THE TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM of a manufacturing firm had accepted an important charge: to find ways to address the fact that the firm was perennially locked in what they called “flat growth.” Translation: They were losing their edge. The trouble was, the team simply could not seem to make big decisions, no matter how important. In fact, the more urgent the decision, the more the team members would put off making it, careful to avoid topics on which they knew they disagreed. Worse yet, they sometimes acted as if they did agree on key issues, only to leave the meeting and, as one person put it, “quietly sabotage the decision.” Meanwhile, the manufacturing firm fell more and more behind on implementing crucial strategy.
What was going on with this team? Through a leadership audit of the team members, the truth came out: Virtually every one of them was uncomfortable with interpersonal disagreements, scoring low on the conflict management EI competence. Suddenly the reason for the team’s inability to make decisions was obvious. It had never come to the collective realization that open discussion and disagreements about ideas—as opposed to attacks on people who hold disparate views—sharpen decision making. Instead, the team had adopted the habit of avoiding all disputes.
For this group, recognizing that their shared gap had resulted in inefficient team habits was like a light going on. In fact, what they had discovered was an important, but invisible, force acting on the team: The ground rules regarding conflict and their collective feelings about it added up to an emotional reality that paralyzed them. With that insight, they could see what they as a team—and as individuals—needed to change; further, they recognized that beyond a behavioral adjustment, a real solution would require a shift in mindset about conflict.
We’ve seen repeatedly that when teams (and entire organizations) face their collective emotional reality, they begin a healthy reexamination of the shared habits that create and hold that reality in place. In fact, for leaders to extend emotional intelligence throughout their teams and organizations, that’s precisely where they need to start: by taking a hard look at reality, rather than focusing first on an ideal vision. Thus the sequence of reflection and self-discovery is reversed from what it was at the individual level, described in chapter 7.
Why the reversal? It’s a matter of motivation. As individuals, we feel most motivated to change when we tap into our dreams and ideal visions of our lives. That vision of our personal future gives us the energy and commitment to change our behavior. The ideal vision for a group, however, is often a much more distant concept, so it simply doesn’t provide enough motivation to instigate change. A good example is the lofty language found in company mission statements, which often feels light-years away from employees’ day-to-day experiences at work.
Groups begin to change only when they first have fully grasped the reality of how they function, particularly when individuals in the group recognize that they’re working in situations that are dissonant or uncomfortable. It is critical that they understand this reality on an emotional, even visceral, level. Yet recognizing discomfort does not, in itself, enable change. Group members must discover the source of discontent—an emotional reality that usually goes beyond such obvious sources as “a bad boss.” The root of the problem often lies with long-established and deeply embedded ground rules, or habits that govern the group. We call those rules norms when we talk about teams, and culture when we refer to the larger organization.
Once there’s an understanding of the emotional reality and norms of teams and the culture of an organization, it can be used as a basis from which to develop the ideal vision for the group, which, to be truly captivating, must also be in tune with each individual’s personal vision. With the reality and ideal vision understood, it is possible to identify and explore the gaps between them and consciously plan to align what’s happening today with the vision of tomorrow. The more aligned the reality is with the ideal, the more the change can be counted on to persist over the long term. That type of “attuning” ideals with reality is what creates the framework for moving away from dissonance and toward an emotionally intelligent, resonant, and more effective group.
Before exploring how to make change happen, however, we’ll look more closely at the concept of emotional reality. We’ll first explore this in the context of teams and move later to discuss organizations, since team situations are usually closer to people’s daily experience. Teams also provide a more immediate venue for change—while at the same time offering a reflection of the larger organizational reality.
