1088: How to Build Higher Performing Teams with Emotional Intelligence with Vanessa Druskat

Pete Mockaitis
Vanessa, welcome!

Vanessa Druskat
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be here with you and your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I’m excited to be chatting about emotional intelligence today. And so, since we’re going to say the word a lot, I think it’d be helpful to do some defining upfront. It’s a popular term. What exactly do you mean when you say emotional intelligence?

Vanessa Druskat
I like to think of it as recognizing emotion and using it as data. So, we now know that we never turn our emotion off, and people around us don’t turn emotion off, and we send signals to one another through emotion.

And so, the question is whether or not we recognize it in ourselves and what it channels to others, and whether or not we recognize it in others. And then once we know it’s there, do we manage it? Do we think about it? That kind of thing. So, emotional intelligence is using it as data.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I think some people might be just sort of brush aside emotional intelligence like, “Well, yeah, of course, you know, I’m going to be respectful and not a jerk and try to listen to people and understand where they’re coming from.” So, am I doing it? Am I doing the things to be emotionally intelligent there, Vanessa? Or is there more to it?

Vanessa Druskat
Oh, a good one. Well, it’s not about just being nice. It is about fulfilling the goals in the moment. And, of course, I like to think of those goals as being humanistic in intent. So, for example, sometimes you have employees that just don’t listen to you unless you get harsh. You recognize their emotions, that they’re not affected by your feedback, and you got to get tougher with them. And so, you can read that in them and you modulate your emotion and get it tougher.

Let me give you an example. I tend to be very empathetic. And so, I have a lot of students, you know I’m a university professor, I have a lot of students who come and argue with me about their grades. One time, I had a student come and say, “I’m going to lose my scholarship if you don’t change my grades.” And in the back of my head, I was being very empathetic and thinking, “Oh, no, there goes her scholarship.” But I had to be fair. And she had many opportunities during the year to come talk to me, and I had said that to her.

So, anyway, point being that I had to manage my empathy in that case and think about the whole, all the other students whose grades I wasn’t going to change. So, anyway, it’s not just about being nice. It’s about thinking about, “What are your goals?” Fairness is always a goal for me and I override my empathy in order to become fair quite often.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, to your definition there, it’s, like, you’re recognizing your emotional instinct, like, “Oh, shucks, that sounds really tough for this person. I’d hate to put them in a tight spot. Oh, I really don’t want them to suffer.” So, you’re recognizing that empathetic emotion, and then you’re using it as data, it’s like, “So, therefore, I’m going to need to dig deep and kind of present something counter to what is sort of naturally would bubble up inside of me.”

Vanessa Druskat
Exactly. And another great example is nervousness, anxiety. So, I talk to a lot of leaders, especially since I work with MBAs. They’re just starting out in their career and they’re not feeling confident. And I have to coach them to turn their nervousness into excitement. So, if they recognize they’re nervous, it’s easier to work with it and to manage it. People don’t want to be led by a leader who doesn’t sound like they know where they’re going.

It’s a really key skill. We now know that emotional intelligence is the heart of social skills, interpersonal skills. We never used to know how to measure interpersonal skills. Now we do, because interpersonal skills, every interaction involves an exchange of emotion. And, by the way, if we want to merge into why do I study emotion in teams, it’s because teams are hotbeds of emotion.

Think about all the interactions that are going on at any time, “Who’s talking? Who’s not talking? Who’s saying things? How are they saying? How is that affecting me and my ideas?” And so, if you think about teamwork, it’s really a place or a situation in which you want to have an emotionally intelligent environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And you say, “Now we can measure it.” Tell me how is this measured?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there are several different measurements for emotional intelligence. I would say that there are probably four really great ones out there. You can Google it. You can go to the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. The acronym is CREIO, C-R-E-I-O. And we list all of them.

I’m on the exec board of that organization. We list all the assessments that are out there on that website. And you can take a look at critiques of them, pros and cons of all of them, but there are a lot of options now. There are self-assessments. It turns out self-assessments tend not to be so great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to say, if you were going to go there, I was going to challenge you. Because, I mean, I’ve taken some of these, like, “Yes, I strongly agree,” or, “I very frequently take into account the other emotions of the people on my team,” or, “Yes, I respect norms in my team.”

