First Person Plural: EI & Beyond
First Person Plural: EI & Beyond
How to Build a Team that Works with Vanessa Druskat
Vanessa Druskat advises leaders in some of the world’s top organizations. She's an award-winning researcher and leading expert on team leadership. The Team Emotional Intelligence (Team EI) model came from her 3 decades of field research examining team cultures that inspire high-performing collaboration. She and her colleagues have used the model globally to teach leaders how to build higher-performing teams. Dr. Druskat serves on the faculty of the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics in Durham, New Hampshire, USA.
Her work is now available to a wider audience through her book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest.
First Person Plural is brought to you by The Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Courses, where you can develop your own EI skillset. These tools can help you understand and manage your emotions, build stronger relationships, and be a more effective leader.
PEOPLE AND PLACES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:
Daniel Goleman talks about his Emotional Intelligence Courses, available at danielgolemanemotionalintelligence.com
Hello and welcome to our first new episode of first person plural in a little while. I'm Hanuman Goleman And I'm Dan Goleman, we're going to be offering a sort of mini series within first person plural. These episodes have a slightly different format. You may know about the Daniel Goleman emotional intelligence courses. These courses offer practical development of each ei competency well for the alum of those courses, we've been hosting an event series called ei a force for good that features special guests whose experience, work and wisdom is exceptional, and who we feel can add to our emotional intelligence, journeys and understanding.
Daniel Goleman:These speakers go beyond the theory of emotional intelligence, what they share adds understanding of what ei looks like in various parts of our world, personal, interpersonal, work, home, relationship. There are so many ways that emotional intelligence can enrich our lives, and these conversations bring some of those to light. This podcast mini series gives us the chance to share this wisdom with a larger audience.
Hanuman Goleman:These events are hosted and moderated by our senior course facilitator, Michael Stern. At the end of the events, the guests take questions from the course alum that lead to some really fantastic insights and response so that the answers make sense while not sharing anyone's voice without their permission. I will re-voice these questions myself.
Daniel Goleman:The first podcast from the force for good events is with Vanessa Druskat. She has done truly brilliant research that brings to light what ei looks like at the group level, Team emotional intelligence, Team EI, as she calls it. She's recently published her first book, The
Emotionally Intelligent Team:Building Collaborative Teams that Outperform the Rest. Vanessa's research has informed my books, and I'm thrilled for her work to be getting a larger audience through This book.
Hanuman Goleman:Great! So let's get to the event.
Michael Stern:Thank you all so much for being here today. My name is Michael stern, and I'm here with Vanessa Druskat, which is really wonderful. Hi Vanessa, thank you for being here.
Vanessa Druskat:Hi Michael. It's really, really lovely to be here with all of you.
Michael Stern:Thank you. Thank you for making time to join us. So by way of a very short bio, I'll just read this to introduce you to everybody, if folks aren't familiar with you. So Vanessa, Druskat is a associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire, a social and organizational psychologist. She has spent 30 years researching team collaboration and performance, which led her to pioneer the concept of team emotional intelligence. And I know that you had a team in that effort of
Vanessa Druskat:Yes, thank you for mentioning that. Yeah.
Michael Stern:So just to start us off, Vanessa, what's live for you right now? How are you showing up? What's what's present for you?
Vanessa Druskat:Um, well, excitement about the book. You know, it's what I'm mostly excited about, is, is the recognition people now have that, you know, you can build a collaborative team. There are things you can do. I think a lot of leaders don't realize that there are actions you can take that improve the chances that you will have a team that resonates with one another and that is more collaborative and and fun. And so that's what I keep trying to emphasize. I've been in a lot of podcasts recently and talking to journalists, and, you know, it's been an exciting time for me, and also, at the same time, all of a sudden, I'm like front and center in all these environments. It's very uncomfortable for my introverted self, you know, I've always been an introvert who can behave like an extrovert, but it's a little uncomfortable to be the one out front and center. And you know, you mentioned there was a team I worked with on this, and I really want a shout out for my colleague, Steve Wolff, who I met in graduate school, and the two of us did a lot of the work together. And there were a whole bunch of graduate students and people, primarily at Case Western Reserve University, with me, who really added great value to this to the model and to and to the ideas in the book.
Michael Stern:Yeah, shout out to the grad students who never got their names published. You know,
Vanessa Druskat:indeed
Michael Stern:the light work.
Vanessa Druskat:Indeed, indeed.
Michael Stern:Yeah, cool. So would you be willing to share a short story from your personal life about how you first got connected to this work?