In the last few decades much research has proven the superiority of group decision making over that of even the brightest individual in the group. 1 There is one exception to this rule. If the group lacks harmony or the ability to cooperate, decision-making quality and speed suffer. Research at Cambridge University found that even groups comprising brilliant individuals will make bad decisions if the group disintegrates into bickering, interpersonal rivalry, or power plays. 2
In short, groups are smarter than individuals only when they exhibit the qualities of emotional intelligence. Everyone in the group contributes to the overall level of emotional intelligence, but the leader holds special sway in this regard. Emotions are contagious, and it’s natural for people to pay extra attention to the leader’s feelings and behavior. 3 So, very often it is the group leader who sets the tone and helps to create the group’s emotional reality—how it feels to be part of the team. 4 A leader skilled in collaboration can keep resonance high and thus ensure that the group’s decisions will be worth the effort of meeting. Such leaders know how to balance a team’s focus on the task at hand with attention to the relationships among the team members. They naturally create a friendly, cooperative climate in the room, a climate that fosters a positive outlook on the future. 5
Accordingly, a leader who isn’t emotionally intelligent can wreak havoc in a team situation. Consider the following examples.
• A division of a healthcare company was losing money hand over fist, providing inferior service while employing too many people at every level. The management team was headed by a short-sighted leader and held endless meetings to seek consensus before it would make changes regarding critical issues such as cutting staff. Unable to come to any decisions, within a few years the ailing division pulled the entire company into financial disarray.
• Janet, a brilliant leader in a large insurance company, stepped into a sleepy division with the force of a tornado—and absolute intolerance for the old ways of doing things. For people on the team who didn’t agree with her plans, she had one clear and very public message: There’s no room for you here; find something else to do. Little did Janet realize she had mobilized a force for a new cause in her team—to see her fail at any price. Within a matter of months, what had been a reasonably successful division began performing miserably, and within a year it was dismantled.
Unfortunately, these scenarios are all too familiar to many of us. At the root of both situations was a problem related to how the leader managed the silent language of both emotion and norms. We take norms for granted, but they are immensely powerful. Norms represent implicit learning at the group level—the tacit rules that we learn by absorbing day-to-day interactions and that we automatically adopt so they can fit in smoothly.
When all is said and done, the norms of a group help to determine whether it functions as a high-performing team or becomes simply a loose collection of people working together. 6 In some teams, contention and heated confrontation are the order of the day; in others a charade of civility and interest barely veils everyone’s boredom. In still other, more effective teams, people listen to and question each other with respect, support each other in word and deed, and work through disagreements with openness and humor. Whatever the ground rules, people automatically sense them and tend to adjust how they behave accordingly. In other words, norms dictate what “feels right” in a given situation, and so govern how people act.
Sometimes norms that seem helpful, and that are even rooted in noble goals, can become destructive. That was the case with the healthcare division example recounted earlier. One of the division’s most vaunted norms was a commitment to consensus in the decision-making process. But whereas consensus usually results in highly committed and motivated team members, in this division the leader had come to use it as a way to stall and even hijack decisions—especially decisions that would move things in a new direction.
In the case of the new leader of the sleepy insurance division, Janet’s failure to identify the team’s emotional reality and to comply with its underlying norms wrought catastrophic results. She underestimated the power of the tribe: the tight cohesion that people feel when there are long-standing collective habits and a shared sense of what they hold sacred.
Charged with transforming the division into a state-of-the-art unit, Janet came in with big dreams and a keen eye for what needed to change. Using a classic commanding leadership style, she looked around, found a few folks who looked liked “leaders” (actually they looked just like her), pulled them close, and began cleaning house—readily sacrificing people with the least power. When her new subordinates objected to her tactics, Janet wasn’t fazed; she was convinced that the senior people would see the need for change and adopt her vision—or else get out.
What Janet failed to take into account were the unspoken but powerful norms that had governed the division long before she came aboard. The most important of those norms was a strong bond of loyalty among the team members, who prided themselves on taking care of each other even during hard times. They had also found ways to deal with conflict that ensured that few people were hurt. By treating people roughly, Janet violated core cultural norms. The team members found their guiding principles—collaboration, kindness, and respect for “face”—under attack, and they fought back. Within a matter of months, as people came together around their shared sense of outrage, key team members openly tried to wrest leadership from her, while many others chose to leave—leading to the division’s eventual demise.
