Are you too smart to innovate? 5 tips to accelerate the process.
Why IQ + EQ = Success
What happens when you put a team of brainiacs in a room and tell them to innovate? On rare occasions, there's a breakthrough, but most of the time nothing happens. The team stalls, can't come up with anything and spirals into dysfunction.
We've learned two things about innovation:
- Innovation is rarely a lightbulb moment of lone genius, and
- Innovation depends on emotional intelligence or EQ.
Yes, you need smarts, but brainpower is not enough. It's emotional intelligence combined with intellect that accelerates innovation.
How BlueEQ can accelerate innovation
Over and over again, we see super smart people who can't work or connect with their colleagues. They're abrasive or withdrawn or egocentric or impulsive or lacking in empathy or have other social and emotional dificiencies.
These EQ barriers become team barriers, and team barriers become innovation barriers. A lack of emotional intelligence becomes the limiting factor, and no amount of IQ can make up for what the team lacks in EQ.
This explains why a team of mediocre intellects can often outperform a team of superior intellect. If that's the pattern, what do you think happens when you add deadlines, pressure, and less margin for error?
You guessed it. The brainiacs with low EQ lose every time. Under pressure, they just melt down faster.
If you're lacking innovation with individuals and teams, IQ is not your problem. Emotional intelligence is your problem.
So what do you do?
- Get a baseline on your team's individual and collective emotional intelligence by taking the BlueEQ assessment.
- Identify 2 or 3 critical EQ gaps and discuss them openly with your team.
- Put aggressive ground rules and development plans in place to move the needle quickly.
Here are 5 behaviors that can help build teams and accelerate innovation
Developing high-performance teams at the office isn't a quick fix, but these best practice behaviors can get you started. Hover over or click on each of the icons around the circle below to reveal each tip.
