Developing an Emotionally Intelligent Team

Emotional Intelligence is positive and effective. It has direct commercial benefits. Exploiting it creates competitive advantage and encourages better performance.

ith Developing an Emotionally Intelligent Team you'll have pages and pages of tried and tested activities devoted to making the teams in your organisation OUTSTANDING.
What's more, you don't have to be an expert on all the background theory and research of Emotional Intelligence. These activities simply draw upon your skills as a facilitator.

List of Activities:

1. Team Emotional Intelligence

The TIEs that bind

The success of the organisation depends increasingly on the success of teams; how well teams relate to each other is crucial. They need, as individuals, to have high Emotional Intelligence (EQ), but this won’t guarantee that the team, as a unit, will also have high EQ. This activity explores the dynamics of a dysfunctional team, looking at the underlying problems, and focuses on ways to help the team to knit together and improve their level of Emotional Intelligence.

2. Team Emotional Competence

A team that CARES

Emotionally competent teams function better, because they have more support and feel more valued. In this activity, participants learn how to deal with disagreement before it becomes hostile, to trust each other, and to be clear about who will do what. This enables them to make better use of their skills, and leaves them more energy to deal with any problems, by using the CARES framework and the TIE factors.

3. Team purpose

Body, head, heart and soul

It’s vital that the team should share a common purpose, yet many teams never actually discuss what that common purpose is. Successful teams put aside time to discuss their common goals, which helps to build trust, and can create a momentum that provides energy for the whole team. Based on the work ofAugusto Boal , this activity shows participants how to illustrate the current and desired states of their teams. This can bring out deep understanding and lead to considerable positive development within the team.

4. Building team trust

Transparency and reliability unite and strengthen the team

The organisation that has trust has a key competitive edge and is far more likely to retain customers and staff. When trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain. Through exercises and discussions of participants’ personal experience, their own organisations and the business case, teams come to understand the need for a high level of trust and the behaviours that will build it.

5. Effective EQ communication in teams

Say what you feel – feel what you say

Too often, meetings are stumbling blocks that prevent good ideas coming to fruition, rather than opportunities to get ideas across. Here, communication in the team is improved, as participants are helped to achieve mutual respect and the uncovering of hidden truths. These are essential elements of an emotionally competent team.

6. ‘Get real’ communication in the team

Discussing the dead elephant

The best teams recognise the importance of open dialogue, but emotional disabilities can get in the way, and teams often have hidden agendas and taboo areas that cannot be discussed. In this activity, participants experience how to increase emotionally intelligent, authentic communication in the team, using the ‘reflecting team’ concept to encourage members to deal with difficult topics honestly and openly.

7. Emotional labour in your team

Are you faking harmony?

Organisations often need staff to display particular emotions, such as pleasure in serving a customer, whatever they may actually be feeling. This artificial regulation of emotions (emotional labour) creates a stressful internal contradiction which, if it is transferred to within the team, becomes a serious barrier to honesty in communication. This activity demonstrates the effects of genuine and faked harmony and shows staff how to eliminate or moderate the negative effects of emotional labour.

8. Managing agreement

From Groupthink to teamthink

Groupthink is an excessive form of group cohesion where it becomes difficult or impossible to diverge from group consensus, and decisions are made on the comfortable but static basis of unalterable group norms. The emotionally intelligent team will face the problem of anxiety when difficult decisions have to be made, rather than concur for the sake of peace. Through this activity, the causes and effects of Groupthink are analysed, and participants find out how to avoid the negative effects of Groupthink in their teams.

9. Mutual feedback

Going through the emotions not the motions

Feedback sessions are important, and need to be conducted with a view to improving relationships and collaborative effort in the team. However, they are likely to involve some painful soul-searching and, poorly handled, can cause pain and a breakdown of trust. This activity enables participants to identify and to overcome the hindrances which can block the provision of successful, emotionally intelligent feedback.

10. Team atmosphere

Watch out, watch out, there’s a virus about!

Emotions are so infectious that they can spread like a virus, creating growing mutual blame and antagonism, bitterness and negative office politics. Here, participants examine what makes for good and bad group atmospheres. They develop an understanding of the causes and consequences of the emotional virus, and how to combat it, thus improving collaboration, team learning and productivity.

11. Empathic solidarity

You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist

We live in a changing world where we are constantly expected to adapt. A defensive reaction is common, but this is the opposite of what is needed. Team members must trust each other fully, if they are to move confidently forward. For this, they need to support each other in empathic solidarity. This activity helps participants to build the trust and shared commitment vital to that empathic solidarity.

12. Collective creativity

What’s round and dangerous? A vicious circle

Today a peacock, tomorrow a feather duster

We need creativity to keep pace with the changing world, but change is frightening and it’s tempting to try to stay the same. However, you can’t move forward without trying out new things, and you can’t try out new things without making mistakes. To improve creative thinking, it must be permissible to be wrong. In this activity, participants explore the myths and realities surrounding creativity, and the role of playfulness and risk. Creativity exercises stress the role of openness and collaboration and their underlying emotional competencies.

13. Understanding disagreement

Dangerous whirlpool or a reservoir teeming with new ideas?

We need conflict, or nothing would ever change. What we don’t need is hostility. Teams need Emotional Intelligence to welcome conflict as the spur for change, and to deal with it in a constructive way. Here, participants are shown how to understand the nature and causes of conflict, and to perceive constructively handled disagreement as a source of positive energy.

14. Creative abrasion

Swimming with sharks – fight, flight or getting it right

The concept of creative abrasion stems from the idea of fusing two ideas that seem to be opposite, without diminishing either. Being receptive is vital, so that, instead of one idea blocking the other, ways emerge of gaining the advantages from both ideas. Positive conflict involves drawing out differences to create synergy. This activity looks at how we can bring disagreement to the surface, instead ofallowing certain views to become undiscussable . It gives team members the confidence and skills to confront difficult issues in a way that will add value to the team’s decision-making processes.

15. Team happiness

Thank God, it’s Monday! Is that an oxymoron?

Happiness comes less from external factors than from how we see our lives. The happiest people and the best workers are those who are in a job that they really like doing. It pays in financial, as well as social, terms to have happy people in the workplace. This session uses a range of methods to show participants how to increase the level of fun and happiness in the team.

16. The awakened team

The consciousness that has created the problem is not the one that could provide the solution (Albert Einstein)

Teams, faced with growing change, uncertainty, ambiguity and risk, need to be highly attuned to their own development needs and capabilities and to the forces of change in the external environment. This is the ‘awakened’ team. Participants experience how to look outwards as well as inwards, in order to be more able to manage significant change through increased resilience and a heightened awareness of their own emotional maturity levels.

360 pages, with 171 OK to copy pages