Janet is a good example of one of the biggest mistakes leaders can make: ignoring the realities of team ground rules and the collective emotions in the tribe and assuming that the force of their leadership alone is enough to drive people’s behavior. Still, it happens in company after company: A leader walks into a new job—often a turnaround situation—ignores the power of the group’s norms, and pretends that feelings don’t matter. Rather than using resonance-building leadership styles, the leader employs a steam-rolling combination of commanding and pacesetting styles. The result is a toxic and rebellious environment.
Clearly, the leaders in the previous examples lacked the emotional intelligence to address the group reality and raise team interactions to more productive levels. Leaders who have a keen sense of the group’s pivotal norms, on the other hand—and who are adept at maximizing positive emotions—can create highly emotionally intelligent teams.
Collective emotional intelligence is what sets top-performing teams apart from average teams, as shown by the work of Vanessa Druskat, a professor at Case Western’s Weatherhead School of Management, and Steven Wolff, a professor at Marist College’s School of Management. Group emotional intelligence, they argue, determines a team’s ability to manage its emotions in a way that cultivates “trust, group identity, and group efficacy” and so maximizes cooperation, collaboration, and effectiveness. 7 In short, emotional intelligence results in a positive—and powerful—emotional reality.
Not surprisingly, a group’s emotional intelligence requires the same capabilities that an emotionally intelligent individual expresses: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. What’s different though, is that the EI competencies relate both to individuals and to the group as a whole. 8 Groups have moods and needs, and they act collectively—just think about the last time you walked into a meeting late and could actually feel the tension in the room. You could tell there had been a conflict of some sort, even before anyone said a word. The group, as a whole, was tense and poised for a fight. You also knew that the group, as a whole, needed some action to get back on track—and if it didn’t happen soon, things would spiral downward. This is what we mean by group moods and needs.
As is true with individuals, in teams each of the EI abilities builds on one another in practice, becoming a kind of continuum. In other words, when team members begin to practice self-awareness, noticing the group’s mood and needs, they tend to respond to one another with empathy. The very act of showing one another empathy leads the team to create and sustain positive norms and manage its relationships with the outside world more effectively. At the team level, social awareness—especially empathy—is the foundation that enables a team to build and maintain effective relationships with the rest of the organization.
The Self-Aware Team
An engineering firm’s management team had scheduled its weekly meeting at an offsite location. Just as the meeting was about to begin, one team member stormed in, mumbling something about the meeting being held at a place and time that was inconvenient for him. Noticing how upset he was, the leader called everyone’s attention to the sacrifice the team member was making and thanked him for it. The effect of that acknowledgment: no more anger.
A team expresses its self-awareness by being mindful of shared moods as well as of the emotions of individuals within the group. In other words, members of a self-aware team are attuned to the emotional undercurrents of individuals and the group as a whole. They have empathy for each other, and there are norms to support vigilance and mutual understanding. So although this team leader’s gesture may have seemed simple, often just such an astute and seemingly subtle move can do more to reduce dissonance and restore resonance than an action full of bells and whistles.
Since emotions are contagious, team members take their emotional cues from each other, for better or for worse. If a team is unable to acknowledge an angry member’s feelings, that emotion can set off a chain reaction of negativity. On the other hand, if the team has learned to recognize and confront such moments effectively, then one person’s distress won’t hijack the whole group.
That intervention in the engineer’s team points to the near seamlessness between a team’s self-awareness and empathy, which leads to its self-management. It also illustrates how a leader can model behavior. The leader in this case modeled an empathetic confrontation of a member’s emotional reality and brought it to the group’s attention. Such a caring attitude builds a sense of trust and belonging that underscores the shared mission: We’re all in this together.
Team self-awareness might also mean creating norms such as listening to everyone’s perspective—including that of a lone dissenter—before a decision is made. Or it can mean recognizing when a teammate feels uncomfortable in learning a task, and stepping in to offer support.
In their research on teams, Susan Wheelan of Temple University and Fran Johnston of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland point out that very often it is an emotionally intelligent team member—not just the leader—who is able to point out underlying problems and thus raise the self-awareness of the group. 9 Such was the case at a strategic planning session at Lucent Technologies.