And so, it’s like, well, we’ve had Tasha Eurich on the show a couple of times talking about self-awareness and how people tend to be not as self-aware as they think that they are. And so, yeah, the self-assessment, I think, has some value, but also has plenty of potential to be wildly off for many folks. So, how is it done in practice then beyond the self-assessment?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there are some scales that, first of all, ask others about how you come across, “Are you empathetic?” and various permutations of what that looks like. And then there are some that ask sort of deep questions, like, “What would you do in this circumstance?” And you have to make selections about how you would manage your emotions or help others manage their emotions or how emotionally aware you’d be. So, there’s a lot of good options out there.

But I got to tell you, you know, there’s also a lot of different ways of measuring IQ. And so, you know, and there’s a lot of disagreements. I’ve been in meetings with a bunch of IQ researchers, and they can’t agree on a definition. And it’s pretty well the same with emotional intelligence. I mean, we do tend to agree on the definition, but there are nuances.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, that’s interesting. And I guess I’m curious in terms of, if anyone is continuing to discount like, “Oh, yes, emotional intelligence, that’s just common sense. Of course, that’s a thing that we should just do as kind humans who are thinking through stuff.” What’s something that’s often overlooked or undervalued or counterintuitive? What’s some stuff that people think they know or understand about this emotional intelligence stuff that, in your experience, you realize, “Hmm, au contraire, many folks are quite mistaken here.”

Vanessa Druskat
All right, two things I’ll say. One is that they think this is a fad. They just think it’s another one of these things. But there has been so much research done on it. We now have meta-analyses, many of them. So basically, that’s studies of hundreds of studies. That train left the station a while ago. This really does predict leader effectiveness. It does predict the performance of your employees.

Let me give you an example for that, and then I’ll come back and say more about what people don’t realize. One of the things that we don’t think a lot about is how much we demonstrate care and respect to the people who work for us. It turns out that something like 50% to 70% of people don’t feel respected by their bosses.

Now, I don’t think any boss goes in assuming that they want to be disrespected. They just don’t know how they come across. And so, that’s the kind of thing that will turn off motivation or will turn off your ability to think clearly. I don’t know whether or not your audience realizes it, but we are emotional beings and our emotion affects our ability to think clearly.

So, when we’re nervous, we simply, our cognition is not as strong as it could be when we’re feeling what we consider homeostatic. A little bit of nervousness is good. It sharpens our focus. But overwhelming nervousness just destroys our ability to think.

And so, if you’re the kind of leader who comes across as disrespectful or skeptical or many different negatives that can be taken, any behavior, any nonverbal behaviors that you send to your workers can be construed in ways that reduce, not only reduce their ability to think and work well, but that turn off their motivation.

So, we’re more motivated when we feel we’re part of the picture, when we’re cared about, when we think we add value, when we know. One of my doctoral students, I write about this in my new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team. One of my doctoral students did a study on which leaders sort of jumped on board to a huge organizational change that she was studying.

And she thought it’s going to be personality, it’s going to be all kinds of things. She was in the organization for a full year while they were going through the change, and so she did a whole bunch of data collection up front and then looked at who jumped on the change, what ended up happening. And the one question that threw out every other piece of data she collected was, “Do I feel respected and valued by my boss?”

And those who did, jumped on the change. They were more amenable to the change. They helped their leaders roll out the change. If you felt like you were replaceable, in the eyes of your boss, you were much more reticent about it. You were more defensive about the change. So, those little behaviors have huge consequences.

And so, coming back to your original question, which is, “What do people not know about emotional intelligence?” I think the people who don’t understand, haven’t bothered to look at it, don’t recognize that humans are emotional beings. There is so much neuroscience out there now. Neuroscientists are saying, “Look, we’ve got so much data. We have to change the way we operate in organizations.”

It’s crazy to go along and operate as usual because so much of the way people behave depends on their emotions, how they feel about being in the environment that they’re in. And so, you can’t just treat people as if they’re objects. You’re going to have motivation problems and you can do it for a while.

It’s kind of like the cheapest way to build a team is to have an enemy, going into battle, “We got an enemy. We got to beat them. Everybody’s going to.” The esprit de corps automatically comes. We’re wired that way. But you can’t do that more than once in a while. The tight deadline will motivate, but you burn people out, and that’s not your everyday motivation.

