The Emotional Reality of Teams JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE / Spring 2002 55 JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE / Spring 2002 © 2002 by Daniel Goleman DOI: 10.1002/npr.10020 THE EMOTIONAL REALITY OF TEAMS TEAMS The capabilities that the authors have defined as components of Emotional In- telligence—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relation- ship management—apply to teams as well as individuals. And so, to optimize a team’s effectiveness, its members—and especially its leader(s)—must “tune in” to its emotional state and needs. © 2002 by Daniel Goleman Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee Daniel Goleman is co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. Richard Boyatzis is professor of organizational behavior and chair of the Department of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Annie McKee serves on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, teaches at the Wharton School, Aresty Institute of Executive Education, and consults to business and organization leaders worldwide. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. Excerpted from the authors’ book, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. © 2002 by Daniel Goleman. All rights reserved. * * * 55 T he top management team of a manufacturing firm had accepted an important charge: to find ways to address the fact that the firm was perenni- ally locked in what they called “flat growth.” Trans- lation: they were losing their edge. The trouble was, the team simply could not seem to make big deci- sions, no matter how important. In fact, the more urgent the decision, the more the team members would put off making it, careful to avoid topics on which they knew they disagreed. Worse yet, they sometimes acted as if they did agree on key issues, only to leave the meeting and, as one person put it, “quietly sabotage the decision.” Meantime, the manufacturing firm fell more and more behind on implementing crucial strategy. What was going on with this team? Through a leadership audit of the team members, the truth came out: Virtually every one of them was un- comfortable with interpersonal disagreements, scoring low on the conflict-management Emo- tional Intelligence competence. Suddenly, the rea- son for the team’s inability to make decisions was obvious. It had never come to the collective real- ization that open discussion and disagreements about ideas—as opposed to attacks on people who hold disparate views—sharpens decision making. Instead, the team had adopted the habit of avoid- ing all disputes. For this group, recognizing that their shared gap had resulted in inefficient team habits was like a light going on. In fact, what they had discovered was an important, but invisible, force acting on the team: The ground rules around conflict and their collective feelings about it added up to an