The meeting was going all too predictably. The reigning executive had asked, as she always did, for a “stretch goal” to set next year’s numbers. The team responded with its usual bravado: “Double digit!” “We can do anything we set our minds to!” But Michel Deschapelles, currently a regional vice president for Latin America, felt frustrated. He knew that the team’s norm of public bravado had long masked underlying patterns of ineffective goal setting—which went far to explain the division’s slow growth—and reflected people’s tendency to avoid accountability by hiding behind vague goals.
He decided to challenge his teammates: “Do you guys really mean it?” he asked. “Then let’s go for 400 percent growth this year! Let’s make that our goal!” You could see the reaction on people’s faces: They thought he had gone mad. For a moment dismay paralyzed the group. But after a few minutes, people started to laugh: Deschapelles had called their bluff and shed light on the group’s hidden norm of empty bravado.
His challenge initiated a frank discussion about how the team had hidden the truth of its performance behind meaningless phrases. Soon the team was able to have more realistic conversations about measurable goals and concrete steps to attain them, holding one another accountable for what they could achieve as a team. That proved to be a pivotal moment for business performance, creating new clarity about who was responsible for what. For the first time, financial results for the following fiscal year let the team demonstrate its value to the corporation: They helped to close over $900 million in sales.
Deschapelles’s actions sparked collective mindfulness—awareness of what the team was doing, and why. 10 This level of self-awareness in a team leads to an ability to make decisions about what to do and how to do it, rather than blindly following ineffective norms or swaying with the winds of team members’ (or the leader’s) emotions.
The Self-Managed Team
Cary Cherniss, chair of a well-known research group, puts team self-awareness front and center and holds group members accountable for managing how they work together. At the beginning of a day-long meeting, he passes out the day’s agenda—along with a list of “process norms” that outlines how the group will carry out that agenda. For example:
Everyone, not just Cary, should take responsibility for:
• Keeping us on track if we get off
• Facilitating group input
• Raising questions about our procedures (e.g., asking the group to clarify where it is going and offering summaries of the issues being discussed to make sure we have a shared understanding of them)
• Using good listening skills: either build on the ongoing discussion or clearly signal that we want to change the subject, and ask if that is ok …
Members of this group, who come from around the world, say these meetings are among the most focused, productive, and enjoyable of any they’ve attended.
This example offers an excellent lesson in how a team led by an emotionally intelligent leader can learn to manage itself. Of course, Cherniss should know what he’s doing—after all, he heads the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. But none of the process norms that Cherniss passed around were out of the ordinary, in and of themselves. What was unusual was that Cherniss made sure he reminded the group of its collaborative norms—making them explicit so that everyone could practice them.
This raises an important point about team self-management: Positive norms will stick only if the group puts them into practice over and over again. Cherniss’s group continually maximized its potential for interacting with emotional intelligence, raised its level of effectiveness, and produced a positive experience for all of the group members each time it met. Being so explicit about norms also helped to socialize newcomers into the group quickly: At one point, the consortium doubled its size, but did so smoothly because people knew how to mesh.
When core values and norms are clear to people, a leader does not even need to be physically present for the team to run effectively—this is of special importance to the thousands of managers who work with virtual teams and whose team members are located all over the globe. In self-aware, self-managing teams, members themselves will step up to the plate to instill and reinforce resonant norms and to hold one another accountable for sticking to them. At one research laboratory, for example, no one can remember who started what has become a tradition during meetings of R&D groups. Whenever someone voices a creative idea, the person who speaks next must take the role of an “angel’s advocate,” offering support. That way the prospects are better for the survival of the fragile bud of an idea, insulating the innovative thought from the inevitable criticisms. The “angel’s advocate” norm does two important things: It helps to protect new ideas, and it makes people feel good when they are creative. As a result, people are more creative, and resonance is continually reinforced in the team.
