How Much of Your Team Members’ Intelligence are you Accessing to Help you Grow Your Business?
Many leaders don’t recognise the power that all businesses have at their mercy, if they can only enable their team members to use more of their intelligence.
What is team intelligence?
Team intelligence is an incredibly powerful asset for scaling a business. The more intelligence you enable within your team, the more productive and healthy your workplace will be.
This becomes increasingly more important as you grow your business. More of your people will be accountable for tackling business challenges, handle customer and supplier concerns, and make ongoing tactical and strategic decisions. The ability for a Founder or CEO to “get across” everything is near-on impossible. In fact, the more involved and “in-control” the Founder or CEO remains, the more they diminish their teams’ intelligence. If they don’t use it, they lose it, and then you’ll lose them!
Liz Wiseman’s world’s best-selling book “Multipliers – How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” suggests that many businesses access as little as 43% of their team members’ intelligence.
The averages from the Accidental Diminisher surveys I have conducted with some of my clients have shown that only around 65% of team members’ intelligence is being accessed.
Even at this level, there remains a substantial opportunity to enhance mindshare, collective intelligence and business performance.
So, if there was one single thing you could do immediately to start accessing more of your ‘team members’ intelligence’, I would suggest the following...
Be more CURIOUS!
This is a massive “multiplier trait”. To do this, see if as a leader you catch yourself doing things such as:
Instantly negating/debating someone’s point of view
Answering someone’s question when they can answer it themselves
Completing a task that someone else should have done themselves
Given, the above are all very normal responses of high-performance leaders but they can have an adverse impact on your team and company growth.
If you really want to enhance your team members’ intelligence, make sure your leaders, LEAD WITH CURIOSITY.
Here are a few practical back-pocket questions you or your leaders can try:
Tell me more about that?
Help me to see what you’re seeing?
What would you do if you were the CEO?
What are you assuming that might not be true?
How might that data be misleading us?
Further to this, if you want to build some clearer dialogue with your team, please do NOT use “closed questions”. A “closed question” is a question that induces a “yes” or “no” response. These are effectively conversation killers and only stifle your ability to connect and learn more about why someone believes in what they’re doing.
Albert Einstein’s take on curiosity is worth remembering...
“I am neither clever nor especially gifted, I am only very, very curious!”
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