What is Team Intelligence and How to Manage It

Knowing what makes the team successful is a prerequisite for harnessing team intelligence. Small team inter-connectedness efforts can seem insignificant, yet their impacts on your organization at large can be huge (the Butterfly Effect).

We can harness team intelligence for business success when we capture what makes us unique in skill set, personality, and drive and bring together emotional and cultural intelligence with empathetic managers orchestrating team synergy.

When you place an intentional focus on the concept of team intelligence, you realize benefits across teams, through to clients. You gain the following benefits:

• An understanding of employee's style, strengths, and development needs
• Promotes diversity, inclusion, and belonging 
• Gives the responsibility of a connections planner to each team member 
• Creates accountability for achieving higher standards of team behaviors and delivery of work
• Drives sustained business performance through improved communications
• More efficiency and effectiveness in capitalizing on business opportunities.

One method of preemptively addressing issues is through the collective intelligence of your employees. Collective intelligence helps create organizational trust, access diversity of thought, and ultimately respect the basic human right to be heard. It also helps deliver the best solutions.

Team Intelligence is fluid and will continue to evolve as patterns within teams change. That said, if you have strong leadership and effective team interaction, you could replace one of the metaphoric cogs of your business, and the wheels should continue to turn.

The common goal should be clear and absorbed by all —regularly. Aligning the goal among teams gives your employees the feeling that everyone contributes to your goals together, forming stronger team bonds.

One tip to help with reinforcing alignment at the team level is to start each meeting with a reminder of the goal for that meeting. Weaving in constant reminders will reinforce the end goal of supporting a shared vision.

To cultivate a culture of transparency and support, specifically in remote or hybrid working environments, it’s imperative that all team members feel they can openly express their opinions.

Three ways you can do to build a psychologically safe workplace:

• frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
• acknowledge your fallibility.
• model curiosity.

People are happiest and most productive when they have a sense of psychological safety. To create an environment where people are comfortable being themselves, they need interpersonal trust and mutual respect.

Employees need to feel like they have a comfortable direct line to their manager and a connection to one another. Frequent check-ins to seek everyone’s opinions can help build all team members’ confidence and comfort level, allowing introverts the opportunity to speak up and not hold back.

Employees like to feel heard, validated, and connected. Managers must create the right environment for engagement to exist organically and effectively.

Often the smallest gestures leave the biggest imprint. With abrupt changes to the corporate world in the past 18 months, many are experiencing greater workloads and responsibilities.

Taking time out from writing a business response to send personal praise or show of appreciation can go a long way in nurturing positive emotions and enhancing performance. Appreciation plays a major role in reducing burnout, boosting morale, and greatly impacting employee retention by increasing employee satisfaction.

Do you have people on your team that keep too much to themselves? This behavior can negatively impact the overall team effort. Non-team-players are often misunderstood as arrogant when they feel out of place and awkward in many cases.

For every strength a team has, there is equal weakness. Identifying and addressing weaknesses on your team leads to a stronger, more successful unit. Taking time to understand individuals’ strengths and weaknesses and developing a strategy to overcome, is key to progression.