Vanessa Druskat:you bet. So it's going to be one story, but with two branches in it. Little known fact is that my father was a professor at UMass Amherst, and his his field was international education, and he just passed. So forgive me if I talk about him for a moment here, when Kenya became independent from Great Britain, he was one of a team of folks who went over to Kenya to help africanize The curriculum for schools in Kenya. So, you know, they've been using the British system. And so he came in to help, you know, work with people to create a more African curriculum for them. So anyway, that was two years of my life, living in Kenya with him and also my brother and my mom, but also lots of travel throughout my life with my parents and being in different cultures, constantly with them and seeing them adapting to different cultural norms. So, for example, I distinctly remember my father talking with Kenyans and spending a long time talking about their families. How's your father? How's your grandfather? You know, conversations that you'd never hear, hear him, him have in the US. Anyway, here's the point. I, from a very young age, understood that cultures influence behavior, and so when I came to the world of teams, and I was interested in teams, I was wholly dissatisfied with the idea that individuals were responsible, completely responsible, for their behavior in teams, what I saw was cultures affecting behavior. So let me just say, you know, you can be really emotionally intelligent, have a great amount of empathy, and you can enter a team where that none of that is displayed or cared about, and you don't demonstrate those great skills, and so I started from a young age, really understanding that culture mattered a lot in the way people behave. So that is one story. But I also want to add something that's quite poignant to that my parents, when I was a five or six, it took my brother and me to Dachau in Germany, and, you know, at the time, we'd been traveling across cultures and seeing people of different colors and different origins and different religions, and when they told me that it was the religion, differences in religion, that had created, you know, the atrocious behavior at Dachau, I was just flabbergasted. As a child, it just made absolutely no sense to me. And so what I found is I've gone back looking through some of the old things I'd written in high school and college, almost always my writing was about valuing differences among people and allowing that to add to the quality of conversations and such, and building a culture that valued those differences. So I saw it in my parents, but I also that shock to my system at a young age never left me. And so anyway, those that's pretty powerful, powerful statement there. I don't want to drag us down, but that that that really shaped, shapes the way I think about teams today.
Michael Stern:Yeah, culture is it makes me think of that phrase, you know, the water we swim in, like we just don't really realize how much our culture is shaping our behavior until we maybe find ourselves in a different culture that feels maybe like jarring to our system. And I think often when we experience that dissonance there, the the automatic reaction can be one in the direction of protection and othering, and, you know, criticizing and judging and so, yes, we hear you pointing to the need to become more conscious of how culture is impacting us, but then also to make space for how other cultures might hold other values that may be different from ours, but are still important and valid and beautiful in their own way?
Vanessa Druskat:Sure? Yeah. And then on top of that, the human superpower, create your own culture, to create a culture that includes everyone, right? I mean, we can assess, adapt, create the culture that's going to bring out the best in all of us, and I think that's really my wish for leaders, that they recognize that they can create a culture that is both high performing and that values and honors the differences.
Michael Stern:the humanity side.
Vanessa Druskat:Yeah,
Michael Stern:Yeah. So maybe let's dig into that, because I also heard you say that a lot of leaders may not even realize that it's possible, or that there's a method for how to actually, intentionally create high performing cultures. And in the description of the book, there's this quote, building a great team is not as simple as putting a bunch of emotionally intelligent individuals together and expecting great things to happen. It's about developing an emotionally intelligent culture based on intentional collective norms and habits. So it sounds like that is the key to unlock this culture building power. So maybe you can just say a little bit more about what that looks like in your research?
Vanessa Druskat:Sure. So I have to say that there is this norm within the United States that we focus on individuals. We don't look at the system, the group system, and most leaders I meet asked me questions about how to compose a great team. And hey, can we compose them with emotionally intelligent people? And would that make all the difference? And it reduces, it reduces what really happens in teams to just the individuals in the room, what emerges. And what we've always known in social psychology is that you see the individuals in the room, what you don't see are the norms are the habits and the routines that influence their behavior. I mean, we are social beings, and we are wired to look to others to figure out what the norms are here. So right from the get go, it's fascinating, fascinating research now, with social anthropologists looking at soon as we come out of the womb, we are looking to our parents to figure out what works here. How do I need to behave? How am I going to get the attention that I need? And then in high school, our hormones kick in, and we're looking to our friends rather than our parents. Or junior high, probably, well, we forget that we're doing that, and people do that in teams, and this means that the leaders and the informal leaders have a lot of influence over the way groups operate. Let me give you a simple example. The University where I teach. Currently, meetings will start, and no one will even say hello to one another, I'll pass people in the hallway, and I can't tell you how often I'm like, hey, hey, you know, it's just my nature, because I feel like that's matters, and nobody responds. These are my colleagues. Okay? So the norms there are not to acknowledge one another, you know, it's just the way it is, and people don't realize that we have control over that, and that's just the way it is. And so I think leaders and informal leaders a need to recognize that all eyes are on them, and then they also need to realize that let's include others in deciding what is the environment that we want. Let's assess the environment. Let's find out what are the norms? Are they working for us? Are they including all of us? Are they leading to the kind of performance that we want? And how can we tweak them? And keep in mind, teams are not static. They are always waxing and waning, and so that's a constant. Thing that needs to happen is we check in and you know, Hey, Michael, sometimes we're going to have to ignore your ideas, push you to the side, but we want to make sure that that's not happening all the time to you. We want to make sure that we check in and say, is everyone feeling a valued member of this team? And you can do that, and you can make change.
Michael Stern:So would you refresh our memory, the three different clusters of Team norms and how they fit together? And then I would also like to invite you to speak a little bit about the concept of belonging, because I know that that has emerged in your research as a really key part of what creates these emotionally intelligent teams and cultures. And my sense is, I don't know, I'd be curious to hear what it's been for you talking with different leaders and podcasts and everything. But to me, the idea of belonging makes so much sense when you look at it from that perspective that you were sharing about how we are social creatures in such a profound way. You know, like from the moment we're born, it's just a fundamental need and really shapes our mental and emotional and physical well being for our whole life. And yet, I feel like talking about something like belonging in a professional context, in a leadership context, is one of these places where emotional intelligence might start to sound a little squishy. So curious how you're how you're holding that, and how that fits into your work these days.
Vanessa Druskat:Sure, sure. So that's, that's, that's a lot of you asked me a bunch of things, so let me I'll do my best to tie it all together. So you know that in the model, there are three clusters of norms that we found that really make a difference. And for those of you who know the model, you may find it surprising or not so surprising that I've renamed some of those things in the book. So I worked with a lot of people to help me name them things that were more memorable or that fit better for readers. The first cluster, I'm now calling this the cluster that about individuals. I'm now calling it how we help one another succeed. And I did that because I really want to emphasize the importance of the feedback and how critical that is. You know, when you're in a group of people who can help you get better, it's a waste not to get their feedback, and it can be done in a way that adds value to their lives. And it's not necessarily taken as a slight, but it's taken as a value added. So anyway, the first cluster is about addressing the needs of the individual. The second cluster is about this constant adaptation and assessment, where all voices come in to help create a model of how this team wants to work right now, and the priorities and ways and balances two pieces. You know, there's a norm that we call proactive problem solving in that group. There's also a norm that we focus on optimism with we call build optimism. I see those as a balance. I see the team is needing to allow folks who want to criticize in there, and also making sure that you allow folks who create a picture of where you're heading that's positive and hopeful to motivate the change and the work that you're doing. The final cluster is about reaching outside, and this requires some humility. I work with a lot of teams that just feel like they've got everything they need in the team, but this is really about reaching out and learning from people who are outside that can make you better. And there's a lot of research that's coming out on that now, by the way, and about how we go out there, you bring it in and you reflect on it that you can't just get a whole bunch of information in without reflecting on what you're learning and then adapting that to the team. But anyway, now let me get to the belonging piece and how that links to all of this. So we spent about 20 years building the model, and then I spent about 15 years out on the road, testing the model, working with organizations, and seeing what happened when I got out there, and building the norms using the survey that we had developed for the research, using it with teams, the survey basically helps a team look at its culture. It gives you a snapshot of what are the norms now? Are you valuing one another? And what we really like about that, by the way, is the range it provides. So you would, of course, see that the leader and the high status folks felt like they were respected, but you'd see a tail on that with a bunch of people not quite feeling and that's what we would