THE GROUP IQ

Adapted From Emotional Intelligence

Today’s economy is largely driven by knowledge workers, people whose productivity is marked by adding value to information – whether as market analysts, writers, or computer programmers. Peter Drucker, who coined the term “knowledge worker,” points out that such workers’ expertise is highly specialized and that their productivity depends on their efforts being coordinated as part of an organizational team. Writers are not publishers; computer programmers are not software distributors. While people have always worked in tandem, notes Drucker, with knowledge work, “teams become the work unit rather than the individual himself.” And that suggests why emotional intelligence, the skills that help people harmonize, is increasingly valued as a workplace asset in today’s economy.

Perhaps the most rudimentary form of organizational teamwork is the meeting, that inescapable part of an executive’s lot – in a boardroom, on a conference call, in someone’s office. Meetings are but the most obvious, and a somewhat antiquated, example of the sense in which work is shared – as well as through electronic networks, e-mail, teleconferences, work teams, informal networks, and the like. To the degree that the explicit hierarchy as mapped on an organizational chart is the skeleton of an organization, these human touchpoints are its central nervous system.

Whenever people come together to collaborate, whether it be in an executive planning meeting or as a team working toward a shared product, there is a very real sense in which they have a group IQ, the sum total of the talents and skills of all those involved. And how well they accomplish their task will be determined by how high that IQ is. The single most important element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional intelligence. The key to a high group IQ is social harmony. It is this ability to harmonize that, all other things being equal, will make one group especially talented, productive, and successful, and another – with members whose talent and skill are equal in other regards – do poorly.

The idea that there is a group intelligence at all comes from Robert Sternberg, a Yale psychologist, and Wendy Williams, a former graduate student of his, who were seeking to understand why some groups are far more effective than others.⁸ After all, when people come together to work as a group, each brings certain talents – say, a high verbal fluency, creativity, empathy, or technical expertise. While a group can be no “smarter” than the sum total of all these specific strengths, it can be much dumber if its internal workings don’t allow people to share their talents.

This maxim became evident when Sternberg and Williams recruited people to take part in groups that were given the creative challenge of coming up with an effective advertising campaign for a fictitious sweetener that showed promise as a sugar substitute.

One surprise was that people who were too eager to take part were a drag on the group, lowering its overall performance; these eager beavers were too controlling or domineering. Such people seemed to lack a basic element of social intelligence, the ability to recognize what is apt and what inappropriate in give-and-take. Another negative was having deadweight, members who did not participate.

The single most important factor in maximizing the excellence of a group’s product was the degree to which the members were able to create a state of internal harmony, which lets them take advantage of the full talent of their members. The overall performance of harmonious groups was helped by having a member who was particularly talented; groups with more friction were far less able to capitalize on having members of great ability. In groups where there are high levels of emotional and social static – whether it be from fear or anger, from rivalries or resentments – people cannot offer their best. But harmony allows a group to take maximum advantage of its most creative and talented members’ abilities.

While the moral of this tale is quite clear for, say, work teams, it has a more general implication for anyone who works within an organization. Many things people do at work depend on their ability to call on a loose network of fellow workers; different tasks can mean calling on different members of the network. In effect, this creates the chance for ad hoc groups, each with a membership tailored to offer an optimal array of talents, expertise, and placement. Just how well people can “work” a network – in effect, make it into a temporary, ad hoc team – is a crucial factor in on-the-job success.

Consider, for example, a classic study of star performers at Bell Labs, the scientific think tank near Princeton operated by the old AT&T back when it was a telephone monopoly. Such labs are peopled by engineers and scientists who are all at the top on academic IQ tests. But within this pool of talent, some emerge as stars, while others are only average in their output. What makes the difference between stars and the others is not their academic IQ, but their emotional IQ. They are better able to motivate themselves, and better able to work their informal networks into ad hoc teams.

The “stars” were studied in one division at the labs, a unit that creates and designs the electronic switches that control telephone systems – a highly sophisticated and demanding piece of electronic engineering.⁹ Because the work is beyond the capacity of any one person to tackle, it is done in teams that can range from just 5 or so engineers to 150. No single engineer knows enough to do the job alone; getting things done demands tapping other people’s expertise. To find out what made the difference between those who were highly productive and those who were only average, Robert Kelley and Janet Caplan had managers and peers nominate the 10 to 15 percent of engineers who stood out as stars.

When they compared the stars with everyone else, the most dramatic finding, at first, was the paucity of differences between the two groups. “Based on a wide range of cognitive and social measures, from standard tests for IQ to personality inventories, there’s little meaningful difference in innate abilities,” Kelley and Caplan wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “As it develops, academic talent was not a good predictor of on-the-job productivity,” nor was IQ.

But after detailed interviews, the critical differences emerged in the internal and interpersonal strategies “stars” used to get their work done. One of the most important turned out to be a rapport with a network of key people. Things go more smoothly for the standouts because they put time into cultivating good relationships with people whose services might be needed in a crunch as part of an instant ad hoc team to solve a problem or handle a crisis.

“A middle performer at Bell Labs talked about being stumped by a technical problem,” Kelley and Caplan observed. “He painstakingly called various technical gurus and then waited, wasting valuable time while calls went unreturned and e-mail messages unanswered. Star performers, however, rarely face such situations because they do the work of building reliable networks before they actually need them. When they call someone for advice, stars almost always get a faster answer.”

Informal networks are especially critical for handling unanticipated problems. “The formal organization is set up to handle easily anticipated problems,” one study of these networks observes. “But when unexpected problems arise, the informal organization kicks in. Its complex web of social ties form every time colleagues communicate, and solidify over time into surprisingly stable networks. Highly adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and elliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.”¹⁰

The analysis of informal networks shows that just because people work together day to day they will not necessarily trust each other with sensitive information (such as a desire to change jobs, or resentment about how a manager or peer behaves), nor turn to them in crisis. Indeed, a more sophisticated view of informal networks shows that there are at least three varieties: communications webs – who talks to whom; expertise networks, based on which people are turned to for advice; and trust networks.

Being a main node in the expertise network means someone will have a reputation for technical excellence, which often leads to a promotion. But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks. The stars of an organization are often those who have thick connections on all networks, whether communications, expertise, or trust.

Beyond a mastery of these essential networks, other forms of organizational savvy the Bell Labs stars had mastered included effectively coordinating their efforts in teamwork; being leaders in building consensus; being able to see things from the perspective of others, such as customers or others on a work team; persuasiveness; and promoting cooperation while avoiding conflicts. While all of these rely on social skills, the stars also displayed another kind of knack: taking initiative – being self-motivated enough to take on responsibilities above and beyond their stated job – and self-management in the sense of regulating their time and work commitments well. All such skills, of course, are aspects of emotional intelligence.

There are strong signs that what is true at such labs augurs for the future of all corporate life, where the basic skills of emotional intelligence will be ever more important, in teamwork, in cooperation, in helping people learn together how to work more effectively. Knowledge-based services and intellectual capital are central to corporations, and improving the way people work together is a major way to leverage intellectual capital, making a critical competitive difference. To thrive, if not survive, corporations would do well to boost their collective emotional intelligence.