Editorial
If you’re lucky, you’ve experienced what it feels like to be on a high-performing team. Clear on the mission and confident in each other’s abilities, you lock arms with your fellow teammates and feel like you could conquer the world. Spirits are high, even when the challenges mount. Failures become moments that teach the team a new lesson. Members support each other when someone needs to take a break, and everyone celebrates together when milestones are reached.
Too often, that kind of peak experience at work is rare. It’s more likely you feel lost in an organization, unclear on the “big picture,” and unable to make a dent in the prevailing culture of disconnection that surrounds you.
It’s not enough to bring your brightest people together and wing it. While tools and technology may keep us in touch, they are not enough to keep us connected. Regardless of department or seniority level, when your organization fails to collaborate effectively, your best people not only can’t do their best work, but they leave in search of better experiences.
How a team collaborates is more critical to innovation and generating outcomes than who is on the team. Having observed thousands of teams globally across dozens of industries at MURAL, we’ve formalized a way of working that drives business outcomes. We can refer to this as relationship intelligence, or the human factors in teamwork. Yet, forming meaningful relationships at work remains elusive. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report, 43% of leaders say relationship building is the greatest challenge in remote and hybrid work.
Relational Intelligence
Estimates of how much time workers spend collaborating with each other vary, depending on industry, role and other factors, but in a modern knowledge worker organization, teams undoubtedly spend significant amounts of time collaborating. Some estimates go as high as 80% of our time. Given how much time people spend working and being with others at work, it’s no surprise that relational challenges arise. But this is also the opportunity to form high-performing teams: focus on relationships.
You don’t hire machines. You hire human beings. And humans are complicated. Given the impact of relationships to teamwork, it’s quite surprising how little attention is put on team dynamics.
Any attempt at collaboration must explicitly recognize and pay attention to the human and personal aspects of teamwork. Treat people like machines or relegate relationship-building to a once-a-year offsite team-building exercise, and the inevitable result is disconnected, unproductive, unhappy teams. The focus on the connection between people collaborating is what relational intelligence is all about. Getting it right makes our teams function better. And smarter.
Relational intelligence involves the ability to be aware of and understand your own and others' values, needs, styles, and interests. In essence, relational intelligence deals with the interpersonal human aspects of team collaboration.
We’re not suggesting that colleagues need to be friends or considered “family.” But work relationships are social in their own right, and these social aspects matter. They drive effective teamwork, innovation, and the overall mental well-being of an organization.
Working together on a team isn’t easy — especially in today’s remote and hybrid world. Despite countless ways to communicate, teams still struggle to collaborate, much less innovate. Our own research shows that the biggest concern of people working in remote teams is a lack of social connection with colleagues. In the midst of the pandemic in 2020, people indicated in our yearly survey that they missed social interactions with colleagues most.
Other research confirms that social aspects are critical to modern teams. The authors of an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review suggest that with hybrid workforces now common, deliberate attention must be paid to social connection in remote and hybrid work: “Remote work is now so widespread that organizational leaders must be prepared to manage the negative impact on social climate that can result. This will require conscientious attention to ensuring support from managers and colleagues in both the office and at home.”
In order to solve for disconnection in organizations, human relationships and social aspects of work must be brought into play. Practically speaking, relational intelligence entails getting present to one another, listening, and reflecting. It’s also about learning how to share creative ideas and connecting with team members on a meaningful level.
And it’s not a one-time thing. You must make it a deliberate part of collaboration on a regular basis. It starts with deepening your own relational awareness as a collaborator.
Trust Falls Won’t Solve Your Collaboration Problems
Simply put, collaboration requires us to work with others. This cannot happen until we recognize our own strengths, weaknesses, and styles of working. Collaboration starts with the right mindset and extends outward. Three factors most influence our relationships within a group:
Curiosity: Every collaboration is an opportunity to learn. Team members need curiosity — not only about the topic and challenge at hand—but about each other, and they should check egos and biases at the door. The best collaborators are perpetual beginners, always coming to their teams with an open mind, a readiness to accept new ideas and find solutions together.
Respect: Empathy and inclusivity are foundational to respect in the collaborative context. Every member of a team must afford the others the emotional and physical space to express their thoughts and ideas. The alternative is disastrous, not only because of the negative climate created but the loss of the very ideas and opportunities for creative collisions that power collaboration. Respect is distinct from trust, which implies a sense of earned reliability and truth. While trust is a consistent aspect of high-performing teams, it’s not necessarily a prerequisite for collaboration. Otherwise, we’d never be able to work with individuals we’ve never met before.
Willingness: True collaboration happens at a deeper level of connection. If team members don’t intend to work together, meaningful collaboration won’t happen. Sure, a group of people can be brought together to discuss the topics at hand, and they may even cooperate and coordinate with each other. But if there isn’t a genuine intent within each of us to work with others, we’re really just performing “collaboration theater.”
Together, these three factors determine a team member’s readiness for collaboration. Patrick Lencioni sums it up well in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: “Great teams ensure that everyone’s ideas are genuinely considered, which then creates a willingness to rally around whatever decision is ultimately made by the group.”
These qualities add up to something more than the sum of their parts, too: an intrinsic motivation for collaboration, a passion within you or something you believe in.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
This differs from extrinsic motivation, which is doing something to win an award or avoid a punishment, or the desire to achieve something based on external pressure. If you consistently cultivate your own curiosity, respect, and willingness for meeting others where they are, being a productive member of a team is its own reward.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
