DEVELOPMENT
Better collaboration
starts with these
three skills
Teamwork is a fundamental part of business.
But, there are some key skills we need to
make teamwork, work says Jen Jackson
THE EXPERT
Jen Jackson is CEO of
award-winning employee
experience company
Everyday Massive,
speaker, and co-author
of How to Speak Human.
She works with forward-
thinking leaders to
transform the employee
experience—increasing
connection, improving
communication, and
building capability in
leaders and teams.
A study published in The Harvard Business
Review found the time spent on collaborative
activities at work has increased by over 50
percent in the past two decades. Larger projects,
complicated problems, tighter timeframes; these
require bigger teams with specialised skill sets and
diverse backgrounds, often dispersed globally.
People in high-performing teams achieve
better results, find better solutions, identify
mistakes faster, and report higher job satisfaction.
Profitability improves when people work together
well. However, psychologists from Carnegie
Mellon, MIT and Union College discovered
group performance is only slightly correlated
to individual talent. Often, the opposite is
true. Instead, better collaboration comes from
improving capability in three areas.
1
Empathy
Carnegie Mellon found that when it comes
to teamwork, emotional quotient (EQ) trumps
intelligence quotient (IQ). The highest performing
teams in their study all exhibited high average
social sensitivity or, the ability to intuit how others
feel, based on tone of voice, facial expressions
and other nonverbal cues. As long as they had
the necessary expertise, teams with higher
average social sensitivity collaborated better and
outperformed groups with a lower score.
62 Chief of Staff | Issue 1 2020
2
Psychological safety
Psychological safety describes an
environment where people feel confident team
members will accept them for who they are,
without judging them for speaking up, making
mistakes, showing emotion, sharing feelings or
expressing personal concerns. Google discovered
that people on teams with high psychological
safety were less likely to leave, more likely to
innovate, bring in more revenue, and were rated
as effective more often by their leaders.
To build this environment, Harvard Business
School professor Amy Edmondson recommends
leaders create clear structures where everyone
understands their role and expectations, foster
camaraderie and inclusion, framework as learning
problems rather than execution problems,
acknowledge fallibility, and model curiosity by
asking questions.
For a team to achieve their full potential,
Edmonson advises leaders to balance
psychological safety with accountability.
3
Communication
Communication plays a crucial role in
ensuring people understand the collective
purpose, individual roles and expectations,
and have a clear plan for execution. Research by
KPMG shows a strong correlation between leaders
who actively communicate purpose with team
engagement and morale.
The Carnegie Mellon study also found
conversational turn-taking—the way in which
group members share discussion—makes a
difference. When everyone contributes roughly
equally, collective intelligence increases. In
teams where one or two people dominate the
conversation, the opposite occurs.
By developing these three skills, leaders and
EAs managing teams can significantly improve the
performance of their teams. S
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