Everyday motivation comes from emotion. There’s no motivation without emotion. And it can be fear, or it can be a sense of belonging and a sense of social worth and contribution, which is what everybody wants. We get a high. We literally get a dopamine hit in our brains when we feel cared about and part of something, where people include us and value us. And it’s not that hard to create that if you know what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff. Now when you say in the research associated with change management, one question threw out everything, by that language, do you mean this one question was so predictive that all of the others were kind of inconsequential to consider?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes, everybody focuses on personality. Everybody wants to focus on personality. And I got to tell you, personality is not a great predictor of behavior in complex situations. People have said that for decades. We just like it. It sounds so clear. It’s intuitive, you know?

Personality is very easy to study. It’s very easy to blame. There are many other things that are harder to study, emotional intelligence being one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so feeling respected and valued, is the top and, apparently, most people don’t feel this. Could you share, like, what are some of the best practices or worst practices that are common? Because, in a way, it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to respect and value people such that they are feeling respected and valued.

And yet, apparently most managers aren’t getting it done right now. So, what do you see are the top behaviors that you think folks need to start doing because they’ve overlooked it or stop doing, because they don’t realize how damaging it is?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, there’s two things I want to say there. One is I think that leaders need to start working on their emotional intelligence. When I look at what it requires to send those messages of respect and value, it often requires managing your own emotions, managing the point that you don’t feel respected.

So, what happens is that there’s a cascading effect that goes on in organizations. And we’ve long known that a lot of managers, a lot of leaders are kind of stuck in the middle, where they’re not getting the love, if you will, just call it love, from people above them. And yet they have to turn around and pass it on below. So that’s not easy.

And so, it really has to start at the top. But if it doesn’t, you don’t have to pass that kind of negativity down. And, in fact, when you do, your team won’t work as well as it could. And that really requires recognition, understanding, understanding self-awareness or yourself. So, for example, back to this idea of me being empathetic. I really fundamentally think it’s one of my biggest skills.

Well, I periodically do these EI assessments just because I use them so often. I want to know how I’m coming across. There was one point at which my colleagues all rated me about as low as you can get in empathy. And I thought, “What’s going on there?” And the reason was that I was so busy, I was running past them in the hallways. I was cutting off conversations. I wasn’t being my best self. And I had it in me. I just wasn’t demonstrating it. And I didn’t realize.

So, again, sometimes you don’t know how you come across. Leaders are often the last ones to know how they come across. And so those assessments can be really useful. But moving the conversation towards what my area of expertise is and what I wrote the book about, which is, “How do you build this into a team?”

Because what we don’t do well is teach leaders how to build good teams. And teams, what matters in teams is how team members interact with one another. Teamwork is not about how the leader interacts with each individual or each individual’s interpersonal skills that they never get to use in the team. Teamwork is about how we help our team members to interact with one another.

And because teams are really interactions, and as I mentioned earlier, they’re hotbeds of emotion because there are so many interactions, and so what you want to have in a team, what you want to build in a team, are expectations, routines, norms that helps team members interact effectively with one another.

So, just simply, do your team members listen to one another? Okay, probably not. The average team members, they don’t. They’re thinking about what they’re going to say. They’re not thinking about what the other person says because they’re trying to impress. They’re trying to compete. So that’s a norm. A norm is that when you make comments, you’re trying to impress others. You’re not really trying to add on to what others are saying.

And so, what you need to do is change the norms, change the routines, build an environment where the expectations that people have for one another are about listening, caring, building on one another’s ideas. And when you don’t do that, you get called out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, how does one build that environment?

Vanessa Druskat
Yeah. Well, the first thing you got to do is you got to take a look at the norms that define how people interact in your team. So, every team has norms. And so, what are norms? Norms are, they’re our perceptions of how we’re supposed to act in this environment. So, every time we go into a new environment, we analyze what’s going on, we look at the people with status, and we figure out how things work around here.

And so, every environment, every team, differs a little bit. And so, what I’ve tried to figure out is, “What’s in the environment of those teams that are doing really well, that are surpassing their goals and performing at the top?”

And I tried to define those norms. Well, I haven’t tried. That’s what I’ve done. My colleagues and I have done that. And we’ve come up with this model of specific norms that build that environment. And so, I can lay out what those norms are for you. But the idea here is that you change expectations about how you’re supposed to behave.

