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Unlocking hidden intelligence Leadership teams need to invest more in their relationships, problem-solving abilities and practical plans in order to improve performance. It’s important to unlock hidden intelligence in your team, says author Rob Pyne IN 2010, five psychologists set out to test the collective intelligence of teams. They subjected teams of three to five people to hours of tests, including brainstorming, making moral judgments, negotiating and critical thinking. The results of the study by Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues, published in the journal Science, are little known, and yet they are incredibly important to the way we work, which increasingly involves working in cross-functional teams. First, the obvious. They found that, just like individuals, teams do have an ‘IQ’ score that predicts their performance on a wide range of tests. If they were good at the brainstorming task, they tended to be better at the negotiating task. They called this ‘Factor C’, for collective intelligence. Surprising predictors of collective intelligence Second, the not-so-obvious. While the individual IQ of each team member played some role in determining the performance of the team, it was in a distant fourth place. Of the top three top factors that predicted the performance of a team, the number of females in that team ranked in third place. The more females, the higher the collective intelligence of the team. Women, it seems, are
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