This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Build An Emotionally Intelligent Team with Dr. Vanessa Druskat | 328

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Let’s be honest — teamwork is hard. Especially when people have different communication styles, priorities, and let’s just say it... egos. But emotionally intelligent teams don’t just magically fall into place — they’re intentionally built, brick by sweaty brick. Dr. Vanessa Druskat joins us to break it all down. She’s a globally recognized expert on team performance and emotional intelligence, and her new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, is basically the manual we all should’ve been handed before our first group project… or leadership role. Vanessa explains why individual emotional intelligence isn’t enough — and why it’s the team’s collective practices that matter most. We talk about what high-performing, collaborative teams actually do differently, how to create group norms that drive trust and accountability, and why "getting along" is way less important than knowing how to navigate conflict. No more crossing fingers and hoping for chemistry. Want a team that performs and actually likes working together? This one’s for you. Connect with Vanessa:  Website: Vanessadruskat.com    LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-druskat-aa7822/ Book: https://www.vanessadruskat.com/books-1 Related Podcast Episodes: How To Build Emotionally Mature Leaders with Dr. Christie Smith | 272 The Sixth Level Of Leadership with Dr. Stacy Feiner | 236 196 / Energizing Your Team Through Radical Empathy with Erin Diehl Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Nicole Kalil, host of the This Is Woman's Work podcast, but also a mom, partner, hotel snob, cheese enthusiast, and entrepreneur. Basically, like you, I wear many hats. And I mostly love the entrepreneur hat. Okay, there are days where I question my own sanity and my life choices, but for the most part, it's the right fit for my personality, the freedom I value so much, and my most important goals.

But one of the things that I miss most about my corporate days, aside from the predictable paycheck and not having to fix the printer myself, is being part of a team. The kind where you can walk down the hall and brainstorm on a whim, where someone's in the trenches making decisions with you, where ideas bounce, people collaborate, and everyone brings something different to the table. Of course, with that comes, well, people, which means different personalities, different communication

styles, occasional drama, and the emotional gymnastics required to work closely with humans who do not think just like you. Now, as an entrepreneur, my team looks very much more like a collection of brilliant individuals scattered across time zones, connected by Zoom, email, and a mutual disdain for unnecessary meetings. And while I'm pretty independent, I will admit that I miss the synergy, the group think, the magic that happens when someone takes an idea and runs with it or challenges it

in a way that makes it better. So whether your team is large and together or small and scattered, the question becomes how do we make it work? How do we build teams that bring different strengths to the table and still manage to communicate, collaborate, and perform at the highest level? Today's guest has answers to some of those questions. Not the surfacey kind of answers, but the real ones.

Dr. Vanessa Dreschett is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and team performance and associate professor at the University of New Hampshire and co-author of one of Harvard Business Review's most celebrated articles on emotionally intelligent teams. Her brand new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, Building Collaborative Groups that Outperformperform the rest explores how it's not Individual emotional intelligence that matters most it's what the team practices together Okay, Vanessa. This is one of those topics. I wish I had learned about decades ago, but since it's never too late I want to kick off the conversation about building emotionally intelligent teams by asking what I think most of us might be thinking,

which is how important or not important is the leader's emotional intelligence when it comes to the team's emotional intelligence? Does my question make sense? That's a great question, Nicole. The leader's emotional intelligence is important. And so, what I like to say is that if anybody needs to be emotionally intelligent on the team, it's the leader. And that's because much of what I write about, much of what I found in my research focuses on the emotional needs of the team members as a group. And so leaders who understand that human beings are emotional beings are just more in sync with the model. They find it intuitive once they learn about it. It makes perfect sense,

and it's just easier to develop emotionally intelligent teams if you are emotionally intelligent. You don't necessarily need to have members who are emotionally intelligent. You have to have routines. Let me just give you an example. I don't know about you. Well, first of all, let me just say I loved your description of teens at the start. It's exactly why I started studying teens. When I was younger, I was on a bunch of great teams and they were some of the highest points of my life. When I got to the workplace, not so much. And so I wanted to find out, well, you know, what's really missing there.