So, team self-management is everyone’s responsibility. It takes a strong, emotionally intelligent leader to hold the group to the practice of self-management, especially for teams not accustomed to proactively handling emotions and habits. When core values and the team’s overall mission are clear, however, and when self-management norms are explicit and practiced over time, team effectiveness improves dramatically, as does the experience of team members themselves. Being on the team becomes rewarding in itself—and those positive emotions provide energy and motivation for accomplishing the team’s goals.
The Empathic Team
A team in a manufacturing plant knew that its success depended in part on getting the maintenance team to give their equipment top priority. So the manufacturing team members nominated that team for a “Team of the Quarter” award, and they wrote the letters that helped the maintenance team win. That relationship polishing helped the manufacturing team maintain its record as one of the plant’s top producers.
The effect was clear: By helping to trigger a feeling of team pride in the maintenance group, the manufacturing team created goodwill between those two parts of the organization—and a desire to help the other succeed. The team used its skills to try to understand another part of the organization and how the two groups affected one another, thereby cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship. As a result, both teams succeeded better than either one would have on its own.
An emotionally intelligent team, then, has the collective equivalent of empathy, the basis of all relationship skills. It identifies other key groups in the organization (and beyond) that contribute to the team’s success, and it takes consistent action to foster a good working relationship with those groups. Being empathic at the team level doesn’t just mean being nice, though. It means figuring out what the whole system really needs and going after it in a way that makes all those involved more successful and satisfied with the outcomes. 11 The manufacturing team’s proactive stance worked on two levels: It built resonance between the two groups, and it helped shine a spotlight on the good work of the maintenance team when it was recognized as the plant’s top performer.
Empathy across organizational boundaries—team to team, for example—is a powerful driver of organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, this kind of empathy goes far toward creating a healthy emotional climate organization-wide, as well as creating a positive emotional environment in teams themselves.
The leader who wants to create an emotionally intelligent team can start by helping the team raise its collective self-awareness. As some of the examples discussed earlier illustrated, this is the true work of the leader: to monitor the emotional tone of the team and to help its members recognize any underlying dissonance. Only when a team can confront that emotional reality will it feel moved to change. By acknowledging a shared sentiment as simple as “I don’t like how it feels around here,” a team makes a critical first step in the change process.
A leader helps initiate that process by listening for what’s really going on in the group. That means not only observing what team members are doing and saying but also understanding what they are feeling. Then, once a leader has helped the team uncover its less-productive norms, the group can come together around new ways of doing things.
Strategies for exposing a group’s emotional reality can take myriad forms. For example, a vice president at a financial services company told us: “I always start by looking not at how I see things, but at how my team members see things. I ask myself, ‘What’s happening with that person? Why is he doing those awful things? What is he afraid of or angry about? Or, what is she excited about, and what makes her feel secure and happy?’ ”
By modeling and encouraging in her team the key competency self-awareness, that vice president made her division a center of excellence. Moreover, since its group norms included empathy and a focus on others—rather than on its own wants and needs—the division was able to look beyond itself and identify leadership and management issues that the company as a whole needed to address. As a result, the division has hit several home runs in the programs and initiatives it has launched, including a management-assessment center that’s known in the industry as best in class.
SETTING GROUND RULES: THE LEADER’S JOB
MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, it is the team leader who has the power to establish norms, maximizing harmony and collaboration to ensure that the team benefits from the best talents of each member. A leader accomplishes that by moving the group toward a higher emotional tone, using positive images, optimistic interpretations, and resonance-building norms and leadership styles, particularly visionary, democratic, affiliative, and coaching styles (see chapter 4 for more on styles).
For example, leaders can model behavior through their own actions or by positively reinforcing members who do something that builds the group’s emotional capacity. One might do this by conducting a short check-in session before meetings start, to ensure that people whose mood might be “off” can express their feelings and have them soothed. As Kenwyn Smith of the University of Pennsylvania and David Berg of Yale University noted in their research, such emotions in a group are crucial signals to a leader “that the issue or event at hand should be engaged rather than avoided”—short-circuiting the trouble rather than letting it smolder. 12 For example, a leader might make a point of phoning a member whose behavior has been rude and discussing the issue, or she might make sure she asks members who have been quiet what they think about a particular decision.
