Take Your Team to the Oscars

The Help, Moneyball, and The Descendants – these Oscar nominated movies demonstrate ways of understanding team and individual emotional and social intelligence.  The Oscar nominated movies and some other great ones we highlight demonstrate interesting tips for team and individual awareness.  This is a great way to build team engagement and knowledge on how to improve skills.  It always helps to have a model so our discussion is organized around the Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey^® (TESI^®), which includes the seven key skills we’ve found teams need for building their ESI.

We list two movies for each of the 7 skill areas and discuss the first one.  We hope you’ll comment on our blog site and contribute to this fun learning opportunity for all of us!  We thank the many people involved in making these movies for the great entertainment and the remarkable ways in which your work teaches us.  We enjoyed the movies we are reviewing here and recommend them to you.

Team Identity:  The Help and Of Gods and Men

Team identity measures the level of pride each member feels for the team as a whole, and how much connection and belongingness members feel to the team.

The Help:  The team is composed of African-American maids in Jackson, Mississippi at the dawn of the civil rights movement. A plucky new college graduate who grew up there is horrified with the way her grown-up school chums relate to their maids. So she asks one to tell her story and eventually they all get involved, and what’s been going around for so long starts to come around at last.  The maids had always given each other emotional support; this project brought them together in an act of tremendous courage to have more of a sense of pride, possibility and certainly belongingness to their team.

Motivation:   Margin Call, Albert Nobbs

Motivation is a competency that measures the team’s internal resources for generating and sustaining the energy necessary to get the job done well and on time.

Margin Call: In this case the team is made up of professionals in a financial company who have just realized they are holding tens of millions of dollars worth of worthless stock.  They decide to sell it to their clients the next day in order to save the company. This is capitalism at its worst, and the few conscientious team members cannot change the self protection trend. At the end of the day the conscientious ones are unable to shift their corporate compliance habits, the result is disaster for the company’s investors.  This is a movie your team could see in order to strike up considerable discussion about appropriate motivation and to ask when do we stick with the pack and when do we break free?  It can be a great start to discussions about ethics and how to find win/win answers.

Emotional Awareness: I Am, Iron Lady

Emotional awareness measures how well team members pay attention to one another and demonstrate acceptance and value for one another.

I Am: Tom Shadyac, the highly successful movie director for Jim Carrey films such as Ace Ventura pet detective has everything and lives like it until he has a bike wreck and his life is in peril. He discovers that he’s gotten it all wrong as has everyone around him it seems, so he takes a film crew and begins asking knowledgeable people such as Desmond Tutu the Nobel laureate, Noam Chomsky the political theorist and Coleman Barks the poet and Rumi translator: “What’s wrong with our world?”and “What can we do about it?” Their answers are a consistent formula for living sustainably in relationship with each other and the environment.  Some of the key concepts in the film are: cooperation is in our DNA; the truth of who we are is we are because we belong, technology and the human narrative are beginning to come together; we are geared at a primordial level to feel what each other feels.

This is more a film about an individual leader than a team, but the ideas are ones the team can see and extrapolate concepts and values they want to notice and promote in one another.  Iron Lady is listed as the opposite of emotional awareness.  Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as paying primary attention to herself and unflinchingly adhering to the beliefs she developed as a child rather than learning and responding to new ideas and populations.

Communication:  We Bought a Zoo, Beginners

Communication provides information on how well team members listen, encourage participation, share information and discuss sensitive matters.

 We Bought A Zoo: This movie tells the story of a major attempt to start over after the death of a spouse and mother. The hurting family leaves their old house, old neighborhood, old school, old job and buys a house in the country that is home to over 40 species of animals and an unusual assortment of people who take care of the animals.  The team becomes the father, the zookeepers and the two children, all learning how to work together to get this challenging small business into start up mode and to turn a profit. The father is the team leader.  He is now the employer of the zookeepers, the food and shelter sponsor for the animals, and the source of love and guidance for 2 children. Most of the movie he’s afraid he’s just about to let everybody down but he keeps taking his own advice to his lovelorn son: “20 seconds of insane courage will deliver something totally magical.”  Fortunately it works and the results are as heartwarming as humorous.

Team members can pick up lots to talk about in terms of which zookeeper or other team member they most identify with and how the different personalities help promote or challenge team success.

Stress Tolerance:  HappyThankYouMorePlease, Moneyball

Stress tolerance measures how well the team understands the types of stress factors and manages the intensity impacting its members and the team as a whole.

