I’ve been blogging about MIT’s fascinating research on team effectiveness for years, including about: a study by the Human Dynamics Laboratory on team communication patterns correlated with performance metrics; the implications for virtual team building; and the implications for policies prohibiting telecommuting programs. Now MIT has some new studies that link not only communication patterns but also emotional intelligence to team effectiveness. Here’s the skinny. Researchers put people in groups and gave them various tasks involving logical analysis, planning, brainstorming and other tests to measure their intelligence. They found little correlation between the collective intelligence of the group and the average individual IQ of each member. Where they did find a significant positive correlation is in three areas: 1. How equally the members of the group communicate with each other rather than one or two people dominating the conversation (this is the part we already knew from the previous study).…
Showtime’s new television series The Affair offers an interesting illustration of the fiction of memory. It’s a topic that many psychologies and organizational development theorists have written about,…
For the past year, I’ve been traveling around the country delivering a soft skills course to the field office supervisors of a federal agency. The course includes a…
Jason Feifer recently wrote a great article for Fast Company Magazine called Fear and Loathing of Silicon Valley. He makes a convincing case that the current dialogue about…
One of my contractors asked me to help the proposal manager put together consultant resumes and bios for a major proposal they were working on. After I finished…
I taught a leadership development class focused on making change recently. It was fourth in a series, and the previous classes had focused on adapting to change but…
I’m accustomed to angry or frustrated groups of training participants but sometimes they are truly a challenge. A recent group of federal agency employees was so stressed about…
I interviewed a federal employee recently about her experiences working on a public complaint hotline, so that I could write case studies for a training program I’m developing. …
Jon Gordon’s The No Complaining Rule is a short, fun read with a simple concept that anyone in today’s business world can quickly implement. The book tells a…
We often make the mistake of thinking that something can only be measurable if we can count it or put it on a graph, especially when it comes…
When the challenges of team building for virtual teams come up for discussion with workshop groups, my usual mantra is that we don’t do anything different when managing…
When I was in my 20s I had a real problem with speeding tickets. New Hampshire has tough traffic laws and I was put up for “habitual offender”…
One day recently a woman who had been in my team building class stopped by to say hello. She wanted to tell me a story about how she…
I’m re-reading Jim Collins’ classic Good to Great this week, after many years. I’m struck by how much clearer the concept of Level 5 leadership is to me now…
I know from experience that a sense of purpose and meaning in one’s work is far more motivating than money or any other tangible benefit. Back when I…
After watching Dave Logan’s TED talk about tribal leadership last spring, and blogging about it in fascination, I finally read his book. Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to…
Questions are so powerful for learning and communication. We all know that already. But a great post by Shane Snow illustrates how important it is to use the…
My latest Netflix binge is The West Wing, the political drama series that won numerous awards during its 1999 – 2006 run on NBC. While re-reading Patrick Lencioni’s…
Dan Pink, author of the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that when we’re seeking creative problem-solving-type work, we must create an environment that…
One of my favorite topics for a team building session is the fundamental attribution error, or FAE for short. The FAE is a concept in social psychology which…