Individual Versus Collective EQ in Teams
If you’ve read me for a while, you may have noticed that my tone used to be (even more?) caustic, ironic, indignant and grandiose - it made me think - have I progressed or regressed to sound less up-in-arms these days? Is my outlook wiser or more impression managing as I don’t want to look naive...
If you’ve read me for a while, you may have noticed that my tone used to be (even more?) caustic, ironic, indignant and grandiose - it made me think - have I progressed or regressed to sound less up-in-arms these days? Is my outlook wiser or more impression managing as I don’t want to look naive and wide-eyed? Does that make me less courageous? Would I still shake execs by the lapel to have them wake-up to Agile?
I certainly would. Maybe I’ve just learned whom I am talking to in this team of ours and that the choir needs no more preaching but instead - hands-on help. And that the choir needs to reach out to the other choirs. That having choir silos is only increasing the debt. And that indignant as I may be about the amount of HumanDebt we’ve amassed, we probably can never reduce it by pointing fingers but instead, by reminding everyone of the art of the amazingly possible when we are Agile from the heart and experience magic in the team.
Let’s face it, Agile is addictive (like I keep saying, you’ll never find anyone who has accomplished something once they took it to heart who all of a sudden turns around and drops it) and Psychological Safety FEELS good. They both make us better humans. The intense “a-ha!” moments we have when we truly relate to the concept are due to how moments of running fast with Agile in teams that feel just right and where the sky feels like the only limit, are few and far between, and that when they do occur, they leave an immense imprint on our emotional memory. We feel we are stronger emotionally thanks to them and we would have learned a lot about our own feelings and the feelings of others thanks to them which is yes, the loose definition of EQ.
We’re still compiling data about this and one day I would like to have had a conclusive study to demonstrate it, but my hypothesis is that Psychologically Safe Agile teams have team members with higher individual EQs than the rest of everyone.
The other week we were wrapping up a demo call with the COO of a bank and they say:
