414 The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest with Vanessa Druskat

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[00:00:00] 

Mahan Tavakoli: Vanessa dka, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me 

Vanessa Druskat: thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here with you.

Mahan Tavakoli: Vanessa. What a joy it is and I can't wait to learn from you. From your research and your brand new book, the Emotionally Intelligent Team Building Collaborative Groups, that outperform the rest. Before we talk about emotional intelligence in teams, we'd love to know a little bit more about ve, whereabouts did you grow up, and how has your upbringing impacted who you've become?

Vanessa Druskat: Thank you for that question. Two things I think had a big impact on me. my father was in. international development work. He was a professor of international education and so we traveled quite a bit when I was young I had the opportunity [00:01:00] to move from culture to culture. So I always had a cultural perspective. I understood from a young age that when we moved to a different environment, I had to figure out, I had to look around and figure out what was normal behavior in that environment. And, when you're a child you wanna fit in, you wanna make friends. And so I was sensitive to that. And when I got to the study of group dynamics as a graduate student I did not see anything about culture in the study of teams. And it was really sorely missing for me. I was really thinking that my behavior in any team was really more about the environment and what people felt was the right way to behave in that environment than it was about me personally. Although I always brought myself whether or not I felt. I could really be my best self.

Depends a lot on the environment. So that's the first thing. And I wanna just wanna thank my parents who are no longer with [00:02:00] us for taking me around many parts of the world. That helped that. The other thing was that I started working young. We grew up, my dad was on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which is a, basically a farming community. And we he intentionally moved us into a farming town. He didn't want us to be with a bunch of professors kids in our school, which I found out later, by the way, in life, which is why he put us in that town. But the good news was that at the age of 12, I started working on farms. I had friends whose parents owned farms and I was able to earn money, make money as a young kid to buy things that I wanted, that every child wants. and so I started working young and I started experiencing what it was like to work as part. Of a team, that really set me on a path to understanding what good teamwork and bad teamwork looked and felt like. 

Mahan Tavakoli: What outstanding experiences, Vanessa, whether the global experience that you had, the [00:03:00] empathy that it takes to try to understand the approaches of different cultures , to then even here in the states. Your father having you in a farming community, I would imagine your experiences, your father's experiences were very different

so to be able to work effectively, you both needed to be. Able to work in a collaborative environment, but you also needed to understand a different culture and different perspectives to work and relationships than was typical in other environments.

Vanessa Druskat: It's brilliant insight. Brilliant insight. Mahan, that was it. , I was always code switching.  I'll tell you, the hardest environment I ever went to was when my dad did a sabbatical at the University of Texas at Austin. I had to move as a junior high student and Wow.

Was that different, because I didn't expect it to be so different. [00:04:00] And yet it was different in subtle ways. To life is a learning experience and you learn from your failures. I remember a teacher coming up to me once saying, you don't really look like you're enjoying yourself here.

, Are you fitting in? Okay? And I remember thinking, just get away from me. It's gonna look bad. No, I'm not, but I'll figure it out. So anyway, yes, very perceptive. Whether I'm in the truck with a bunch of farmers, or whether I'm in , the academy, you learn from all those experiences, . 

Mahan Tavakoli: Now the other thing that I was thinking about is that your approach is slightly different than the very individualistic mindset of some societies, and I think more so in the us. I also spent many years of my life traveling for work, 70 plus countries. Beautiful cultures learned a lot from them.

But one of the things is here. Whether [00:05:00] it's emotional intelligence that I want to get into more or other aspects, it's the individual that determines their success rather than the group or rather than the environment. So you have taken a different perspective to it and you research the group's impact and the environment's impact, and I would love to understand that a little bit better as well.

Vanessa Druskat: Sure. I don't wanna minimize the impact of individual skills. I will tell you that I have a little bit of a bias, which was that it bothers me that so much of our attention these days is on perfecting us as individuals, and one of the reasons for that is because we are better at most things when we're around other people. When, because we are biased, we've had two Nobel Prize in economic social scientists who have emphasized that we're bi, we have bias minds, and that we [00:06:00] have all kinds of, confirmation biases, et cetera, et cetera. I can go on about that, but and, but that when we're in the, in a group with individuals who we're listening to and especially who we care about we are much better able to meet our goals, to learn to grow. And also I wanna say, in an organization, innovate and do the things that organizations want from us. So anyway I respect individual development, come on I've on my own development my whole life, for leaders, I want them to let go of that. For a while and realize that building a team requires building relationships and building routines that bring the best outta people in the group, that get them working together in ways that make them more than the sum of their individual parts. That's the magic of teamwork, and [00:07:00] we need that today in organizations.