HappyThankYouMorePlease:  This delightful film will reduce your stress just by watching it. When 9 or 10-year-old Rasheen gets left on a subway by mistake a group of 20 somethings come together like an ad hoc team on his behalf. He didn’t know his parents or how old he was and was not interested in any more help from social services, but he turned out to be a great teacher of love just as life was providing some great opportunities for practice for his young adult care takers. For example, a geeky guy wants to develop a relationship with a woman who can’t grow hair because of a medical condition. She doesn’t feel worthy of his adoration but tells her friend who found the boy “Let’s be people who deserve to be loved.”  Part of the lesson is for everyone to learn to feel loved.

This is a great film to show a team with generational differences.  It’s a heartwarming way to appreciate the generation entering the workforce.

Conflict Resolution: The Descendants and Of Gods and Men

Conflict resolution measures how willing the team is to engage in conflict openly and constructively without needing to get even.

Of Gods and Men: In March 1996, an Islamic terrorist group kidnapped seven French Trappist monks from their remote monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria. They were held for two months and then killed.  At the heart of this atrocity is a tale of heroic faith, steadfastness and love, captured in the sublime film “Of Gods and Men.” It is perhaps the best movie on Christian commitment ever made.  This is a powerful movie and one of the best released in 2011 about real team work. The monks made a very difficult choice in the face of certain danger to stay together, practice their faith and be with their Muslim community.

These men were not shy with each other, they got angry, they blamed, they acted like victims, they wept, they hid, and they each eventually realized that they were expressing these emotions in response, not to the people and the world around them, but rather in response to their perceptions and judgments of that world. This recognition is what enabled them to fully surrender their lives to the service they provided the local community, and receive the spiritual grace that sustained them through the ending of their time on earth.

Positive Mood:  Hugo, Midnight in Paris

Positive mood measures the positive attitude of the team in general as well as when it’s under pressure.

Hugo: This is an extraordinarily charming film about children and adults and how courage looks and feels and is practiced from both points of view. There are two small teams, one of children, one of adults.  Ultimately the two teams come together as one, but major challenges are faced first. It’s also a beautifully made movie.

Ask you team what elements of the movie help them have a sense of “can do” that they can bring back to their team.

Don’t forget – take your team to the movies.  Have fun and learn!

The Full Circle of Collaborative Intelligence

In this final week of October we will wrap up our discussion on Collaborative Intelligence (CQ, CI). In the previous two blogs we evaluated motivation, team identity, emotional awareness, and communication. These are skills and behaviors that successful teams seek out when improving CQ. The circle isn’t complete without these final three. In this blog stress tolerance, conflict resolution, a positive mood are examined.

Stress tolerance is the skill of holding the world’s parade of unpleasant surprises at bay. Using other skills such as emotional awareness, conflict resolution, and communication will allow a group to deal with stress earlier in the development and thus make it more manageable. Dealing with adversity and turning challenges into opportunities is the best outcome of stress tolerance.

Conflict resolution is the process employed by individuals and teams facing confrontation. What team do in the face of adversity can define the group. when you’re willing to entertain change and conflict, giving up much of the illusion that you’re in control, you and your team can actually find powerful new levels of success.

One attribute that can effect conflict resolution and stress tolerance is a Positive Mood. Optimism and simple happiness have a lot to do with this type of attitude. As a leader, when people look to you during adversity and you can reflect a positive mood the results are exponential.

These skills and behaviors are the first steps needed to raise the collaborative intelligence of a group. When analyzing a group be sure to recognize your own deeds first. Leading by example has always been the most effective way to create a positive a environment.

Building Collaborative Intelligence with Emotional Awareness and Communication

On the last post we began discussing what it takes to enhance a team’s collaborative intelligence (CQ, CI). On that post we discussed motivation and team identity. On this post we will highlight emotional awareness and communication as fundamental skills in developing with a team’s collaboration.

Emotional awareness is one of the most underutilized of the qualities. Emotions are a rich resource of data and good data leads to good decisions. Understanding emotions improves performance, which drives results.

What makes communication effective is a vast topic; it is the everyday infrastructure that defines our career paths and our most cherished relationships. For a collaboration to be brought to its fullest potential all the participants have to have the ability to relate and respond to their ideas and observations.

