadership can even be a distributed role”

“I didn’t mean the EQ of the leader, I meant everyone’s EQ.”

And that got us thinking again about the notion of #TheEQofTheTeam. If the individual’s EQ is -loosely- defined as understanding our feelings and the feelings of others around us, what is the difference to the EQ of the group? The difference is that the emotions of individuals are only part of the picture and if we want to understand and become sensitive and attentive to the team dynamic, it’s both a collection of individual feelings and the way they interrelate and mesh with each other.

It’s all about the interaction. When our individual EQ grows, we’re better equipped to think in terms of human interactions and recognise patterns of behaviour and emotional states but for it to count at a team level, we have to start seeing them as they occur in the group and not in 1-on-1 interactions as before. 

While individual EQ in the workplace was never mandated, encouraged or really even allowed in some extreme cases, the EQ of the team as a whole, is an even bigger unknown and it hasn’t been discussed much simply because, for the vast majority of our professional lives, the emphasis on teams was all but absent and even if there would have been awareness and interest, realistically, the methods of observation of the team behaviours were absent too. In other words, even if we had wanted to grow the EQ of our bubble we wouldn’t have know where to start when we weren’t looking at its interactions. 

Individual EQ, while not a prerequisite for increasing the EQ of the group, can of course only help. Being able to understand what emotions are part of the collective emotional state, what individual behaviours make a difference and how our teammates feel at any one time, is critical but we don’t need to each become a mini-counsellor Troi (as we were previously advocating ourselves before we saw the light) to start understanding the dynamics of the entire team. 

With tools like ours and others that are at long last measuring how we connect, interact and relate to each other in our team bubble context, we will start seeing not only patterns in our group behaviours but also learn what levers we have at our disposal to change them. 

It’s a type of collective learning in a sense that draws on an ad-hoc, made-to-each-team’s-measure-CBT (CognitiveBehaviouralTherapy) type of approach created by the team itself which is highly empowering.

When teams have the data to inform them of how they feel as a unit - when they can see how they are doing on basics such as trust, connectedness, resilient attitudes, empathy, optimism and above all when they are always working on improving their courage and openness they can’t help but learn from it and therefore adapt. 

Having real, measured and quantified data that maps to specific behaviours and emotions which they can see in every dialogue simply makes them acutely more aware of their interactions and makes the whole topic of the wellbeing and health of the group less scary and nebulous. 

It’s no longer “Just the way we are with each other” but “This last sprint we were closed off, we were impression managing incessantly and we were fearful, so it’s no wonder we couldn’t come up with any new innovative solutions on how to go about this epic and that no one spoke up when we saw we were going the wrong direction, we have to get more flexible and more honest with each other, let’s get on that”. 

When they see that the human interventions they put in place to change each of these newly demystified components of behaviours are bettering their performance and that the data reflects it once they’ve done their own make-shift team-level-CBT, the continuous improvement becomes almost addictive. We see teams go from complete reluctance of “working on the fluffy stuff when we have urgent tickets” to tentative and then complete advocates and evangelists of the idea that one can and should better their performance by changing their team interactions once their collective EQ grows.

Far from the work equivalent of the cheesy “live, laugh, love” signs, having teams with higher EQs who can work on their own behaviours to become Psychologically Safe translates directly into dollar signs when their performance increases by 30-40% as soon as they start increasing awareness and understanding the value of the people work, so any organisation with an ambition of being Agile and competing should enable them to do more of that themselves. 

How would you score your own EQ? What about that of your team? ————————————————————————————————————

The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve 

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.