Emotional and Social Well-Being for your Team Through Collaborative Intelligence

by Marcia Hughes and James Terrell

Emotional and social well-being is a right that every team should have; yet it has seldom been a goal for teams. Calling for well-being at the individual and team level is not asking for too much. Rather, it’s a critical and proper request. Team well-being occurs because teams apply conscious awareness and intentionality to their work, their mission and to one another. The Collaborative Growth Team Model demonstrates the skills needed to lead to well-being, which is exhibited through teams engaging with collaborative intelligence. When your team collaborates, you take time to explore alternative answers and find a solution that integrates the wisdom of the team. It takes more time up front, because you invest in listening to one another, thinking things through, and coordinating the execution of your response with genuine respect for one another. Collaboration pays off big time as you and your team progress. Your self-discipline and collective intuition will make the future much easier to navigate because teams that coordinate their emotional and social effectiveness skills naturally act with collaborative intelligence.

Collaboration is being increasingly embraced as a preferred way for teams and organizations to operate successfully. Teams learn to collaborate by using their emotional and social intelligence, or as we prefer to describe it, emotional and social effectiveness (ESE). Working with ESE displays the control panel that reveals the current emotional competency blend for gauging and adjusting the levels of critical skills needed to meet team and organizational demands. High use of ESE skills by teams creates Collaborative Intelligence. It’s a simple concept with profound implications.

Collaboration involves working with one or more people in order to achieve a resilient result. Intelligence is the ability to learn facts and skills and apply them; we especially consider a person or an action intelligent when the ability is highly developed. We define emotional and social effectiveness as the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and to recognize and respond effectively to those of others. It includes understanding your social community from the “big picture” point of view and the ability to direct change as well as adapt to change.

This team model identifies the seven core skills needed to understand and develop the behaviors of team success. Those seven are team identity, motivation, emotional awareness, communication, stress tolerance, conflict resolution and positive mood. The model recognizes teams then move to the next level of depth as those seven skills are sharpened. At the middle level of operational success teams experience the four highly desired results of empathy, trust, loyalty, and better decisions. Finally, a team that is highly engaged and firing on all its cylinders achieves the significant lasting benefits of sustainable productivity and emotional and social well-being.

As your team moves through the dimensions of this model, the synergy of collaborative intelligence is fired up. Collaboration is a composite skill that emerges from the masterful use of your ESE skills. The members of a football team collaborate when they huddle and agree that they will each do their part to execute a particular play. In the middle of the play, except in the face of an unexpected opportunity, the fullback won't decide to change the play because he’d prefer to run the ball rather than block! Team loyalty is unquestioned.

This set of blended competencies is the birthplace of synergy. Teams tap into their shared memory and individual capacities to maximize their knowledge, problem-solving capabilities, and resilience. They respond with agility to the fluctuating emotional and social contexts of the team and the organizational dynamics. The correct blend of ESE skills is the rocket fuel that propels your team to achieve its full collaborative capacity. Your team exists in order to solve problems, to make decisions and get things done. When a team applies the seven ESE skills, your decisions are long-lasting. This result occurs because the members communicate, have fun and engage in creative conflict sufficiently to test possible solutions and find the best answers. In fact, this result of better decisions is a natural consequence from the collaborative process that promotes the synergy of creative and tested decisions to occur. As this happens, we invite you and your team to notice that you are operating with collaborative intelligence. There is a great deal of information about emotional and social intelligence available. We encourage you to learn more.

© Collaborative Intelligence, LLC.

Marcia Hughes and James Terrell are co-founders of Collaborative Growth and authors of several books including the best selling The Emotionally Intelligent Team and The Emotionally and Socially Intelligent Team Survey™ (TESI®). They serve as strategic communications partners for leaders and teams in organizations that value high performers. Learn more at www.EITeams.com and www.cgrowth.com.