Setting the right ground rules requires an emotionally intelligent leader—again, common sense, but not common practice. The best leaders pay attention and act on their sense of what is going on in the group, and they needn’t be obvious about it. Subtle messages, such as quietly reminding someone not to attack ideas during a brainstorming session, are powerful too. Under such leadership, teams over time naturally accumulate a common, positive lore about how to operate with each other.
Another senior manager pays attention to the group as a whole. Aware that teams often behave differently at different points in their life cycle, this manager creates ways for members to talk about issues that are problematic in new teams. 13 When convening a project team, she’ll routinely get people to talk about their strengths and about what they can contribute to the effort. Subtly, this leader is making team members aware of two aspects of the team’s emotional reality: inclusion dynamics (who’s in and who’s out) and people’s roles (who does what, and why). The openness she establishes with these team start-ups helps to create good norms—habits that will enable the team to deal with the inevitable conflicts later on.
Another way that leaders can uncover the emotional reality of the group is by observing important signals. For example, during a recent merger between two European pharmaceutical giants, one manager checked an easy barometer of her division’s collective emotions: She monitored the number of cars in the parking lot.
When the merger was first announced, this manager noticed that the parking lot was always full, and that many cars remained well into the evening. She knew that people were working extra hard because they were excited about the potential opportunities that the merger represented. Then, as the change process began to hit one delay after another, the manager noticed fewer and fewer cars in the parking lot. Clearly, many people’s initial excitement and commitment was dwindling—and their anxiety increasing.
But what about the cars that continued to appear in the parking lot, day after day? Several pockets of people were apparently managing to remain productive and relatively happy even during that sluggish process. At this division it was discovered that while many of those people were motivated internally—either by a deep commitment to the work itself, such as the R&D scientists, or because they were otherwise skilled in emotional self-management—most people who weathered the change were protected from the turmoil by effective leaders. Those emotionally intelligent leaders made sure that they engaged their teams in the change process, giving them as much information and as much control over their destiny as possible. They noticed how their team members were feeling, acknowledged that those feelings were important, and gave people opportunities to express those emotions.
For example, one R&D manager recognized early on that morale was tanking after a favorite leader left the company. Rather than ignoring the problem (after all, he couldn’t change the situation), he talked to each of his team members individually about their sorrow and concerns. That kind of personal attention enabled him to then bring the team together so that it could refocus its energy on the more positive changes surrounding the merger. Another manager held “team closedowns.” Instead of simply shuffling people on to their next job as new positions were announced, on several occasions he brought the old team together to celebrate the past, mourn the end of an era, and discuss hopes for the future.
These managers are good examples of leaders who managed their own feelings and the collective feelings in their units so that people spent a minimal amount of emotional energy deciphering—or fighting—the changes. By keeping their eyes open and monitoring the tone of their groups, the leaders captured positive energy and found constructive outlets for negative feelings.
The CEO of a midsize company asked us to work with three members of an executive team who were not cooperating well together. The CEO thought the cure would be simply a matter of doing some team building to get things back on track. We decided to get more information. In our coaching conversations with team members, we looked for the emotional reality of the team and its norms, as well as themes concerning the leader’s impact. We also took a snapshot of the team’s emotional intelligence using the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI), and we assessed management style and the executives’ impact on the climate of their organization. 14 What we found surprised this CEO. True, the team wasn’t working well together, but what it needed wasn’t team building. The results of our interviews and the picture the 360-degree feedback painted about the team showed several underlying problems that required a very different kind of solution.
Not surprisingly, there were a few problems with specific team members. One team member, for example, measured very low on self-awareness. He was completely missing the clues people gave him about his style of interaction. In meetings, he would express strong viewpoints and not understand how his aggressive manner was coming across to others. When people tried to get through to him about these issues, his body language said, “Lay off.”