Mahan Tavakoli: We absolutely do. Vanessa, and I've had lots of conversations over the years, most specifically over the past few years on the impact AI is going to have on our work and the fact that with the exponential nature of change around us, the best teams require that even more. There is no more one source of knowledge or a few people that are able to solve the issues and tackle the issues as.

Effectively. So what you're mentioning is even more important now than it was five, 10 years ago, which is why one of the things that I love about your work is that you talk about team emotional intelligence, and my understanding is that's not just hiring emotionally intelligent individuals and putting them together.

So how [00:08:00] do you define team emotional intelligence and why does that matter to work today?

Vanessa Druskat: . Colleagues and I define it as building a team culture, we'll define as norms routines and habits, that produce productive, constructive emotion, such as trust. safety, the willingness to debate which produces better collaboration and good outcomes. So it's really about routine interactions that produce an emergent state , that allows us to question, learn, work together honestly and productively.

Mahan Tavakoli: The question in the minds of a lot of executives that I talk to is, how do we do that? I understand, and part of what you're mentioning is [00:09:00] we have to have group norms. So is it that the leadership team comes together for two days, three days, and says, these are the norms that we're going to live by from now on.

How do we establish some of those norms that you are talking about? Okay.

Vanessa Druskat: . First thing is that every has norms, every group, every team, we human beings are cultural beings. In other words we always adapt our behavior to the expectations of the culture that we're in. So from the moment we're born we're not born with certain instincts about how to behave.

There are a few of those, but primarily we are always looking to others to tell us how to behave in a certain environment. We do it in our families. You know how, what about your, if you're eating together as a family at the dinner table, how are you interacting? What are the norms, and we adapt to those, the [00:10:00] idea here is that you already have a culture in your team. If you've got a team that you're leading, the question is whether or not those norms bring out the best in one another, or not they enable the team members to interact in ways that hear every voice tap into the skills in the room, that integrate, build on new knowledge from what everyone is sharing. Because I'll tell you, that's rare in teams and I've, I have watched an awful lot of teams. I've observed an awful lot of team cultures, in the average team, that's not what I see in the average team. I see people with status and power dominating conversations. I see a lot of wasted talent and so I want. to learn how to build norms that [00:11:00] are inclusive of all voices and that use the knowledge that everyone brings.

Mahan Tavakoli: , Therefore, how would they do that? The CEO, the executive says, I. Get it. And in your book you also talk about the importance of belonging, which is critical to the sense the individuals in that team, in that group have their willingness to contribute the psychological safety that needs to be there.

So some of those concepts, people understand, they say, okay, help me. What am I supposed to do tomorrow, this week, next week, in order to make that a reality for my team? Understanding that I wholeheartedly agree with you, Vanessa. The vast majority of teams are nowhere near that. Therefore, give me some action steps, give me some things I should consider and I should [00:12:00] do to get closer to what you were talking about.

Vanessa Druskat: you bet. First of all, lemme say that's why I wrote the book. I wanted to give people those action steps. So just as a quick aside, psychological safety, the concept was developed by a friend of mine in graduate school, Amy Edmondson. And so the moment she first started studying that concept, I said, that's cool.

Gimme your scale. I wanna put it in my research. And so I can tell you my norms predict her psychological safety. Coming back to the definition of what is, TTEI. . It's basically building a culture that produces good, constructive emotion, good emergent states of mind. Okay, so how do you build it? This is how I figured it out. It's not rocket science. I found a mentor who is willing to move from being an A person who studied individual leaders to one who studied teams. And I said, let's use your methods. Let's go into organizations and study [00:13:00] and find out what are the norms in the tip top teams. In the teams that are just surpassing their goals, doing well, let's look at the norms in your average, in most teams. And let's see what the great teams do that the average teams don't do. So let me get specific here and tell you what they are. Again, they're not rocket science, but they are things you can develop.