And we usually don’t think about the norms, but behavior is not random. We always look to others. And so, what you want to have is not a team where everybody listens to the boss and everyone listens to the people they think are the smartest or the ones with the most social power in the room. But you want to have a team where everyone contributes and you’re not wasting talent in the room.

Because we know, we know, and we’ve known this for decades, that the more participation you have, the better your team’s performance. We’ve also known that you don’t have to have stars. You don’t have to have geniuses in your team. And, in fact, if you have a team of geniuses and stars and top performers, they won’t perform as well as a mediocre group that has norms that use the talent in the room.

Because, think about it, the stars are often each trying to show who’s smarter. And again, back to what I said earlier, they’re not building on one another’s ideas. They’re not listening. They’re not integrating. And that’s where teamwork really happens. That’s where we solve the complex problems. Every worthwhile innovation in the history of humankind has been developed by a team of people working together well.

People like to think that it’s Steve Jobs who developed the iPhone. No. Maybe you’ve heard the stories, but he didn’t want the iPhone. His team had to convince him. He used to take the iPhone and throw it against the wall when everybody, or the phones that people would give him. He always relied on his teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s hear a few of these norms that make all the difference.

Vanessa Druskat
Sure. So, we have collapsed them into three different categories or buckets. The first one is about what we talked about earlier. And that’s really a focus on the individual and about getting to know people, building a sense of belonging and respect in the team, and building enough belonging that you can give one another feedback and people will take it. So, if people feel cared about, they’ll take feedback.

So, that’s the first cluster. And we consider that as just your launching pad. Because we’ve always known, and again we’ve known this for decades, that if you don’t take care of the individual, the individual is not engaged, and that’s especially true in a team. If you’re just doing your individual work, it’s fine. But if you’re supposed to share your information with others and build on their ideas, then you really need to feel part of that whole. So that’s the first cluster.

The second cluster, we call it, “How we learn and advance together.” And there are four norms in this cluster that get the team meeting together and talking about what’s working well, what needs to be changed, what’s coming down the pike, what are some things that the team needs to be looking out for. So, basically, being more proactive about changes and also being hopeful.

So, we talk about that as being allowing in the pessimism and also allowing in the optimism. Not toxic optimism, but really thinking about, “What are we doing we’re doing well? We want to keep doing that.” And, anyway, allowing all voices, you create a shared mental model for how we’re moving forward. There are no dumb questions. Everyone’s voice is included.

By the way, this is, again, what we see in the top performing team. So, I’m not making this up. These are all norms that we see over and over again. They get in the room together and anything goes and they’re pretty efficient with it. If you do this as a routine, if you do these things routinely, you’re not wasting a lot of time.

The third cluster of norms, there’s only two in that cluster, those are about reaching outside to your stakeholders. So, again, the highest performing teams have a sense of humility about their level of knowledge or what they know. And they recognize that there are people outside that can help them think more proactively, think about what’s coming down the pike, and also just think more innovatively.

And so, they reach out to stakeholders, they’ll invite their boss’s boss into a Zoom meeting or whatever, or Teams meeting, just for a 10-minute Q&A about, “How’s our work? How’s it affecting you? What’s keeping you up at night so we can link into that and know what’s coming down? What do you think we need to know right now?”

You bring that in, it changes that conversation that happens in the middle bucket. So, anyway, they reach out and bring people in, experts, and things like that. So those are the three buckets. Care for your individuals, make sure you’re aligned and you’re constantly assessing and anticipating what’s coming down. And everyone is involved.

And I want to say, I mentioned earlier the sense of respect and belonging that’s in that first bucket, but if you’re not included in these conversations about the future, you know you don’t really belong. It’s a fleeting kind of thing. And so, you really want to bring everybody into that. And then, finally, reaching out.

So, anyway, those are the three buckets of norms. We’ve taken them out on the road. We’ve helped leaders build them and improve their team performance, better decisions, more market share in their area, and things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could we zoom in on two specific norms and maybe let’s pick some norms that are extra transformative and extra easy to pull off and yet somewhat uncommon?

Vanessa Druskat
Sure. All right, I’m going to pick two, one in the first cluster it seems nobody ever wants to make time for, and then one in the second cluster, which is about aligning and learning together. The first cluster, the number one norm in the model is what we call “Understand team members,” understand your team members.

