One of our favourite leadership and team development tools is Gallup’s CliftonStrengths. If you haven’t heard of it, CliftonStrengths is a popular, research-backed psychometric tool designed to measure personal strengths, talents, priorities and thinking styles. We love it because participants find it so accurately identifies their strengths and talents. The model includes 34 strengths, which Read more about CliftonStrengths at work: the big picture[…]
Emotional intelligence refers to our ability to understand and manage emotions – both our own and others’. High EI has been linked to high team performance in numerous studies, but what exactly is the mechanism through which EI facilitates better collective decision-making? Researchers set out to answer this question in a study of 350 respondents working in Read more about Know thyself: How emotional self-awareness boosts team performance[…]
Meetings are a hugely significant aspect of our modern working lives, and are a key way of coordinating action, sharing information and building cohesion across a team. Yet all of us have been in meetings that don’t fulfil this brief, producing little by way of results, dragging down motivation and generally taking up time that Read more about Time is of the essence: How to make meetings work[…]
It makes intuitive sense that groups of people can accomplish more than individuals working alone, and this is borne out by the data. In this study for instance, where groups of different sizes were asked to collaborate on a crisis management scenario, increases in team size led consistently to improved performance, from individuals right up to groups Read more about Teams versus individuals: comparing performance[…]
The concept of “collective intelligence” is a good way to think about how teams differ in terms of their ability to solve problems, make good decisions and generate innovations. Teams with high collective intelligence are better at combining skills, knowledge and abilities in ways that generate emergent, group level competencies that transcend those of individual Read more about How one ‘bad apple’ can drag on team performance[…]