Three Ways to Make Your Team Smarter
Why can you puts lots of smart people into a team - and they come up with lousy ideas? And why is it that our star performers do not necessarily create star teams? Is it even possible to improve the collective intelligence of a team? That's the question that a team of academics set for themselves.
Being a team themselves, of course they believed in collective intelligence but the harder question was: can it be measured? Is there a group equivalent of IQ? Can the collective intelligence of the group as a whole go above and beyond the abilities of the individual group members? And, if it can, what factors contribute to making a team smarter?
In two studies with 699 people, teams were set tasks which involved solving visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources. The same tasks were given to individuals and then to teams. The collective intelligence of the group (which they called "c") far out-performed the average intelligence of individual participants. That makes sense; it's why we do team work in the first place. But what the researchers most wanted to know was: what predicted "c"? What was it that might give any particular group greater collective intelligence?
Their findings are intriguing, provocative and profound. Collective intelligence is not strongly correlated with the average or the maximum individual intelligence of group members. Packing your teams with one, or a few, super smart people may not help you. Furthermore, group cohesion, motivation and satisfaction also did not determine group performance. What did make a difference were:
- Social sensitivity of group members: Teams in which members understood each others' mood did better than teams that lacked that sensitivity.
- Equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking: The groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those where participants more equally shared the floor.
- The proportion of women in the group: The researchers thought that this finding might be connected to the other two, since women tended to do better on sensitivity tests and be good at taking turns.
But most important of all, it reinforces everything everyone has ever said about the case for greater gender diversity at all levels of an organization: namely, diversity makes companies smarter. And this work wasn't published in a magazine for managers, HR professionals or women. It appeared in SCIENCE. In other words, it isn't wishful thinking. It's peer reviewed, analyzed and tested as stringently as possible. It's based on real experiments and hard data. There isn't a manager in the world who doesn't need to read it.
