Great talent often produces poor results. Social cohesion and connection are far more important.
Google found that all-star teams rarely ever produced all-star results. It’s how the team engages and interacts with each other.
Why?
- Egos get in the way (I.e. the need to be right)
- People don’t want to listen
“What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘good’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.”
‘“As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’“
“Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.”
Don’t believe the myth that if you hired great people, you’d get great results.
Collective intelligence almost always trumps brilliant individuals.
Check out the study I quoted above: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.amp.html
#teamperformance #employeedevelopment #employeeengagement #humanresources #salesteams #careercoaching #talentdevelopment #exe #executivecoach