Another team member, recently arrived from a plant halfway around the world, exhibited little understanding of organizational politics in the corporate center and was alienating teammates and subordinates alike with his countercultural behavior. What made it even more difficult for his co-workers (and the man himself) to understand was that, on the interpersonal level at least, he displayed excellent empathy and relationship-building skills—he just couldn’t read the team’s emotional reality, and he was always out of synch.
Most of the time, these problems and other interpersonal issues become the focus of team building. When we looked deeper, however, we found that the real problem was a combination of ineffective norms and a negative emotional tone of the team. There was little self-awareness on the part of individuals or the team as a whole about their own group process: They did not manage individual team members’ emotions or the group’s moods very well, and they spent a lot of time and energy managing the team’s negative emotions. In essence, it did not feel good to be part of the team, and people were avoiding working together.
Part of the underlying problem was that the team had established some ineffective norms in response to the CEO’s pacesetting leadership style. The CEO’s high drive for achievement and his inability to show empathy were creating a dysfunctionally competitive environment within the team. Moreover, while this leader thought his vision and strategy were apparent to everyone, our data showed us that wasn’t the case at all: The reason the team members were moving in different directions was because they were unsure of where the larger organization was supposed to be headed.
Obviously, off-the-shelf team building would have done little to help this executive committee. By recognizing that its collective gap in emotional intelligence had created unproductive habits of interaction, the team could then see what it really needed to change. Equally important, the team recognized that in order for it to change as a group, each member also would have to commit to change as an individual. Armed with accurate information, we were able to target change processes for both the team and its individual members.
This team snapshot illustrates the importance of getting a clear picture of the emotional reality of an environment before launching into a solution. Part of understanding the emotional reality is uncovering the particular habits ingrained in a team or organization that can drive behavior. Often these habits make little sense to people—and yet they still act on them, seeing them as “just the way we do things around here.” Emotionally intelligent leaders look for signs that reveal whether such habits, and the systems that support them, work well. By exploring and exposing unhealthy group habits, leaders can build more effective norms.
The previous example of the executive team unearthing its unproductive norms and unhealthy emotional reality points to a critical requirement for larger organizational change—something we will examine in detail in the next chapter. Getting people in the top executive team together to have an honest conversation about what is working and what is not is a first critical step to creating a more resonant team. Such conversations bring to life the reality of what an organization feels like and what people are actually doing in it.
The problem is, these conversations are hot, and many leaders are afraid to start the dialogue—fearful of taking it to the primal dimension. Too often, unsure of their ability to handle the emotions that arise when people talk honestly about what is going on, leaders stick to the safe topics: alignment, coordination of team members’ functional areas, and strategy-implementation plans. While these safer conversations can set the stage for the next discussion—about the team itself, the organization, and the people—most teams stop the discussion at the level of strategy and functional alignment. They find it too difficult to be honest with one another, to examine the emotional reality and norms of the team. And this causes dissonance on the team—after all, everyone can feel when the norms are dysfunctional and the emotional climate is unproductive. By not taking on the problem, the leader actually magnifies it. It takes courage to break through that barrier, and it takes an emotionally intelligent leader to guide a team through it.
The benefits of such a process at the top are threefold. First, a new and healthy legitimacy develops around speaking the truth and honestly assessing both the behavioral and the emotional aspects of culture and leadership. Second, the very act of engaging in this process creates new habits: When people in the organization see their leaders searching for truth, daring to share a dream aloud, and engaging with one another in a healthy manner, they begin to emulate that behavior. And third, when truth seeking comes from the top, others are more willing to take the risk, too.
As we have seen in this chapter, leaders cannot lead with resonance if their team’s norms hold them captive. And they cannot change the team’s norms unless they are willing to take on the leader’s primal task—working with people’s emotions and with the team’s emotional reality. That truth is even more apparent at the organizational level, when norms extend to entire corporate cultures. After all, even the most courageous individual finds it hard to buck an entire system. The next step for fostering new leadership, then, is to consider the real and the ideal state of the larger organization.