And so let me just tell you what they are briefly. Now overview, and then let me tell you how I develop them in teams, because it's easy to do once you know what they are. it's easy to begin to do and then it's a change effort. Okay? They fall into three buckets or categories, the norms.

There's nine norms that we found that consistently across all different kinds of cultures, across levels of organizations popped up as important. And that, that were norms that we saw in the greats that we didn't see in the average. Okay? First bucket or first [00:14:00] category is about helping the individuals in the team succeed. So this is the bucket that really focuses on building the initial sense of belonging. So one of the little known fact about teams is if you don't take care of the individuals, you lose them. They become more focused on, do I fit in well? How do I do the right thing here? Because we all want to belong.

And so what I argue is what I see in the great teams, which is that you engage in some of these norms that will just check off that right away. Everyone belongs. Everyone feels known, understood, valued, and supported. That's the first bucket of norms. bucket of norms is how we advance and learn together in an aligned way.

How we build shared understanding, mental models that move us moving together and constantly [00:15:00] checking in and finding out what do we need to clarify? How do we need to adapt? It's always a moving target. Are the goals clear? Who's not clear? Who is clear? Let's talk about, let's bring it all into the room. And so there are four norms in that category that helped teams do that. And again, we saw those in the great teams. The third category of norms is about, it requires humility. It's about recognizing that you don't have all the answers and you gotta reach out to your clients or customers to outsiders. thinkers, innovative thinkers, who can give you ideas that can help you be better at bucket number two, which is thinking about the future and strategizing and getting proactive about what you're gonna do next, being more innovative. And so those are the three buckets of norms the way we build it.

I'm just gonna give you the quick overview and we can obviously dive into any of this. We first evaluate what are the current [00:16:00] norms, and especially we'll use the, these nine norms as a starting point. And by the way, every leader has to adapt these norms to fit their team. But this is the baseline assessment. We'll go in, we'll say, how are you doing on these? On these, there's a nice quick survey that will allow people to do that we've put in the book. But anyway, we look at the baseline. Now here's the trick. We don't just listen to the leader and the high status members. When we do this baseline assessment, we ask everyone, because typically leaders, the people with status and the team think the team is great. This team rocks. I don't see any problems. I remember talking to a leader once who said to me, no one's afraid of me. Are you kidding? Who would be afraid of me? And I said, your team members tell me they're afraid of you. And he said, what do you mean would be afraid of me? I thought, okay, that's, let's not debate that. But if you see it in a scale and hey, these people are afraid of you, changes your [00:17:00] mind. And so the measurement becomes really key. And you wanna, by the way, another little known fact researcher, I'm not allowed to call you a team there's too much variance in the way people respond. To your answers. 'cause there's too many different kinds of experiences. you need to bring people along, move them into that shared experience, that shared way of interacting. Yes, my voice matters, yes. I feel like I belong. Yes. I'm part of the conversation and I feel like I have some voice in where we're going. So anyway, that's what we do. We measure it, we talk about it and we say, okay, what do we need to change? It can't change everything at once. would best move your team toward the goals it wants to meet? It varies from team to team.

Mahan Tavakoli: You did an outstanding job, Vanessa, laying out the three buckets. And , understanding where you are is a [00:18:00] critical part of this process.

One of the challenges I see is oftentimes we tend to assume based on our individual perspective, I've seen as you have leaders be shocked. I've seen team members be shocked at the perspective of other team members as well. So understanding where you are is a critical first step to this process. Now, one of the things that I often hear from CEOs, executives and leaders is,  , we are stretched.

We are busy. We have so many priorities, so many things going on, . From your perspective, why is it important for leaders to prioritize this when they have so much else coming at them with respect to things that they need to follow through, execute on a daily, weekly basis?

Vanessa Druskat: . Brilliant question, and it's a really core [00:19:00] question for leaders, for your audience. What I wanna say is, first of all, you can't afford not to prioritize these if you need your team. So let me give you a story that can help you think this through. We once worked with one of my favorite teams ever, which started off as not a favorite team. This was a group of engineers. The last thing they wanted to do was talk about their emotional intelligence, but they were all leaders. This was a very high level team in an organization, I would say N minus one. Their leader was n minus one from the CEO. And they each were ran divisions of the company and their area.