And I always thought, you know, teams can be the best of times and teams can be the worst of times. But you can, for example, have a ritual like welcoming everyone when they arrive in the meeting, looking everyone in the eye and just checking in, how are you today? What's top of mind for you today? That's the kind of thing that great teams do. We learned from studying, we'll talk more about I'm sure, we learned from studying great teams

that they do that commonly and it gets everyone in the room. And you don't have to be emotionally intelligent to respond, but you do have to be emotionally intelligent to think that that's a smart thing to do, a smart way to start your meetings. I like the idea of routines. I think as aspirational as it might sound, to have every member of any team be emotionally intelligent, I'm guessing that is like perfection, right? It's unattainable, unachievable. So it's good to know that it's really about their routines or the systems that you operate under that matter.

So before I go into 1 million questions, can you help me define an emotionally intelligent team? Sure. What are we talking about here? How do we know when we have one? Well, you know when you have one, when everyone's listening and everyone's engaged. I mean, I learned early on, and this is what got me involved in studying emotional intelligence, I learned early on that you can tell what's going on in a team by looking at the faces in the room

and reading essentially or intuiting what the emotion is in the room. And if everybody's in sync, if everyone's looking at one another, you know, there's the word that you used, I believe, in sync, then you at least know they're all attentive. But here's essentially emotionally intelligent teams are teams with routines and processes, we call them norms that build trust, psychological safety, and ownership over what the team is doing. We have a set of routines that help you build that. But the outcome is essentially that you have an emotional attachment to the team because you trust. Ironically, people may or may not know that that's a motivator. We are wired to want to belong to teams where people are supportive of one another and where people trust and feel safe with one another. And it's not that hard to build that environment

if you're intentional about it. That makes sense to my brain. I fundamentally believe that we're wired for connection. We crave it. Yes. And an emotionally intelligent team would be a way to feed or fuel that craving. Yes. And I'm happy to hear it's not as hard as we might think it is. And yet, if it's not that hard, why aren't more people doing it, right? I want to go back to one thing that you said.

You said emotionally intelligent teams are listening and engaged. I could see some leaders or some people thinking, well, that means that they listen to everything that I say and just do it. But what you meant was like active listening, right? Like they're in it with you. Because from my lens, I would imagine a component of having an emotionally intelligent team would be to be able to disagree or challenge or offer a different perspective

or acknowledge the differences. So talk to us about that. Like when you say listening, what does that mean? Sure. So let me say that first of all, the model, we call it the team emotional intelligence model, has three buckets of norms. And the first bucket, there's an order in which we believe you need to develop them

when you're starting off with the team. But the first bucket is about really belonging. So building a sense of connection, giving one another feedback, building a sense of respect. This is really critical to filling in people's need to belong, need to fit in. We are wired to want to fit in and belong. And so if we have to conform to do that, we'll conform. And so what we argue is that you need to build that, build it authentically.

And then in the second bucket, you start to do things that get people to participate and debate, et cetera. But what you don't want is people holding back because they're afraid to not fit in. They're afraid to get rejected. Honestly, people don't want to be ostracized, ignored, rejected. They start to behave badly when that happens. We can talk at Nausium about that, the research on that. But anyway, let me stop there. Hopefully that makes sense to you, that you build those relationships as a primary baseline. Then you can get active and collaborative.

Okay, so let's talk about some things that we can do to create, to address that first bucket, the belonging, the connection, the respect. I would imagine one of the things that you already mentioned, the looking people in the eye, acknowledging them when they walk into a room, like caring enough to just connect at the basic level. That seems like a good opportunity. What else should we be doing or what routines or norms should we be focused on in that first bucket? Okay. There are three of them, but before I dive into them, I just want to let you know

how I came up with them or how my colleagues and I came up with them. Starting from my doctoral student days, my master's degree, I got very interested in why some teams were so great and some were not. For my doctoral dissertation, I solicited the help with a couple of really famous psychologists, and we went into organizations and we found samples of teams that were truly outstanding performers. Okay, so they were the top 10% of performing in the organization. They also had nominations from team members.

We collected a bunch of data. They were the top 10% of all kinds of things. And then we looked at a group of average performers in the same organization doing the exact same tasks. And so these are the three things, what I'm going to tell you are the three things we found in that research. So I'm not just making this up off the top of my head. And what we discovered, at first I didn't believe that it would have such a powerful impact, but here they are. First one, you got to get to know one another. You've got to take the time to build an understanding of people's values, what's important to them, how they like to receive information.