Build CQ with Team Identity and Motivation

Build CQ with Team Identity and Motivation

Does your team or group struggle with productivity?  Come at it with a new twist.  Instead of deciding to fix a little part go for the gold and build Collaborative Intelligence (CI or CQ). Developing Collaborative Intelligence (CI or CQ) within a group or team takes effort and recognition of the value CQ brings to the table. Some degree of collaborative intelligence may already exist in a group, however without acknowledging its effect and attempting to utilize that intelligence, inefficiencies and redundancies will plague the team. Honing key skills and behaviors with the direct intention of improving your team’s CQ will improve their partnerships and productivity.  The 7 key skills measured by the TESI http://theemotionallyintelligentteam.com are the indicators of a team’s capacity to build CQ.  Those 7 begin with:

Team Identity through which team members find a purpose for their work. This might seem a bit elementary, but it remains critical that everybody within the group finds a personal reason to engage and a reason for the whole team to exist.  How else do they measure success or feel proud?

Next comes team motivation, which measures the commitment to mobilize their three basic resources: time, energy and intelligence. When every member understands and stands behind the goals of the group the more likely they are to be motivated. Building this feeling in people is what makes great leaders.

Exploring Collaborative Intelligence

Collaboration – a word increasingly used, a goal set by organizations of all types – governments, for profit, and non-profit – yet what is it?

You know collaboration is a popular concept, but do you know when you’re being collaborative?  Do you do it well?  Does your team?  How about your organization?  Signs of the desire to collaborate increase daily and the challenges on our planet that call for high level collective actions are indisputable.  So let’s help one another know how to collaborate and how to do so intelligently!  This is an invitation and a challenge we hope you’ll join!

We’re launching the discussion; and you know the only way for it to be truly collaborative and intelligent is by bringing our collective wisdom to the front.  Your voice is needed! So join the blog discussion!

The Collaborative Growth Team Model demonstrates the process to building collaborative intelligence through effective team work.  Team’s can measure their functioning and strategically improve through using the TESI® and you can learn more through The Emotionally Intelligent Team.

Let’s explore root concepts that lead to Collaborative Intelligence.

What is Collaborative Intelligence?

Collaboration involves working with one or more people in order to achieve a resilient result.  Intelligence is the ability to learn and apply facts and skills; we especially consider a person or an action intelligent when the ability is highly developed.  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.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence is the name of a discipline which studies the physiological and behavioral aspects of effective emotional communication. It could be called the art of influence, because any time we need to persuade someone to follow a specific course of action we need to influence their thinking and decision-making processes. This, it turns out, is accomplished through how effectively we interpret their emotional signals and respond with our own.

Over the past 20 years psychological researchers have developed scientifically validated and reliable assessments for measuring the accuracy of our emotional perceptiveness and how skillfully we send and receive emotional energy patterns. Extensive research has now proven how critical the so-called “soft skills” of managing human relationships are to the bottom line, and inaugurated a new era of emotionally-based personal and professional development.

We refer to emotional and social effectiveness (ESE) and refer to it 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.

How to Meet Financial Worries: 10 Steps to Maintain Your Emotional Well-Being

Without the strength to endure the crisis, one will not see the opportunity within. It is within the process of
endurance that opportunity reveals itself. – Chin-Ning Chu

In these economic times….. How many times have we heard that phrase recently? Quite a few and it isn’t
going to stop soon. Being reminded of the current financial situation personally, nationally and world-wide is
useful. It is important to be informed personally and as a citizen. However dwelling on it by making financial
concerns the focus of your day or shutting down and getting downright cranky won’t help.

Managing financial responses is critical for yourself, your team and your organization. As professor Sigal
Barsade emphasized in the New York Times on October 19, 2008:

“It is very easy to “catch” anxiety through a process known as emotional contagion.”

Individual, managers, organizational leaders, in fact all of us, need to take responsibility to respond with a
focus on responsibility, opportunity, and possibility in order to move through this challenge with grace and
success. This behavior will also shorten the length of the hardships as it calls for building effective teams and
community as we find effective answers.

Healthy responses to your own financial challenge:

1. Start by taking care of yourself, turning to that which nourishes you and provides hope and perspective.

2. Second reach out and help someone who is less fortunate than you. Giving is healing.

3. Express gratitude on a regular basis – at least five times a day, notice what works and comment on it
out loud.

4. Take stock financially with an intention of acting with creative intention rather than with the plethora of
negatives that are available, such as anger, fear, anxiety, guilt, and so on.

5. Consult with your financial advisor or someone in your life who can help you think things through, put
this challenge in perspective and provide a reality check on your plan of action.

6. Tell yourself the truth. Stay informed and then bring in a healthy dose of optimism and another one of
reality testing. Be insistent on hope without being unrealistic. Your optimism will be more credible for
yourself and others when you include a plausibility check.

7. Take response – ability. Begin developing a plan of action. Pace yourself, give yourself time to
understand, consider options and then act.