Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

142 LEADING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH EXAMPLES
As noted in Chapter 1, for many years Robert Kelley of Carnegie-
Mellon University has been asking people in various companies the
following: “What percent of the knowledge for doing your job is
stored in your own mind?” In How to Be a Star at Work, Kelley
stated that the typical answer was 75%. By 1997, the percentage
had slid to about 55%, and in one company it dropped as low as 10%.
It is obvious that the group mind knows more than the individual
mind and that teamwork or collaboration brings about better decisions
than working alone.
Cambridge University Business School explored this topic further.
They set up an experiment with 120 simulated management
teams who were asked to make important decisions for a mock
business. Some teams consisted exclusively of high-IQ members.
Surprisingly, these high-IQ teams performed worse than other “less
brilliant” teams. Why? The members of the high-IQ teams spent too
much time debating issues and trying to outshine each other. They
failed to attend to the necessary practical parts of the job, such as
communicating information and coordinating a game plan.
In another study, the Center of Creative Leadership evaluated
top American and European executives whose careers had derailed.
It revealed that the main reasons for executive failure were the
inabilities to build and lead a team. Lastly, in a study of 60 work
teams operating in a large American fi nancial services company,
the behaviors that mattered most for team effectiveness came down
to how members interacted and connected. Clearly, the demand for
team skills will only grow in the years to come, as more and more
work is done at a distance and in cross-functional project teams that
form and dissolve depending on the task.
Hillary Elfenbein found that teams with greater average EI have
higher team functioning than groups with lower EI. She found the
ability to understand one another’s emotional expressions explained
40% of the variance in team performance. 1
Are You a Star Performer in teamwork and collaboration or
just average? Do you regularly and consistently (80% of the time)