“That bolded sentence is hiding a lot of heavy conclusions in plain sight. First, neither the average intelligence of the group nor the smartest person in the group had much to do with the group's "c" factor. Just as great artists don't necessarily form great bands when they pool their talents, smart people don't automatically make smart groups.
Furthermore, the predictable troupe of buzzwords you would expect to correlate with successful groups—"cohesion," "motivation," and "satisfaction"—didn't have much to do with effective teams, either. Instead, the single most important element of smart groups, according to the researchers, was their "average social sensitivity." That is, the best groups were also the best at reading the non-verbal cues of their teammates. And, since women score higher on this metric of emotional intelligence, teams with more women tended to be better teams.”
I think this is about listening, looking at people to see how they are and holding in mind an ideal of how the group should be operating. There is a problem where people think ‘how can I be heard to contribute?’ instead of ‘how can I contribute?’ or even ‘how can the team make the best product?’. There is something here about individuality vs. communality, the blindness of passive egotism.
And also, this thing about women improving team function closing the gender gap is cute but absurd. We are really good at compensating individuals, and bad at compensating teams, and the person who is the best at making a great team probably isn’t going to be the one who is more visible or the most aggressive.
Lastly, ugh, you just said this was a skill – don’t go to ‘men have an innate disadvantage’ here; let’s talk about improving this skill maybe for everyone? I really think the absence of this skill leads to a lot of sexist (and racist and etc…) microaggressions in the failure to be looking to the other person or feeling any responsibility for their feelings.
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