How much of your team members’ intelligence are you accessing to help you grow your business?

How much of your team members’ intelligence are you accessing to help you grow your business?

Many leaders don’t recognise the power that all businesses have at their mercy, if they can only enable their team members to use more of their intelligence.

What is team intelligence?

Team intelligence is an incredibly powerful asset for scaling a business. The more intelligence you enable within your team, the more productive and healthy your workplace will be.

This becomes increasingly more important as you grow your business. More of your people will be accountable for tackling business challenges, handle customer and supplier concerns, and make ongoing tactical and strategic decisions. The ability for a Founder or CEO to “get across” everything is near-on impossible. In fact, the more involved and “in-control” the Founder or CEO remains, the more they diminish their teams’ intelligence. If they don’t use it, they lose it, and then you’ll lose them!

Liz Wiseman’s world’s best-selling book “Multipliers – How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” suggests that many businesses access as little as 43% of their team members’ intelligence.

The averages from the Accidental Diminisher surveys I have conducted with some of my clients have shown that only around 65% of team members’ intelligence is being accessed.

Even at this level, there remains a substantial opportunity to enhance mindshare, collective intelligence and business performance.

So, if there was one single thing you could do immediately to start accessing more of your ‘team members’ intelligence’, I would suggest the following...

Be more CURIOUS!

This is a massive “multiplier trait”. To do this, see if as a leader you catch yourself doing things such as:

  • Instantly negating/debating someone’s point of view

  • Answering someone’s question when they can answer it themselves

  • Completing a task that someone else should have done themselves

Given, the above are all very normal responses of high-performance leaders but they can have an adverse impact on your team and company growth.

If you really want to enhance your team members’ intelligence, make sure your leaders, LEAD WITH CURIOSITY.

Here are a few practical back-pocket questions you or your leaders can try:

  • Tell me more about that?

  • Help me to see what you’re seeing?

  • What would you do if you were the CEO?

  • What are you assuming that might not be true?

  • How might that data be misleading us?

Further to this, if you want to build some clearer dialogue with your team, please do NOT use “closed questions”. A “closed question” is a question that induces a “yes” or “no” response. These are effectively conversation killers and only stifle your ability to connect and learn more about why someone believes in what they’re doing.

Albert Einstein’s take on curiosity is worth remembering...

“I am neither clever nor especially gifted, I am only very, very curious!”

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Hello, I’m Adam and I am deeply fulfilled by helping businesses and their leaders grow.

Having worked in corporate for over 20 years and made major contributions to some huge successes. I always felt that something was missing…I wasn’t living in line with my purpose. 

Visage Growth Partners was born to help others achieve their dreams, the ultimate “pay-it forward”. We help others in order that they can make incredible contributions in their lives and the lives of others - and it’s the most personally and professionally fulfilling life we could lead.

At Visage Growth Partners, we believe a business cannot grow beyond the level of the leadership capability. Whilst we can help you grow your business strategically and operationally, we know that real growth comes from igniting the collective power of your leadership team and empowering the team to work together and inspire real success professionally as well as personally.

It is the magical blend of extensive industry experiences, access to world’s best practices in business growth methodologies, and the ability to engage and support senior leadership teams that has Visage Growth Partners deliver exceptional results for our clients. I look forward to meeting you and hearing more about you and your business and how we can clear the pathway to successful growth for you and your business.

adam siegel