Their region was losing market share. Their team leader got let go and they were scared and they couldn't understand why we're so talented as individuals, what's going on. So we've got 'em together in a room and they were so angry and they didn't want to talk about emotional [00:20:00] intelligence and they started barking at us.

But anyway, we started talking about we, we moved the conversation to who they were and how well they knew one another, how often they interacted with one another. What we found was that they were like foreigners to one another. One. I remember one person said, I never talk on the phone. I don't have time to talk on the phone. And the other person said. No wonder you're not answering my calls. I just thought you didn't like me. I thought you were just ignoring me. Alright. It's good thing to know, and so once we started getting them to peel those layers, they started realizing, that they weren't interacting, they weren't sharing information, they weren't coaching one another, they weren't finding out where they were aligned and misaligned.

And most important of all, they weren't building on their one another's knowledge. They were such smart guys. They were all guys. The leader was a woman. [00:21:00] And one of the small things they decided to do when we laid out the emotional intelligence model was they decided that when each person talked, they were gonna nod their head and they were gonna look one another in the eye. And what they ended up doing was, sharing more information. It's amazing what'll happen when your teammates start listening. Really listening to you, which happens when you're nodding your head and and you find that you have information to share. They have follow-up questions, which by the way, follow-up questions is a great way to show Yeah, you're good.

I wanna hear more. they really changed everything about what they did. And so anyway, together they built some new strategies, some really proactive ways of thinking about things. They did a whole, they included a whole bunch of other norms include one of our norms called proactive problem solving. And. They were soaring ahead within six months. They were soaring ahead just by using the talent in the room. So [00:22:00] does it take a lot of time? No, just head nodding and listening carefully. And I gotta tell you, another team, what ended up happening is one of their, they moved us. They, changed 'em, so well, they moved us to another team that you know, leader in the organization.

We started working with them and I sat in on one of their meetings and each person was presenting okay, with the boss in the room, right? Again, N minus one from the CEO, this large corporation. And everyone was presenting to impress the boss. And it was so boring and so it was so useless. You had all these smart people in the room and you were presenting to impress, not do that. Let's pres, if we're in the room together, let's exchange information and build on one another's ideas and figure out where we can take this. So anyway it, that's, I know I'm veering quite a bit from your conversation. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. The initial assessment may [00:23:00] take more time than you want it to do, but that's only because you've got to peel the layer of who these folks are. You spend half a day doing that. You develop the norms, routines, new ways of interacting. People feel better and everything is faster. interactions, quick assessments, less defensiveness, et cetera. , 

Mahan Tavakoli: , As you mentioned, Vanessa. First of all, it doesn't take a lot of time Secondarily. It reduces friction and the time it takes to get things done. And more importantly, it drastically impacts the quality of the output of the group, the intelligence of the entire group, as opposed to an attempt at intelligence of the individuals.

Because you also talk about how in emotionally intelligent teams, the team members help each other succeed. Now, believe me, over the years, I work with a lot of leadership teams that [00:24:00] are called a leadership team, but in most instances, there's a lot of angling going on and positioning going on, whether in developing the strategy or then the budget.

Vanessa Druskat: yes.

Mahan Tavakoli: these are real critical issues to be addressed if you really want to have a well-functioning team. I.

Vanessa Druskat: Absolutely. There's so much competition. The higher you get in the hierarchy, we're competing let me come back to that original bucket, which seems so. Crazy to a lot of leaders, which is about building that sense of belonging, building that connection, understanding one another. Until you really know what everyone else knows and you know how to work with them, you can't tap in to what they have. You don't even know that they have information you need. All right. And so you, once you do start to think about how we're gonna help one another succeed and that comes from getting to know one another, learning more about what one each person brings then you're wasting [00:25:00] opportunities.

You're wasting talent, first of all, in the decisions and the outcomes that you create. Thank you for reminding me that all of this team stuff is about the outcome, the decision, the problems, the way forward. But you're also wasting opportunity to develop yourself. Nobody knows you better than your team members, and I've seen teams, team members get promoted into high level positions that they've always wanted when they become emotionally intelligent teams and their colleagues are willing to give 'em tough feedback.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love that you went there because you do talk about feedback as a tool for team growth. It's one of those areas that I find Vanessa people have a lot of difficulty with. What is feedback? What's the right kind of feedback? Who do you give feedback to? How do you give feedback within team structures based on your research and what you have seen, how can feedback be used as a tool for growth?

