Emotional Intelligence and Teamwork

Written by Renée Safrata - renee@reneevations.com, January 14th, 2010

Teamwork. You either love or you hate it. And for good reason. Effective teamwork requires a lot of emotional intelligence.

I’m thinking the folks over at Scotiabank have emotional intelligence in spades. They’ve launched a new initiative called “one team, one goal.” Here’s the amazing part: they have 69,000 team members, spread across 50 countries.

How are they going to find the glue that unifies all these different employees to get results? By putting emotional intelligence to work. Here’s what that means. An important principle in emotional intelligence is starting with what matters.

Scotiabank focused on finding a solution to connect people so that they would generate results they needed. They sat down as a leadership team and thought, Hey! We’ve got a lot of members, in a lot of different places, a lot of data, and we need to get one core result. What’s the glue? What’s going to hold the team together? What’s going to align all of the data and the people?

Applying the power of Emotional Intelligence, they got to the idea of developing a mentoring program in which top-tier level executives would nurture and teach second-tier executives. That became their glue and goal:  Develop new leaders.

Then it gets really exciting.

They started to think about this glue as a conversation about Scotiabank’s values, Scotiabank’s skills, and Scotiabank’s culture. They started teaching all that to this group of people, and it led to some robust conversations about problem solving.

Next thing you know this magical thing starts happening: the human element kicks in. People get electrified by ideas. They engage and connect. They solve problems and get results.

That’s emotional intelligence in action. You find the glue that will align people and data. For Scotiabank it was developing leadership through mentoring. For your team, it could be something different.

It’s interesting to note that Scotiabank is the only Canadian company to make the list of The Global Top Companies for Leaders. I’m guessing emotional intelligence has something to do with that. What do you think? How can you use emotional intelligence in your team and organization? What’s your glue?

Get “Talent needs to be nurtured” Financial Post Article

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1. Emotional Intelligence Series #7: Leadership Assertiveness and the Importance of the Vision!
2. Emotional Intelligence and Our “Private Self”
3. How to Develop Your Team’s Emotional Intelligence
4. Emotional Intelligence – What the heck is it??
5. Emotional Intelligence Series #6 – Life is an Energy Management Game