And so, this norm is about getting to know one another, “Who are you? What do you care about? How do you analyze problems? What are your skills? What are your weaknesses?” Personality surveys can help with that, but that’s just one of many things. What you need to do is you need to know how to pass information to one another.

You need to know how to speak to one another, “What does that person care about? What keeps them up at night? What are they excited about? What’s their busy season?” Let me give you a couple examples. I had a team that I worked with where one member, a team member said to the others, “You know, I don’t answer the phone.” And they were like, “What? Who doesn’t answer their phone?”

This is, by the way, a multicultural team, and so they were in many different locations, very high level, and it was a leadership team. And everybody in the team thought that the person was just a jerk. We stereotype people. And for one reason or another, the person just, who was an introvert and didn’t like talking on the phone.

So, anyway, we started peeling the layer of who that person was, and it enabled people to interact with him more fully. And guess what? He started sharing more information with them. And information is gold in a lot of organizations. And when everyone, we started peeling those onions of who we are, what we know, and what’s on your mind right now, I can say, “Well, Pete, if that’s on your mind, I got some ideas for you. That’s what’s worked in my division. This may work in your division.”

And so, when you peel the onion of who people are, it does a few things. A, you can’t belong if you don’t feel known and understood. And, B, it brings you more into the conversation. And, by the way, I mentioned Steve Jobs a while ago. He had a coach that coached his teams. And one of the number one thing that coach did was get people in the room talking about what he called trip reports, “What happened to you over the last week? Where were you? What did you notice? What did you see?”

And his motive was to help one another understand what was on this person’s mind, and to learn more about one another so that they could work together more effectively and they could feel more connected. So, anyway, that’s a norm. Nobody wants to waste the time to get to know one another, but I got to tell you, I’ve never seen a high-performing team where members don’t know one another.

Especially when the teams are remote or hybrid or dispersed in any way, there’s a psychological distance that people feel. And a lot of team members feel like they’re the only one who isn’t known, or, “Everybody else knows one another, just not me.” And that’s a recipe for disaster. So, anyway, let me stop there. That’s one norm. Do you want to ask any more about that, or I’ll move to the second one?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I want to know then, when it comes to understanding team members, what are some of the behaviors, practices, the things teams do regularly that facilitates that?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. Great question. The most obvious one that a lot of teams do and that really does work is something called check-ins at start of meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
We were just talking about check-ins at great depth with Bree Groff, and about how great they are.

Vanessa Druskat
Oh, cool. I’m glad. Bree, I know Bree. I’m glad that she talked about check-ins. Maybe a difference between what I would say, because I know her emphasis is on enjoying the workplace. What I would say is the questions need to be good ones. A lot of the teams that I work with, people don’t want to talk about their personal lives. But they will talk about, “What’s on your mind? What are you excited about? What are you nervous about right now? What are the biggest challenges you’re having?”

You have to cap these check-ins with 30 seconds each or something. But you can get a sense of what’s going on in a person’s life and how you can work together. You don’t feel so alone when you find out others in your team are having challenges like you. It’s a brilliant way of building a more supportive environment in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in practice then, that might just be asking that question, “What are you excited about? What are you worried about?” And just going around each person at the beginning of a meeting or something like that?

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. And as I mentioned in the book, I wouldn’t start with that if it’s the first time you’re doing it. I might start with an easier question, you know, “What was the best job you’ve ever had? Where did you work before this?” you know, little things. And then I would get deeper. But you know what I advise leaders to do is to pass those questions off to team members.

So, put somebody in charge for a month in the check-in questions. And help them realize that they need to start light, but you can get deeper as you go. The other thing is to find out whether or not anyone in the team wants to talk about their personal lives. There’s a lot of teams where people just don’t want to, they just want to have a clear demarcation between, you know, what’s going on with their kids or their partner and what goes on in the workplace. So, anyway, that’s that.

Another, one of my favorite ones, let me just say this, because this can be even, take you even to deeper levels of understanding, something I like to call a gallery walk. And this is where whoever’s in charge of the questions gives everyone a flipchart paper, if you’re meeting face to face. I’ll tell you how to do it if you’re not in a minute. And then you answer a bunch of questions.

So, “What does this team need to know about you?” or, “What do you like most? What do you like least about this team? What do think we need to change? What’s working well? What do you think is working well?” Or, “What was the best team experience you ever had? What were the ingredients in it that you want to replicate in this team?” you know, little things like that that can teach you.

