Google’s Project Aristotle—the holy grail of team studies—collected hundreds of measures from hundreds of Googlers but found no magical individual trait that predicted team success. Personality, competence, emotional intelligence—none of these mattered.
So, is there any way to predict how well people will work in teams?
The secret ingredient
Our latest research, led by Siyu Yu at Rice University, sheds light on this question. Prior research has shown that groups in which members argue over who has more status—for instance, whose contributions are most important, and who has more influence over group decisions—suffer from reduced performance. To that end, we’ve identified a key individual skill that helps determine a team’s status dynamics, good and bad. We call this skill “status intelligence,” and it captures how accurately a person can read the status dynamics of a group—how much respect and influence each team member has. This requires accurately perceiving and understanding social interactions, such as who people listen to and look to for approval of their suggestions, who interrupts successfully, and whose ideas are quickly passed over versus elaborated on by the team.
To measure this skill—and determine its ability to predict a team’s success—we created a 10minute test that we can give to people before they join a team. To create the test, we brought groups together in our lab, tasked them with generating a proposal for a web-based company, and videotaped their interactions. They were not instructed how to behave, so behaviors like interruptions, holding the floor, tone of voice and physical dominance were all revealed naturally, as they would be in any team meeting. At the end of the interaction, team members rated how much each person had “respect and admiration from other team members,” and “influence over the team process.” Then, we created short clips of these 45-minute interactions that showcased group discussions. Then, to take our test, a new set of working adults watched nine of these short video clips, and made the same ratings that members of the real teams did.
That is, they had to guess how much status and influence each team member in each group had, based on the video clip, and we used those guesses to measure how accurate they were in perceiving the teams’ status hierarchies. So, rather than asking people to self-report how socially skilled they are (do we really think the guy with no social awareness knows how socially (un)aware he is?), our test measures people’s actual ability to perceive status in teams. Some people were good at it, others not so much, and their status intelligence predicted both their individual work performance, and the quality of their relationships with co-workers.
Furthermore, returning to the question of how we can predict team performance, we found in subsequent studies that status intelligence also predicts success in working with others. We measured participants’ status intelligence and then placed them on teams tasked with generating business plans, as well as more traditional decision-making tasks. Teams made up of people higher in status intelligence had substantially fewer costly and unpleasant status disagreements, which led to better group performance on both tasks.
Not EQ
Intuitively, this makes sense. Imagine joining a new company, or meeting with an important client team for the first time. Having high status intelligence enables you to perceive who is respected and influential, which in turn will help you know who to seek out for advice and mentorship, learn best practices from, and pitch your ideas to, as well as avoid unnecessary conflict with teammates. Importantly, this skill is not the same as emotional intelligence, which involves accurately reading emotions from facial expressions, managing one’s emotions and being empathic (and did not predict team performance). Status intelligence requires reading dynamic behaviors between people.
What determines who is “status intelligent” and who is not, and how these skills can be trained, are still open questions. Even so, just having identified this new and important social skill suggests some important steps managers can take to increase their own performance and the performance of their teams:
1. Don’t assume people can accurately read status (and that includes you). Instead, make status conversations explicit.
Our research has made clear that not everyone has the skill to accurately detect status—it’s revealed through subtle behaviors that can be tough to spot. Yet at work, we often assume that people’s status is transparent. Leaders can help bridge the gap in status intelligence by first measuring the status hierarchies of their teams. This would involve surveying employees to ask: “Who do you respect and admire in domain X?” and looking for repeat mentions of the same people. Then, some form of this information could be disseminated to new employees during onboarding, to assist them in making good decisions about who to learn and ask advice from, as well as to team members themselves, to help them avoid status conflict and achieve higher performance. Similarly, leaders could encourage new employees to ask their co-workers about who they respect most. Taking these steps would significantly mitigate the disadvantages faced by those who are not naturally high in status intelligence and thus less able to perceive status from observation alone.
2. Acknowledge that status differences exist in all work organizations, even “flat” ones.
Status can be considered a bad word these days, especially in the workplace. As a result, organizations sometimes try to get rid of status hierarchies altogether and replace them with a “flat” structure, assuming that no titles means no hierarchy.
That’s a recipe for poor teamwork. Teams determine their status hierarchies often within minutes of interacting, regardless of organizational structures, and trying to hide this—like pretending that someone with 20 years of experience has no more expertise or influence than a fresh college graduate—will just lower everyone’s status intelligence, reducing individual and team performance. Instead, we encourage teams, upon forming, to have an open conversation around where everyone’s relative expertise and strengths lie, and acknowledge that some individuals will consequently carry more influence over certain decisions. These conversations will increase everyone’s status accuracy and reduce status conflict. Managers of existing teams can also initiate such conversations to increase team performance.
3. Intervene when teams show signs of status conflict.
One immediate consequence of low status intelligence in teams is status conflict, or teams struggling to determine their members’ relative status rankings. Clear red flags include arguments over whose expertise is more relevant, whose contributions matter more and who should be making decisions. If a team is exhibiting these behaviors, it should stop working on its tasks, acknowledge the downsides inherent to status conflict, and initiate a conversation as described in step No. 2. The ability to read status hierarchies at work is a critical skill for individual and team success, and not all of us have it.
Can it be taught? Maybe. But at the least, managers can recognize its importance— and do their best to make sure team hierarchies accurately reflect the true statuses of team members.
Dr. Kilduff is an associate professor of management and organizations at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Dr. West is a professor of psychology at NYU and the author of “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them.” Email them at
reports@wsj.com.
JON KRAUSE
