Enabling Team Intelligence

Clearly leaders achieve and maintain the highest level of emotional intelligence. Effective leaders extend emotional intelligence, cultivating it within others, creating a broader culture for team intelligence to flourish.

I defined Team Intelligence in the Spring 2008 article "Enabling Team Intelligence,” published in InfoSecurity Professional magazine.  It occurred to me as a logical extension of Daniel Goleman's work in emotional intelligence. In his model, the individual is considered throughout the process, and techniques are applied to consistently improve the individual's awareness and ability to manage complex and challenging situations.  

As a fan and practitioner of Goleman's emotional intelligence techniques, what I realized was the need for a similar model to apply to teams similarly seeking to improve and maintain performance.  I needed to extend the model from individual interactions to team dynamics.

Before embarking on this challenging yet rewarding journey, it’s important to note that team intelligence requires dedication and time to achieve.  There are no overnight solutions, and personal and team improvement requires an active, conscious, continuous conversation in order to effect real and lasting change.  It requires individuals and team to honestly assess themselves and each other.  It can be challenging to look into the dark corners of oneself; however, the resolve to face the hard challenges within ourselves can empower teams to overcome interpersonal issues and complete the difficult conversations everyone avoids.

PROCESS OVERVIEW

The team intelligence cycle begins with a self-inward, introspective assessment, including one-on-one interviews with leadership, as well as undertaking the Meyers-Briggs (or similar) personality instrument; this is designed to instill a deeper self-understanding for each team member.  The cycle continues through self-outward behavior awareness and begins the work of the team focus inventory, the team-defined baseline for performance improvement.  The team then begins the work of team development, starting with inter-team relationships to build team trust.  The team outward phase continues the improvement process by utilizing the focus inventory to drive team performance and growth.  The team enters the customer phase, proactively partnering with the customer based on a deep understanding of customer needs and goals.  Finally, the team reflects and assesses their performance across all focus inventory goals, and refreshes the team goals as necessary.

Team intelligence provides a repeatable framework for creating and sustaining high performance teams – and high performance teams make all the difference in getting to the finish line first.

STARTING THE CONVERSATION

Team intelligence begins with setting the overall framework for improvement with the team; it's important that all team members understand the approach and goals, and also realize their commitment in time and focus.  Most teams respond positively - they want to improve, they merely need a leader who will dedicate the time and attention needed to address team performance.  It may be a new experience for teams to consider their performance as a public conversation, and it is normal to have doubters in the group; they will become converts when they see that the changes are real and lasting.

It can be challenging to start the conversation with the team.  The Team Interview Questionnaire is a good place to start, and it covers both individual and group assessments.  It provides the team leader an opportunity and platform for understanding each team member, their growth goals, and attitudes towards the team.  The Team Interview Questionnaire is conducted in private one-on-one sessions with each team member.  It's important that when each team member assesses the performance of the focus inventory - the group of behaviors and competencies from which the team will select improvement candidates - that they assess it based on their perception of the team's performance, not their personal performance or skill level.  The focus inventory results are aggregated on an anonymous basis and then discussed with the team as a whole.

Assessing the focus inventory vectors with the internal and external customers directly involved with the team is a useful exercise, and provides a sounding board for the team self-assessed scores.  Using the same assessment areas and rating scale provides an interesting view when compared to the team's assessment of its own performance.  Expect some gaps between what the team says and what the customers say - those will be key motivators for the team to improve.

That's just the beginning.  Once the team reviews its aggregate performance assessment, the group will identify the three or four areas of improvement that will provide the most value to the team, the organization, and its customers.  These areas of focus can be based on using indicated strengths to overcome perceived weaknesses, or the lowest score area, or a previously identified opportunity for growth.

ACHIEVING TEAM INTELLIGENCE: COMPLETING THE CYCLE

The complete team intelligence cycle begins with the start state and transition period, wherein the team identifies areas of growth opportunity on an individual and team level.  Often better results are achieved on an individual's year-over-year annual performance based on their participation in team intelligence, as the strides they make in personal competencies are easily translated to the team, and have an increasing effect on team performance.  

Team awareness is fostered in the growth and feedback portions of the process.  During this period, team members enhance their social and emotional intelligence, and develop new team norms.  Individual competencies are assessed throughout this period to further enhance self-awareness and improvement planning.  New communications channels are often introduced and leveraged during this phase, and information flows more freely within the team.  Transparency increases and silos of information are reduced.

Team intelligence is achieved when the team has reached sustained momentum in their individual and team improvements, results are realized, and most importantly, proactive customer partnering begins.  At this point, the team and customers reassess the focus inventory, identifying progress, and prioritizing potential opportunities for further improvement.  The team enters a new cycle of improvement, often with accelerated results as team intelligence becomes part of the team baseline. 

REAL-WORLD RESULTS

In one case, the principles of team intelligence were put into use by a team initially resistant to embrace a new collaborative team approach. 

The team had a common problem - they had identified some long-standing issues, but were hesitant to face them face-to-face, as a group.  Confidence among the team was low that changes, short of replacing personnel, would sustain any lasting effects.

Once the team anonymously scored themselves on the focus inventory, the customers rated the team's performance using the same scale and categories.  This "sanity check" of including customer assessments, and the resultant variance of the results, was instrumental in motivating the team to take action and improve their performance.

First the team underwent emotional intelligence and team awareness training to develop a common vocabulary and set a behavioral framework.  New norms were introduced, and destructive behaviors were no longer tolerated by the team.  Occurrences were openly identified and soon eliminated.  Meetings became a productive exchange of ideas again. Creative solutions emerged, and the group was able to deliver - as a team.

The graph displays the results of the year-long efforts put forth by the team, and shows both team scores (blue) and customer scores (green) from beginning (light) to end (dark). With the exception of two areas, the team demonstrated higher performance across the entire range of the focus inventory by the end of the year.

It's noteworthy that the largest improvement occurred across team-related performance vectors – including Trust,  Communication, and Collaboration – as identified by both the team and the customers.  These are all key indicators that the team had moved toward higher performance and team intelligence.