You can also do it with pictures. So, I’ve had team members bring in pictures of their old rugby team or pictures of them skiing with their, of course I lean towards sports because I love sports, but skiing with their family and the camaraderie they felt on that holiday. But, anyway, and you put it up on the wall and people walk around and read one another’s and they can comment on it, and it’s over with pretty quickly.

You can do that virtually by just having everyone bring in a PowerPoint slide and you get 30 seconds to read off your PowerPoint slide, your answers. And it’s a powerful way of getting a lot of information pretty quickly. I am constantly trying to get to the point where I know you well enough to give you feedback. And I care about you. I’m no longer stereotyping you. Because I really believe that giving one another feedback is important in teams. I’ve seen it work so well.

If you can build that level of respect and knowledge of one another, there’s different ways to give feedback. Some people want to hear it, boom, like that. They need to or they won’t listen to it. Some people want it very gentle. And so, caring about how you give the feedback allows the feedback to get heard. And I think, again, this individual cluster of norms, we call it how we help one another succeed.

Okay. So, the second norm is one that we call proactive problem solving, and team members love this. And leaders don’t often involve their teams in thinking about, you know, “What are we missing? What are the opportunities we’re missing? And what’s getting in the way of our success?” One of the things I use, which many of your audience members will probably know a lot about, is a SWOT analysis.

So many team members are anxious about what’s being missed. I mean, as a team member myself, there are so many things I know that I never have the opportunity to share because we just never have those conversations. No one said to me, “What are the threats that you see, Vanessa? And let’s talk about it and let’s prioritize those threats. Yes, what you care about Vanessa is important, but it feeds into something that’s even more important right now.”

And that aligns me. That helps me feel in control. We all have a need. This is one of our fundamental core needs. Belonging, by the way, is the most fundamental core need we have. Social neuroscientists will tell you that, psychologists who study it have long known that. We’ve evolved to need to not be rejected, but to be included, which is what belonging is.

But we need to feel a sense of control as well. That’s another core need. And you help me feel more in control when I’m able to have those conversations in the team. So that’s the other norm that’s often, those are two really key norms.

And then just a third one that I would focus on. You didn’t ask for a third, but would be this norm that we call “Understand Team Context,” which is about understanding what’s going on in the broader organization that we need to know about, or in the client’s world that we need to know about. It helps you be more proactive, and it helps you be more successful as a team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, earlier, you also talked about listening and how we’re not doing it right. And if that’s the case, we’re called out on it. Can you share, how can we tell if poor listening is happening and how do we call out as best practice?

Vanessa Druskat
Great question. Well, it’s the norm, and it becomes the norm in the team. So, are we building on one another’s ideas? Are we writing down? What I love to do when I lead a team discussion, I write down everyone’s ideas. And I’ll come back to, “What do we think about what Pete said, what Vanessa said?” And I just make sure that everybody’s ideas are heard and entertained.

We know about listening with nonverbals. So, for example, I talked to a colleague recently who served in a team where the team leader would take notes on what people were saying on her computer. And whenever my colleague started talking, she’d stop taking notes, those ideas. So where does your brain go with that?

We have a hyper, hyper, hyper – I can’t underline this enough – sensitivity to whether we’re being heard and valued. This is linked to our core need to belong. Back in the day if you were ever kicked out of the tribe, you were dead.

And so, we have evolved to have an emotional brain that is really sensitive to reading the nonverbals of others and knowing whether our ideas and things are valued or not. And so, we look, we look around, and we notice, “Are people checking their email while I’m talking? Are they looking at me?” Eye contact. Now, we’ve got a lot of focus on neurodivergence these days around how people, whether or not they want to receive eye contact.

But, in general, the research basically says that when you make eye contact with me, it tells me that I’m accepted by you. It’s really powerful, even more powerful when it’s online. When you’re meeting electronically, when a person feels like the leader’s looking them in the eye when they’re talking, they feel a greater sense of acceptance and belonging and validation.

And so, it’s more than the eye contact, it’s the attention. Attention is a gift. So let me just make this practical for you. I had a team of very masculine engineers who were, their team wasn’t doing well and their boss couldn’t let go.