Do they like feedback? How do they want feedback given to them? Where are they from? It doesn't have to be personal information. Let me just say some teams, in fact the more feminine teams that I work with, want to know, you know, hey, do you have a partner? You know, where'd you grow up? That kind of thing. They want to learn that, give some context. And a lot of the many masculine teams don't want to touch anything outside of the workplace. So in this case,

it's sort of like, tell me about your role. What was your favorite job you ever had? What are the challenges in your role? What do you like best of it? So anyway, we peel the onion of who these people are and it is a huge, huge factor in building respect. Second thing is giving one another feedback. So people wanna know when they're doing something out of line. We consider this helping others succeed.

So getting to know what are their challenges, what help do they need, and serving as a resource, including many of the members of our emotional intelligence teams, build their individual emotional intelligence from feedback from the team members. The third norm in that group is about what we call caring behavior, but it's really respect. And so what we do, what we recommend teams do when we work with teams is we have them define what does respect look like in this team? Where did you see it last time? And quite often, it's about looking people in the eye when they talk, writing down what everyone says,

capturing everything, listening. These small acts have huge consequences. In fact, there's been some really interesting research on what eye contact means to your sense of belonging in a team. So especially eye contact from the leader. And here's the interesting thing, especially when you're meeting online, you're meeting virtually. Funny things that eye contact matters even more.

And let me say one more thing about this and then I'll stop. Leaders always get eye contact. Leaders and informal leaders, people with high status in the team get that level of respect naturally. So, they don't notice it when others don't get it. But I go in and I observe teams. One of the things that I often do is go from team to team and observe their cultures. So often it's when the lower status, the new people are, and we can talk more about how people get disengaged. Those are the ones

when they're talking, people look away. People pick up their phone, check their text messages when the lower says, and that's a recipe for disaster. You want this to be about the whole team, and that's what the great teams do. Yeah. I mean, I myself have experienced and have observed so often where people will pick up their phones. It's like, it's frustrating to me nowadays with the note-taking options on our phones and our computers because sometimes it's hard to distinguish what people are doing. But it's so disheartening and it feels maybe at a higher level to me than, I don't know, it just really bothers me.

It feels disrespectful when people are... And I think once you feel disrespected, it's hard to move past that toward anything else productive. Yes. So before we talk a little bit more about building emotionally intelligent teams, I want to make sure that people understand that there is a business reason to do this. I think a lot of times it gets wrapped under the, you know, oh, this would be nice to do or people are complaining or, you know, whatever, as opposed to, you know, there is data and research that proves that this makes teams more productive and more profitable.

A, is that accurate? And B, can you share a little bit why this isn't just, and I put in air quotes, the right thing to do, but that there's a business case for it too? Absolutely, there's a business case for it. Let me just say this. We haven't paid enough attention to team building. So we tend to focus on the individual skills of leaders, individual skills of team members. We have not paid enough attention

to how do you build a good team. But yes, there's plenty of data we've always known. I can tell you, you can have mediocre team members with good processes and norms, like emotionally intelligent norms, outperform teams filled with geniuses. So it's really about the way you work together that has the bottom line impact on how innovative you are and on your performance. I'm a humanist, but I've taught in business schools. I'm a psychologist, but I've taught in business schools for 30 years. And everything I've ever done, I've linked to higher performance because to me, that's

what businesses care about. And I honestly believe being a more humane leader, helping teams build a collaborative culture is a win-win. It's win for the people, it's a win for the leader. And so let me tell you, there are other norms that increase the ownership of the outcome. So basically you want to feel like you belong, but you also want to feel like you're an ownership of the outcome. And that increases your motivation. One quick thing, and then I'll let you ask your next question, but we know, for example, that when teams stop and evaluate how well they're doing,

when they kind of do a quick check-in, what are we doing well, what are we not doing well. Not many teams do that. Many leaders are too nervous to do that. They feel like it's an assessment of them. When they do that, you can increase your performance by from 30 to 40 percent. In simulation studies, we've seen that over and over again. That's a minor tweak, minor behavior, huge outcome. So I'm gonna throw out a few things under the premise

that we really haven't been taught a lot about creating emotionally intelligent teams, right? Individual producers maybe, but this idea of team building, most leaders don't go to school for that or get taught that. So there are some things that I think leaders struggle with that I hear pretty often. So this sort of balancing between socializing and productivity in team meetings.

There are people who, like you said, maybe wanna talk about how their weekend was and some people don't. Like any suggestions about how to get an effective team meeting and what's the balance between the connecting, the getting to know each other and the productivity getting things done? Sure. So, the getting to know each other needs to be routine. And I would say 10 minutes at the start of a meeting if you have that much time.

