How To Build Collaborative Teams That Outperform The Rest

 

“Great teams can sometimes feel like magic. So much so that it can be hard to pin down why they work so well. But such dynamics are explainable—and replicable. And at their heart is emotional intelligence,” explains Vanessa Urch Druskat, author of the new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team. 

“Team Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a group culture created by a set of norms that build a productive social and emotional environment that leads to cooperative interactions, collaborative work processes, and hastens effective performance,” says Druskat. 

Drawing from her social and organizational psychologist and professor experience, Druskat combines thirty years of research and team development to present a model for building and leading emotionally intelligent teams. She offers practical advice on how to build a team where members: 

Build community through routines that motivate teamwork: Helping one another succeed through understanding, caring, and feedback—feedback with information exchange that builds trust and collaboration and reduces unproductive conflict. Adopting practices that recognize people’s unique talents and leverage their value in the team.

 
Learn and advance together through routine assessment and adaptation: Reviewing team processes, supporting personal expression, building optimism, and solving problems proactively. Updating and aligning a shared model of top priorities and proactively addressing challenges. 

Seek to remain at the leading edge of change: Engaging stakeholders by building an understanding of the team's impact and developing external relationships. Regularly reaching outside the team to exchange information and learn from other groups and those who can accelerate team idea generation and improve decisions. 

In reading The Emotionally Intelligent Team, leaders and aspiring leaders alike will learn how to develop a strong team culture that motivates and sustains successful collaboration and high performance.

 
More specifically, the book provides a road map to: 

• Give new teams a good start.

• Clarify the goalposts toward which to focus a team’s development.

• Assess the teams’ current state to keep it on track.

• Identify what’s needed to improve collaboration, innovation, and performance. 

“This book is a must-read for leaders, team members, and students of leadership—people who want to learn how to build effective teams,” shares Druskat.  

Some of my favorite learnings and takeaways from the book include: 

• Team members should recognize that getting to know one another’s specific interests, experiences, areas of expertise, and skills improves the team’s ability to tap into these talents to improve outcomes. 

• Team feedback should be delivered with caring, developmental, and encouraging intentions. Remember that feedback is a gift that emphasizes a group’s culture of continuous growth and improvement. 

• All team members should recognize that taking on a more-optimistic mindset can build resilience and increase the team’s creativity. 

• Individuals on the team should be encouraged to challenge the status quo and to think creatively about ways to address current and future challenges.

 

Vanessa Urch Druskat

 
The author shares these additional insights with us:

Question: What are the best norms to implement in a team as a first step to shift culture? 

Vanessa Urch Druskat: To answer this question, I need to provide some context. My colleagues and I spent two decades studying high-performing teams across various industries to identify what these teams did differently than average-performing teams doing similar work. That research led to the development of the Team Emotional Intelligence Model (Team EI Model), which is a set of team norms and routines that fall into three clusters: (1) How we help one another succeed, (2) how we learn and advance together, and (3) how we engage our stakeholders. 

It wasn't until we took that model on the road for a decade and used it to coach leaders and their teams that we learned how critical it was to start any team cultural shift with the first cluster of norms. This cluster focuses on knowing and mutually supporting individual team members. Our experience supports evidence showing that until team members feel a sense of genuine acceptance, support, and belonging, it's difficult for them to focus entirely on the team's work. 

It didn't take us long to realize that a sense of belonging starts with feeling known and understood. Addressing this need aligns with the first norm in the first cluster of the Team EI Model, which is labeled “Understand Team Members.” Experience taught us that team members were more willing to share their authentic views about the current team culture–and their desired future culture if we opened a team culture-building session with an activity that helped team members get to know and trust one another better. Specifically, this involved asking them to answer a series of questions such as: What does this team need to know about you to support your success on the team best? What are you most excited about right now as this team works toward achieving its goals? What are you most concerned about? 

Shifting a team's culture only happens when all team members feel aligned around the future state they desire. Also, when the team feels it owns its culture. This ownership begins by creating an environment in which members feel known enough to be comfortable sharing their authentic feelings and ideas.  

Question: How do you recommend teams handle conflicts that arise from personality differences, especially between introverts and extroverts? 

Vanessa Urch Druskat: Conflicts arising from personality differences often emerge when some individuals receive more recognition or privilege than others. In truth, personalities are only one of the many differences among team members that easily arouse frustration if they cause members to experience a lack of fairness. Thus, the real conflict is often about equity and who feels valued more by the team. 

One comparison between extroverts and introverts suggests that extroverts tend to think while talking. Introverts think before they talk. Let’s use this difference as an example. If the team never allows time for introverts to think before speaking, extroverts will dominate team discussions. No perfect resolution exists. Thus, team norms can’t resolve it, but they can manage it. 

For example, introverts benefit when team norms require that agendas with discussion topics are sent out in advance of a meeting. They also help when norms provide thinking time for new discussion items. Finally, a vital norm often requires the person facilitating a team’s discussion to feel willing and able to cut off an extrovert from talking for too long. 

Our second cluster of Team EI Norms includes the norm: ”Review the Team.” High-performing teams employ this norm by regularly checking in with the team to discuss challenges and how well the team is currently managing them. There is no end to improvement in teams with a diverse membership. 

Question: How can leaders encourage and manage the solicitation of diverse viewpoints within their teams? 

Vanessa Urch Druskat: We know that hearing diverse viewpoints is crucial for effective decision-making. Even when not all views can be included or applied, hearing a variety of perspectives improves a team's collective thinking and decision-making. However, it can be challenging to raise a point that hasn't yet been raised by another team member, especially if that idea contradicts or rejects another member's position. Research on the human brain indicates that the brain sends error messages to individuals who are about to contradict a team's majority position.

 
We recommend two normative solutions to this common problem. First, to focus on norms in our first cluster, which aims to address team members need to feel genuinely accepted, known, valued, and mutually supported. This sense of belonging is constantly in flux. But, overall, we know that when people feel genuinely known and valued, they are more likely to share authentic views. 

Second, to focus on a norm in our second cluster: “Support Expression.” This norm involves sharing constant reminders with team members that the team wants to hear their authentic views. We were surprised by how many high-performing teams we studied used terminology, props, signs, and other visual aids to remind team members that their opinions were important. At one point, we started bringing small elephants to our team culture-change sessions. We used them to represent that all "elephants in the room" should be discussed. That phrase refers to obvious problems or issues that people fear raising or prefer to ignore, but the need would benefit from examining. 

In summary, it isn't easy for many team members to share views that differ or conflict with those of others on the team. Teams need to remind their members that diverse ideas add value. 

Question: What is the number one marker of an emotionally intelligent team at work? 

Vanessa Urch Druskat: Routine evaluation and adaptation. Emotionally intelligent teams take action to build a productive social environment characterized by trust, psychological safety, and a sense of belonging among team members. Emotions that wax and wane influence these states of mind. 

My colleagues and I learned that, as with any relationship, nudging a team in the direction of trust, safety, and belonging requires attention and maintenance; otherwise, it dissipates. Emotionally intelligent teams create ways to routinely check in to learn how well the team's current norms and habits are fulfilling the needs of the team and its members. They also adapt those norms to fit the team's evolving needs.
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Vanessa Urch Druskat is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of New Hampshire. A social and organizational psychologist, she has spent thirty years researching team collaboration and performance. She is an award-winning teacher and scholar, and her research investigating the differences between the norms and habits of high-performing teams and average ones led her to pioneer, with Steven B. Wolff, the concept of team emotional intelligence. 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.