Because I've seen it [00:26:00] two extremes, one extreme where it is almost toxic.

Vanessa Druskat: Yeah.

Mahan Tavakoli: not feedback. And another extreme where there is very little value. People are not really helping each other grow. There isn't the trust and the psychological safety, how have you seen feedback used as a tool for team growth?

Vanessa Druskat: . Brilliant. I just love the way you asked that great question. So I wanna come back to that first bucket of norms in the model, which so many leaders feel like is a waste of time. Why do we need to get to know one another? 

Mahan Tavakoli: Vanessa, I'm gonna interrupt for a second because as you are saying that I was thinking that as well because in many instances when I've had conversations around that, people almost dismissively talk about that as the soft stuff.

Vanessa Druskat: Yes.

Mahan Tavakoli: We don't really have time, we know each other well enough.

Some of those things that you're mentioning. It sounds simple, [00:27:00] but it's actually those things that get in the way of a lot of teams, including people at the highest level of organizations. So I wanted to underline that as you were going to talk about feedback. Just wanted to mention, I see it consistently.

How dismissive we are of some of these elements that contribute to belonging, that can have a significant impact, even at highest levels, including boards of organizations that have interacted with.

Vanessa Druskat: exactly. You just nailed it. Everybody wants to know how to build psychological safety, how to build trust. The only way to do that is by getting to know one another. I, and I'm gonna come back to this word belonging for a moment, because again, it's one of these words it got scooped up in the DEI world, which great. But much of that is getting thrown out the window right now, unfortunately. Belonging is a core [00:28:00] need. We have, we lived in tribes, in clans, whatever you wanna call 'em arguably, I, one of the citations I read was that it was millions of years. Other people say hundreds of thousands, whatever, in those tribes, we knew each other.

Everyone had a role. Everyone felt central. But here's the key. They had tight norms. They had to, it was life or death. And if you get along and fit in and you were kicked out, were. So what that means is that those of us who are alive today, our ancestors all wanted to belong. They had that gene.

That's who we are. social scientists know that this is the need that rules them all. It's the moment we enter a team, we're not aware of it, but we wanna belong. And lemme tell you what belonging is. It's feeling known, okay? It's feeling valued [00:29:00] it's feeling mutually supported. Alright? So if you want me to trust you, if I wanna trust I if I wanna trust you, I have to know you. You have to know me. I have to know how to interact with you in ways that light you up and don't shut you down, that don't make you defensive. And everyone's different that way. One of my favorite books ever written is this book called First Break All the Rules. Maybe, it was the first book written by the Gallup organization and they opened the book with this chapter about about leaders who surpassed all the other leaders in there and how well they did.

And they're interviewing a leader who they say, tell us about your team. And leader says, I don't really know what I did with my team that made it so great, even though we were consistently, the tops, doing better than everybody else in the company. They said tell us about your team.

He said here is Mahan. If I even look at Mahan with negative eyes, he's crushed. [00:30:00] I can't talk to him that way. But then there's Vanessa, you can yell. You have to yell at her. I've had to fire Vanessa a couple times 'cause she doesn't listen to what I'm saying. And so here you get you, this is what you find is that he's peeled the layers of who these people are. Right? And that enables us to talk real with one another. Okay? Enables us to connect, it builds trust, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't have that in your leadership team, you're not gonna get good feedback.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love that Vanessa, for so many different reasons , and that's also why. I tend to have difficulty when feedback is focused primarily on the mechanism of feedback as opposed to what you are talking about, which is a lot deeper because I've seen it both with organizations I've worked with as well as when I had an incredible CEO and COO that I worked for.

They [00:31:00] knew exactly, to your point, which individual thrived on what kind of feedback and how it wasn't a process of first tell 'em this, then tell 'em that, or this is the structure. It's a connection between the individuals and secondarily to that, both the CEO and COO who I adore to this day since retired from the organization.

The sense of trust I had in them and the belief that they wanted the best for me.

Didn't matter if they said something positive before saying something corrective or first said something corrective. I knew they wanted me to thrive as well as the organization rather than themselves to look good. 

Vanessa Druskat: You just mentioned something which is really part of this, which is that you knew they cared about you as a person.

