Emotional Intelligence training gives leaders techniques to improve performance up and down the company structure

Emotional Intelligence Is the Basis for High Performing Teams

What benefits your company more: focusing on numbers or focusing on people?

Increasingly, companies that make the strategic choice to create a people-centered approach based in emotional intelligence are outperforming those with a profit-focused approach. Studies show that companies that have more female executives are more profitable. Research by McKinsey demonstrates the business case for diversity, showing that companies that embrace diversity and inclusion goals are 35% more likely to be in the top quartile for financial overperformance. Harvard Professor Rebecca Henderson has also documented the many ways that social and environmental goals have become enormous opportunities for growth even for large companies like Walmart and Costco.

Successful companies are finding that financial performance comes from a people-centered approach. If emotional intelligence training sounds expensive, just think: what will it cost if you don’t focus on your people?

On the basis of this research, many companies are putting Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG goals into their performance metrics. Achieving these goals takes a dedicated vision to putting people first. It means building teams rooted in emotional intelligence who can build real trust and respect across diverse communities.

Building Teams Around Emotional Intelligence

The key to emotionally intelligent teams is dedication to values rooted in human dignity and respect. People are inherently emotional beings, and that’s a good thing. Our emotions are a highly evolved system for assessing our surroundings and responding appropriately to events. When there is a threat, our emotions alert us and we’re ready to spring into action. When there is safety and belonging, our emotions prompt us to pitch in, contribute, and support others.

In a workplace, every encounter with colleague triggers either a threat response or a safety response. These responses are instinctual and physical. If we feel even the smallest threat—a lack of respect, being cut off in a conversation, being left out of a meeting, or someone raising their voice either at us or someone else—our amygdala is activated, and we feel stress.

On the other hand, if we feel safe—someone smiles, inquires how we are and listens to our concerns, or offers genuine support for our wellbeing and success—our brains release dopamine and we feel connected, happy and calm. That’s when people start increasing productivity and performance.

When leaders are trained in emotional intelligence, they learn how to avoid the tiny clues that stimulate a threat response and how to make other people feel safe and supported. Emotionally intelligent people listen more. They are better at reading body language. They empathize and bond in ways that help people overcome weaknesses and grow new skills. When teams use emotional intelligence, distractions like conflict, infighting and undermining die down and conditions arise that promote the kind of performance and dedication that it takes to raise results above the average.

High performing teams demonstrate adherence to these six key values.

  • Respect: valuing differences among people.
  • Trust: a willingness to build mutually satisfying relationships.
  • Empathy: the ability to understand how someone else feels.
  • Balancing needs: a strategic stance that requires innovative approaches to considering the needs of customers, employees, executives, shareholders, and the community at large.
  • Collaboration: building teams with people who have different skill sets and whose skills add up to a cohesive unit where no one person dominates.
  • Team development: a deep commitment to the development of other members on the team.

When teams are built on these human-focused values, they are able to dedicate themselves to achieving ambitious goals. The close-knit nature of a supportive and inclusive team is at the center of its high performance. The feeling of belonging and the desire to not let others down becomes an intrinsic motivation that supercharges effort and engagement.

Employees who work on teams that are truly cohesive initiate a virtuous cycle of high performance. Often, they won’t leave their work for more money elsewhere. When employees feel a sense of purpose, belonging, and that they are valued, the rewards can be more important than the paycheck.

How Emotional Intelligence Offers Tactical Advantages

An emotional intelligence approach to building teams requires strategic planning. Just because you call a group of people a team doesn’t mean they are a true, functioning team. If your people are siloed, if they work independently or compete with each other, if they do their jobs mostly independently, they are not a team. They are a working group.

Emotional intelligence training gives leaders the tools to create the conditions for high performance. What differentiates a real team are three conditions which come about only when they are planned and implemented tactically as a strategy for performance:

  • Complementary skills – each person brings a valued skill to the table.
  • Dedication to a common purpose – a clearly defined and measured performance goal, innovative goal, or approach.
  • Mutual accountability – the team itself owns the goal and team members are responsible to each other for support and performance. Success is collective.

A lack of emotional intelligence leads to sabotage of a real team. If one person tries to dominate, people with complementary skills are prevented from contributing and using their full skillset. If people don’t feel safe or connected to each other, their desire for safety will lead to distractions from the work at hand. If one person blames others rather than accepting responsibility for failures, there can be no mutual accountability, instead there will be infighting.

High Performing Teams

A high performing team has a deep commitment to each other’s growth and success. The ability to build relationships solid enough that people champion others besides themselves and work together to see everyone succeed requires high levels of emotional intelligence.

It takes self-confidence not to be threatened by another’s success. It takes emotional awareness to maintain safe and positive interactions, knowing when others need empathy and support, knowing how to ask for support without being perceived as needy or weak. It takes an understanding of how to balance other people’s needs with your own and promote fairness. It takes an ability to navigate feelings, your own and others’, during problem solving or decision making, especially when the problems are difficult and priorities conflict. Emotional intelligence training helps leaders develop the skills needed to achieve these tactical strategies.

All these are core emotional intelligence skills that allow people to tune into how people are feeling and act in ways that help people feel safe, connected, and valued. That feeling leads to a loyalty, engagement, and dedication that supports overperformance over time.

Emotional Intelligence Builds Loyalty

This is a very short story about a client of mine who works for a team within a multinational company where emotional intelligence and leadership are prioritized.

Recently, a recruiter reached out to my client and offered a 50% pay increase to go work for another company. It was intriguing enough to have a conversation. After three interviews, she turned the offer down because the culture at the new company was dominated by one figure who called all the shots.

“I just don’t think I could contribute there,” she told me. “I’d be too frustrated. I’m happy where I am, and I trust my team that I’ll get promoted soon enough.”

Would your team members stay even if they were offered more money elsewhere?

If the answer is no, compare the cost of turnover with the cost of emotional intelligence training.

Imagine what you could do if everyone on your team felt safe, connected, and accountable to each other for high performance. Then decide whether emotional intelligence is a tactic that will work for you and your workplace.