As a management consultant jetting in and out of hundreds of organizations across four continents, I learned to differentiate what distinguished successful change leaders from those who got less-than-desired results.
I noticed that many leaders felt comfortable with technical changes, such as designing a new store layout, sketching an arch bridge, drafting a schedule for data migration, or creating a plan for a product launch.
But these same leaders struggled when making changes that involved groups of people shifting their behavior. In most cases, they relied on tried-and-true intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligencee techniques rather than the group intelligence required for ecosystem change.
The three critical intelligences you need for successful performance and adaptation are:
1. Intellectual Intelligence (IQ): Using logic and reasoning to understand and solve technical problems.
2. Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Managing your own emotions and understanding the emotions of those around you.
3. Group Intelligence (GQ): Understanding and intervening in groups to identify underlying issues, get work done, and make change happen. GQ sits at the individual and collective levels.
I found that successful change leaders possessed high levels of group intelligence, which allowed them to understand how groups functioned and to lead them toward meaningful and lasting change.
Smart business leaders know that the best decisions do not emerge from the executive suite. Decisions improve when the whole ecosystem gets involved in the process and when leaders tap the power of group intelligence. Those who live in the C-suite should never make important decisions without consulting the folks who actually do the work.
I first became interested in group intelligence growing up on a farm in Finea, a small village in southern Ireland, as I watched the bees swarm in the orchard on our family farm. This led me to investigate the intricacies of human ecosystems, and I went on to spend the next three decades studying groups in the workplace, first as a management consultant, then as a hands-on change leader in organizations. We can learn a lot from the bees when it comes to group intelligence.
When the overcrowded hive swarms, scout bees inspect the area for potential new homes, measuring them against a list of criteria including volume, height off the ground, entrance size, and exposure to the sun. Once a scout finds a potential new home, she returns to the temporary staging area to deliver her report in the form of a highly animated dance. From all their hectic dancing, one choice emerges as the best possibility. The bees know all about the power of harnessing group intelligence when making an important change, such as moving the entire colony to the new home.
A paradox emerges in complex ecosystems such as beehives, climate systems, cities, industries, financial markets, governments, and workplaces: On the one hand, complex ecosystems seem volatile and hard to predict. On the other hand, even the most complex systems obey certain basic rules and patterns.
However, change is hard because human ecosystems do not easily reveal their patterns. When you’re caught in a spiderweb, your situation seems like a complex and tangled web. On your left you see a dysfunctional culture; on your right you see a disengaged workforce; above your head you see a performance dip, corruption allegations, an inability to grow, and a quality issue; and below your feet you see a spike in customer complaints.
Which thread should you pull to get out of this mess? Go ahead, pull one. Pull another and another and another. You’re still trapped. The more you pull on the threads, the more tangled you seem to get.
Leaders with group intelligence avoid pulling threads but step back to observe the whole web. Look closely. It’s not a mess, it’s a perfectly cocreated pattern.
How can you rewire the web and create a different pattern? Not by pulling strands willy-nilly, but with very intentional interventions. While you may never be able to predict exactly what will happen in complex human ecosystems, with group intelligence you can identify the patterns and rules that provide the keys to unlocking real, systemic change.
Leaders with group intelligence understand the often-deeply embedded patterns in groups and design powerful interventions that allow complex human ecosystems to bring about meaningful and lasting transformation.
Taken from The Hive Mind at Work by Siobhán McHale. Copyright © 2024 Siobhán McHale. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.