But, anyway, they decided, in order to enact this norm of what we call caring behavior, which is demonstrating respect. We said to them, “How do you demonstrate respect?” And someone said, “Well, you nod your head while someone’s talking.” And so, anyway, they decided that they were going to nod their head and look people in the eye while they were talking.

The consequence was huge. People started sharing more information that they had not been sharing. They started giving more ideas, helping one another more. It’s a motivator. When people are listening to you, now you got to start cutting people off a little bit more, but the participation is more full. And one of the biggest, biggest costs of not having a good team environment is not having people share their best knowledge and information with one another, not supporting and building on one another’s ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Now we had a guest, and he said it just so clearly and simply, it’s that, people see stuff that’s dumb all the time. And if you don’t have an indication that you have any interest in hearing about it, you just won’t hear about it. And so, the dumb stuff will continue. And that is rampant in organizations everywhere.

Vanessa Druskat
Yes. Yes, absolutely. And so that’s why that middle bucket of norms matters so much, which is talking about what’s working and not working. And it’s why the first bucket matters, because the first bucket checks the box on belonging. Typically, we try to belong by conforming. We don’t want conformity. We don’t want people just saying, “Yeah, yeah, that’s how we do it. We do dumb things here.”

We want people to able to raise the truth in that middle bucket, right? People always ask me about the teams I’ve observed, and I got to tell you, the difference between the way the outstanding teams perform and the way your average team performs is stark.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the way the performance difference is stark, and then just the way they conduct themselves in terms of a meeting is stark. Like, one might be shaking, nodding their heads and saying, “Mm-hmm,” and the others are just, like, dead in the eyes.

Vanessa Druskat
Yes, they’re thinking about the next, or they’re competing with one another, which, the higher you get in the hierarchy, the more you get into these. Because who goes higher in the hierarchy? Highly competitive people, which is great. You don’t want to squish that competition. I mean, that can be useful in a lot of cases, but there are times when you don’t want it. There are times when you want collaboration, and that’s how the organization gets ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share your favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Vanessa Druskat
So, there’s a guy, Robert Sapolsky, who’s at Stanford. He’s a neuroscientist and a sociobiologist and does all kinds of things. He’s a MacArthur Genius Grant person.

And someone asked him, “Well, are human beings altruistic or are we selfish by nature?” And he said, “We are neither. It’s all about context. In some contexts, we’re selfish. In some contexts, we’re altruistic and pro-social.” And so, his quote was, “Context, context, context.” And I love that quote because it reminds people that building a team is about building a context. That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Vanessa Druskat
A favorite study is a great study that looks at how good human beings are, how good we are at talking without really saying anything. So, when we’re in a team meeting, how we know just the right amount to say and how to say it to make it look like we are really in and to really not really be sharing our best information, our best ideas. We’ve learned that throughout our lives. And if you’re not careful, that’s what your team members do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Vanessa Druskat
I think everyone should read Matthew Lieberman’s book Social.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job.

Vanessa Druskat
The Stakeholder Analysis Worksheet. So, this is basically a worksheet some colleagues of mine developed that, basically, where you list your stakeholders, who’s got information and ideas that could help you perform better as a team.

And so, you list all of them and you list how well do you know them. And then you list who’s going to be the ambassador to that person, and go out and connect with them and find out what they know and bring it back to the team. I just love that tool. It’s so clear, it’s so easy to do, and it has huge impact.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Vanessa Druskat
Question asking, and follow up questions. So, I just feel like we, in conversations in teams or elsewhere, we talk too much about ourselves and we don’t ask people enough questions and dig. People are fascinating. We can learn so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share or a Vanessa-original quotation that people mention over and over again?

Vanessa Druskat
Well, the biggest one would be that you don’t build high-performing teams by hiring stars. That you build them by shaping social norms that bring out the best in everyone and that use the talent in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Vanessa Druskat
I’d point them to my website first, so VanessaDruskat.com. I’ve got resources and information on there. And then I’d also point them to my LinkedIn account. I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn these days. And it’s just, again, Vanessa Druskat. You can find me there quite easily.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Vanessa Druskat
Assess your team norms. Find out if they’re working well. Find out what’s working and what’s not working. You can change them quite easily. And it’s not hard. It’s easier to change team norms than it is to change people. A lot of bad behavior is the result of bad team norms.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Vanessa, thank you.

Vanessa Druskat
Thank you, Pete. It’s been really a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate you having me on and your excellent questions.