Thirty-second, one-minute max check-in from everyone. I usually ask the team members to come up with questions they want to ask one another with it's bounded by what's interesting. My favorite questions are, what are you excited about and what are you nervous about right now? What are you worried about and what are you nervous about right now? What are you worried about? And everyone checks in quickly. You do it every time. Once in a while, you do a survey, you do something more. There's plenty of ideas, by the way, in my new book that comes out about how to do this. It doesn't need to take a lot of time, but you do it ritually in the beginning of the meetings.

Then you move to the task. By the way, once people talk, hear themselves talk once in a meeting, they'll talk again. So it opens up more conversation. And then you mentioned feedback as an integral part of building that connection, belonging and respect. Yes. Any tips on both the getting and the giving of feedback?

Because I do know a lot of people hesitate. There is some nervousness, especially with the feedback that might be perceived as negative or difficult. Sure. So what we recommend is that you first define what you consider unhelpful behavior in the team.

So what's unacceptable? What's unhelpful here? If I do X, I want you to let me know, right? So you make a list of things that you will give one another feedback on if they do it showing up late, not doing high quality work. So that's the first thing is you talk about that. Second of all, you find out, and this can be a great check-in kind of question or one of those days where you spend a little more time

getting to know one another. It's how do people wanna receive that feedback? Do they wanna get it right away? Do they wanna get it in the quiet of the leader's office? You know, you'd be surprised at who wants it in the quiet of the office and who wants it, give it to me right away. But you talk about, you know, what makes you nervous about feedback? You'd be surprised at who wants it in the quiet of the office and who wants it, give it to me right away.

But you talk about what makes you nervous about feedback. You have that conversation. It's a way of getting to know one another. And a third thing that a lot of teams we work with end up doing is creating a process that they do once or twice a year where they send out some kind of survey monkey survey with what should I do more of, what should I do less of what should I do less of or what do you want to see more of me in the future kind of feed forward you know what should I be doing more of or less of in the future and then you pair up and one person

gives feedback another person gives the other person feedback and there's nobody you can learn more from than the people you work with in teams. We consider this respectful. And this first chunk of norms where I'm talking about building that sense of belonging, we call it how we help one another succeed. We came to that term because so often this feedback helped people get promotions, end up doing things. They would get coached by one another, right?

And it works really well, but you got to start where the team is. And then when you are facilitating or leading teams, I think one of the things that's challenging is getting to know people individually is one piece of the challenge, but then creating an environment or a culture or even like a meeting structure that works for everybody can be really hard. I mean, even as simple as introverts, extroverts, or people who want feedback this way versus people who want feedback another way. How do we honor everybody's desires or preferences or what works best for them, but also still run an effective workday or a meeting? Does my question make sense? It feels very complex.

This is the ultimate question in Teams. I mean, this is it really. What you want is team members to feel so part of a team that they engage in what we call pro-social behavior, which means that you put sort of the team a little bit ahead of yourself. You care about, you give. And by the way, we're wired as human beings to do that. But we're all a little bit different. And we want to have diversity on the team. And so you've got to make space for that.

So here we call this a paradox, which means that you never resolve it. It's something that you manage. And you tell people that you're going to do your best and that you want to know what their needs are, but everybody's needs cannot get met. So what I like to say is that there are moments where there are moments where it feels great, and then there are moments when it doesn't. So perfection is impossible. Long-term perfection is impossible. But you're approaching it constantly. It's a work in progress constantly. You're leaning this way or you're leaning that way. And again, it's a paradox that can't be solved. It can only be managed and continually tweaked. I really like that concept, especially under this guise of belonging, connection, respect.

If people generally feel that way, if they generally experience that, I found that people can be very forgiving and they give you the benefit of the doubt. Versus if they don't, if they feel ostracized, if they feel like there's no connection or no understanding about them or what, then every little thing is like, you know, the death by a thousand paper cuts. You're just collecting evidence over and over again about how you don't belong. And so you mentioned the list of unacceptable behaviors and talking about those upfront and simultaneously this sort of being upfront about the paradox of I'm going to do my best.

I'm going to get to know you and there are going to be situations where I fall short or where I can't accommodate. Generally speaking, people are very understanding, very forgiving, very generous when they feel part of something and when they feel like somebody is in fact doing their best. You completely nailed it. I mean, that's what we see in the very best teams. They know their value. They know they're respected.