Mahan Tavakoli: Yes.

Vanessa Druskat: That they cared about your development. Whole different [00:32:00] way of hearing feedback when you know, the feedback giver cares. , And again, that's part of the relationship development process. . 

Mahan Tavakoli: That's why I love the perspective that you bring to this, that it doesn't put a framework or a system on top of feedback where mechanically people go through the process. You are going much deeper to what really matters to us, and that's why the sense of belonging that you talk about is so critical, including to feedback.

Vanessa Druskat: Yes, absolutely. One of the problems is we don't know that we need , the need to belong. We only know when we don't feel like we belong. So there's some really interesting research that's going on right now looking at why. It's the same thing with respect. Okay. One of my favorite books is called Crucial Conversations, and what they say in that book is, respect is like the air. You don't know it when you have it, but when you don't have it, it's the only thing you think about. Belonging is the same [00:33:00] thing. If we don't feel, if we feel that everyone else is known and we're not known, everyone else is valued, which by the way, we have a negativity bias. And when you are the boss. You're making eye contact with others and you're lifting up your phone to check your messages when I speak. Or any, anything you know, and it could be you're waiting for an emergency, right? Doesn't matter if I don't know that you appreciate me, that you know me, that you value me and you support me, that I'm likely to fixate on the wrong messages. So anyway, we have a hypersensitive feedback mechanism that tells us what these nonverbal messages send.

Mahan Tavakoli: , I love that perspective and it's in my view, an essential way to think about the team dynamics and the impact of the team dynamics rather than focusing on some of the surface elements and some of the symptoms focusing on the root [00:34:00] causes and root ways of addressing it, which is why I love your thinking and your book as well, Vanessa, you are not.

Talking about just the symptoms and the surface. You're talking about the core elements that help a team thrive as an emotionally intelligent team, which is why, therefore it's worth taking the time to focus in on that. Now, one of the other things I wanted to definitely touch on is you also talk about the team learning together and wanted to understand that better because I'm a big advocate for growth mindset team, growth mindset.

One of my good friends has a great book performance paradox on the importance of growth mindset in organizations. How have you seen the learning together pillar work? Is it just a function of going through training together? What is learning together?[00:35:00] 

Vanessa Druskat: The way I've seen it work is through routine aimed at learning, at solving problems. So the learning comes from the problem solving. And if you look at that middle bucket of norms that we have, let me just tell you what they are. The first one is about reviewing what's going on in the team and the team's norms. And I'm gonna skip to the third one of them is about being optimistic and looking and thinking about what we're hopeful about. One of them is about being pessimistic and looking at what we need to be more proactive about. And the other one the fourth norm is about making sure all voices are included. And so actually have a need. It's a core social need share conversations that help us understand things together. So every [00:36:00] one of us understands that our own thinking is limited. At some core level, we know it's limited and we wanna vet, when we're in a team, we wanna vet. Hey, if I've got you there, I can ask you too. And again I may have mentioned this already, but this is what the meeting outside the meeting is often about where we're really trying to find out, what do I really need to be thinking about here? So anyway, I find is that learning together is a, it's a norm, it's a way of being, it's a way of sharing our doubts and our fears and our excitement.

You always gotta include that hope in there, which by the way is not a silly thing. There's so much evidence to show that we are more motivated when we have that positive, hopeful view of where we're going, where we've been. So we have to craft it, again, it's a discipline, right? When I find it happens in conversations when I meet with teams, when we, when I've developed, when I've taken the stuff on the road and worked with teams oftentimes this is the first con conversation they've ever had where they've analyzed what's working and what's not working, where [00:37:00] they're going, and they can ask their leader.

We always ask the leader to sit in the seat with the team members and they're able to ask these tough questions and they inevitably want that to continue. So they want it, let's do it again next month. Whoever can show up will show up. , We put more credence in learning together than we do in learning apart, and it aligns us.

Mahan Tavakoli: In doing so, what you did, Vanessa, , you prompt outstanding and beautiful questions as Warren Berger calls it, in that it's these beautiful questions that when they're presented to the team and to the group, the conversation that it brings out is by itself of tremendous value.

So you just gave those questions that all the leaders need to do is reflect on how can we create the environment where people feel a sense of [00:38:00] belonging and feel comfortable to share the responses and ask these beautiful questions.

Vanessa Druskat: Yes. And I just wanna give you a quick example of that. Brilliant. Thank you so much. You're framing things for me. I do a lot of work with doctors. I do a lot of leadership development, team development with doctors. And I had, I was working with some surgeons at one point, and one of the surgeons said to me, oh yeah, Vanessa, who's got time for that?

I'll have, X number of surgeries back to back. When am I gonna have time for these conversations? And I said to him, try it. Just try it. Take five minutes at the end of that surgery with your surgical team check in about what you know, what went well, what didn't, what questions people have what they need to look. So he said, okay, I'll try it. And he did, and next time I saw him, this is the beauty of having repeat sessions. He couldn't believe how well it worked and how his team appreciated it, and how much they all learned from it, and how much better they became because of it.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:39:00] What an outstanding example, because that surgeon that you talk about, Vanessa, . Could be a CEO, could be an executive, could be an engineer. I've heard the same things said by lots of other people in dismissing the value of these conversations. So what an outstanding example. Now,

I There are lots of myths about teamwork and you've dedicated a good part of your life studying teamwork and now emotionally intelligent teams. What is the biggest myth in your view, about teamwork that you want to kill?

Vanessa Druskat: Thank you for that question. Biggest myth is , that building a good team is about hiring great people. Hiring is the most important thing you do. But that's not how you build a great team. There are plenty of stories and there's been a lot of research on this [00:40:00] besides my own, from faculty members at Harvard and Penn, mentors of mine that basically show that it's about the interactions of the team and what you need are routine interactions that hear all the voices that use the talent in the room. That's what makes a great team. And by the way, mediocre team members outperform your star team members every time if they have better interactions. And it sounds strange. It even sounds strange when I hear myself say it, and, but I gotta tell you, the research bears it out constantly over and over.

And sure as heck iq, the average IQ in the room, the higher the IQs of everyone. That doesn't mean a thing in a team. You got to use the knowledge. You got to use the talent in the room, and there's so much wasted talent in teams.

Mahan Tavakoli: There is a lot of wasted talent and what [00:41:00] you're mentioning, Vanessa, it's. Incredible. Where with some CEOs and executives who are sports fans, when I have talked about sports teams that have done really well, in most instances, they have good players, but they are not the teams that have recruited the star players.

It's that the players play well with each other.

Vanessa Druskat: Yes.

Mahan Tavakoli: They get that, but then when it comes to the organization, they're like, we want the best person for every single role. So that is definitely one of those myths that, as you're saying, the performance of the group is not necessarily reflective of hiring the best person for every role.

Vanessa Druskat: Yes. And yet I don't wanna undermine that.

Hire matters. When I teach classes, I put it up on the board. The most important thing you do is hire, just don't think that's gonna build your team. And that brings me to my next key message here is we need to start teaching leaders [00:42:00] how to build teams. It's not intuitive, it's hit or miss. Some people just know it for some reason. And I'll tell you, many of my college athletes in my classrooms, they get it right away. But it's not just athletes, you remember the debate team and you know how it is, or you're a musician. Musicians get it right away. , We have to start teaching leaders how to build teams. It's not intuitive 

Mahan Tavakoli: Teaching leaders how to build great teams. Nothing can help them more than reading emotionally intelligent team. And. Actually taking both the survey, looking at their team, asking the questions that you've suggested, so getting a baseline understanding of where they're at, and then based on that, working on developing the emotional intelligence of their team

[00:43:00] so I have absolutely loved this conversation as I loved your book, Vanessa. Where can the audience find out more about you and follow your work?

Vanessa Druskat: Best place is my website, vanessa scat.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm posting a lot of ideas on LinkedIn these days. And you can just find me, Vanessa Scat on LinkedIn. It's,  really been a great conversation, Mahan. I really appreciate you're having me on your program and 

Mahan Tavakoli: vanessa, what a

Vanessa Druskat: it again sometime.

Mahan Tavakoli: absolutely what an incredible joy. I loved reading your book. It is a fresh and different perspective. I love the conversation just as much, because the examples you give and the way you approach this is exactly what leaders need to hear and the way they need to hear it.

Absolutely loved it. Vanessa. Thank you so much for this [00:44:00] conversation.

Vanessa Druskat: Thank you. Thank you very much.