And by the way, not everyone is respected equally. You just need to feel respected for who you are, for your level, for what you bring. Yeah, people become more generous. I just wanna say we're wired for this. One of the most exciting things for me that's come out in the last 15 years is all the neuroscience, as well as the evolutionary biology

and evolutionary psychology, the information that's come out. You know, we lived in tribes or clans for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. And those clans, tribes who cooperated, collaborated, lived longer and passed on more genes. But we're also wired to behave badly when we are rejected or ostracized or ignored. In those tribal days, it meant that we were getting ready to get kicked out and it was scary. We become self-focused. That creates a self-focus.

Researchers like myself have been flabbergasted at how badly people behave when that happens. It seems like you would just ingratiate yourself, but here's the problem. You can't ingratiate yourself into the team. They do ingratiate themselves first. It doesn't work. You have to be accepted by others. Others have to help you belong.

You can't make yourself belong. And so that's when you behave badly. And by the way, it's regardless of your personality, regardless of your attachment level with your mother or anything else like that they've studied, everyone behaves selfishly in situations where they don't feel respected or they feel slightly rejected, ignored, irrelevant. Yeah. It's fascinating. Different scenarios and situations are popping into my head.

You mentioned the word paradox earlier, and then it just keeps popping into my head. So much of this does feel paradoxical, and yet the both and are so important. So yes, we need to be able to say what's going wrong, and then you need that person full of hope to come in and say, yes, we've acknowledged that, and here's what is possible, or here's our opportunities, or here's what we have to look forward to. And that's why I think team and leadership feels hard. It feels so complex is because it's always this both and, and the balancing and the navigating and the leading, but also being upfront that you're going to make mistakes and that you are learning

by doing just like everybody else. I don't know. My brain is going a million miles because it just feels so simple in the way that you laid it out. So thank you for doing that. And I think when you're in it, it also feels really hard. Yes, absolutely. And so let me say two things about that that aren't answers to that, but that add to what you just said.

First of all, it's one of the reasons why building your emotional intelligence if you're a leader is a good idea. Because much of emotional intelligence is about managing your own tensions and nerves and doing it anyway, right? Those hard conversations you have. What I've learned is that people are afraid of group dynamics.

Many leaders, they'd rather focus on their own learning than on, they're afraid. But teams make such good decisions. So first of all, my first thought is building your own emotional intelligence as a leader can help you lean into that paradox and recognize that that's it and then perfection is impossible. The other thing though that's another paradox is that teams like leaders who are like captains of a ship that know where they're going. And so the leaders, and I haven't mentioned the clarity of goals and purpose, we also consider that a baseline. It's

not a differentiator in terms of making you outstanding and really high-performer because so many average teams are good at it. But anyway, the leader needs to know where they're going, but they need to have a good team around them that they can check in with and say, what am I missing? You don't have to know it all. Great leaders have great teams that help them. Again, I keep mentioning that we're wired for things, but two social scientists have received the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that we are not rational beings.

And Herb Simon, you know, Daniel Kahneman's famous for his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, but before him was Herb Simon. And he said the same thing. He was a political scientist, got the Nobel Prize for saying we're not rational. His response was, the closest we get to rationality is when we're with a group. So the team, different pieces from your team members that can fill in the gaps. So I like to say to leaders, let your teams help you. They've got information. You do need to be confident about where you're going, but you can be open and open with what do you all think?

You don't need to have all the answers. Let the team help you. I love all of this. It's so fascinating to me. I cannot wait to read the book. Let me just remind our listener, the book is The Emotionally Intelligent Team. And if you want to connect with Vanessa and learn more about her and her work, you can find her on LinkedIn, Vanessa Duskret, and we'll also put in show notes all the other

ways to find and follow Vanessa. Thank you for being here today and for this incredibly important work. I just can't wait to see what's possible with better emotionally intelligent connected teams. Thank you, Nicole. And it's been an absolute pleasure hearing your excellent questions and answering them. So thank you for having me here. My pleasure.

Okay. So friend, here's the thing. Working well with others, especially others who don't think, communicate, or operate just like you, isn't a personality trait. It's a skill, a practice, a set of choices that we can make over and over again, or as Vanessa said, a routine, a norm. And all of that means that emotionally intelligent teams don't happen by accident. They're built with intention, with effort, and with the understanding

that it's our differences that allow us to create something better than one voice or many voices saying the same thing ever could. Be yourself because everyone else has already taken and have the emotional immaturity to allow others to do the same. This is how we show up our best individually and outperform the rest collectively. And all of that is woman's work.