push people to address. You don't want stragglers. A team is a team. And in fact, by the way, when you do research, if there's too much straggling in that, I can't call you a team. Research won't let me call you a team. If there's very different experiences, you're only a team if you're doing things together, right? So that's a technicality, all right. So anyway, what went out onto the world and spent a lot of time building teams? I couldn't believe how well it worked. And I started thinking, why? Because you got to remember that the model was built slightly atheoretically, you know, we went in there and said, Hey, what's going on? Much like the EI model was built, you know, what is it that these great folks are doing that we're not paying attention to? So anyway, I just said, there's a reason why this is working. And I went back to the literature, and I dug deep, and I found this concept of belonging, and the deep literature on it in psychology, and in particular the work of Susan Fiske, who is now at Princeton, used to be at UMass Amherst for a long, long time, and she basically argues and provides a lot of evidence for the idea that, of all the social needs we have that are innate, belonging is the most important. As a fan of The Lord of the Rings, I like to call it, this is the need that rules them all okay? And Susan Fiske basically found and argues that other needs, like our need for control and our need for shared understanding, our need for trust, are all subsets of this greater need. So we like to be in teams where we feel trust, because we know we can maintain our sense of belonging. Control allows us to maintain it allows us to contribute to the team in the ways we want to, so that we can maintain our sense of belonging. So anyway, I started looking at that, and I started thinking about it, and I started writing about it, I started bringing it back to organizations. And lo and behold, I thought it was going to be too, you know, woo, woo, or whatever you want to call it. I can't remember how you refer to it here. You know, it's hard enough to talk about emotional intelligence, as you all know, sometimes organizations take issue with it. Not lately, not so much, but in the early days, it really, really did. But everyone embraced it. And this was before covid. This was before we started talking a lot about dei people embraced it, and I had tons of inquiries about people saying, This is what we need. This is what we need. We need the belonging. People want to feel their part. So let me just define for you what I mean by belonging. And this is kind of I pieced together a couple of different definitions. You are genuinely accepted and you are known and valued and mutually supported. Not only that, though, that you also have a sense of control. So it's not just that good stuff, it's that you have more control and influence within the team and its discussions as well. So this isn't a fleeting sense. It's clear through the actions of the members that you are valued because of the influence that they allow you in the team. And by the way, here's another one. Sorry to keep going on. I know you've got follow up questions, Michael, you can't make yourself belong. And this is some of the most interesting research. Is what happens to people when they don't feel like they belong, and what can they do? And you know what? They can't do anything. You can't make yourself belong. You have to be invited in. And here is the dilemma. This is why it needs to be built into the culture of the team. And when we feel like we don't belong, at first, we'll ingratiate, okay? At first, we'll try to get in that dust. Just doesn't work, okay? Then we start to behave badly. So a lot of bad behavior in teams. We'll disengage. We'll start becoming a little more belligerent. We'll repeat ourselves over and over again. And researchers are flabbergasted at how bad people behave when they aren't respected, when they're not treated like they belong. And their assumption is and they come to this conclusion, especially with these meta analyzes that we lose our ability to control our emotions. When you're rejected, ostracized, treated like you're invisible, you lose your ability to control your emotional regulation ability.
Michael Stern:Thank you for sharing that. I just think it's such a powerful idea, and I really appreciate the different aspects of how you define it, and the implications of what happens when we feel like we don't belong. And yeah, there's just so much rich material in there. So to wrap up, just our chat for now, with belonging, I notice like when I look at the news or look at what's happening politically or just around the world in different ways, you can see how powerful that sense of belonging can be in both what I would describe as positive life affirming ways, but also in harmful and destructive ways. So I'm wondering what you see as what makes the difference, I guess, between moving in this more regenerative collective intelligence direction, or more in this group think conformity us versus them, kind of belonging, and maybe Just in general, what you hope for, something like teeny eye or realizing that we can actually be more conscious about how we build culture together.
Vanessa Druskat:Sure, I do want to talk about the relevance of that third cluster of norms, which is where you're reaching out. Because there is this phenomenon where, when you start getting tighter, you start to think that you're better than other groups, smarter, more capable than other groups, and this is why that third cluster can be so important. You know that humility. So yes, we want everyone to belong, and we want to have a team that's cohesive, but we don't want to have a team that thinks it's got everything it needs and it's better than everyone else. So I'm just going to throw that out there, and that's a very complicated question. I've been in a series of really interesting talks with the Tavistock Institute, by the way, which I'll give a plug to, where we've been looking at you. Intergroup dynamics around these kinds of issues. Group think. Group think is one of the scariest things to have happen in a team, because it happens without you realizing it's happening, and the team EI model addresses it in a number of ways. So let me tell you what group think is. It's where people hold back and sharing their information because they think either someone else would bring that up if it was important, or it's going to ruffle feathers, or it's not my place to bring it up. And what it creates is this illusion of cohesion around a responsive decision way of solving a problem when there isn't really that much agreement in the group. And so in the team AI model, we have a number of ways we try to address this, because it's so important, it happens so easily. And let me just take a tangent on that. We now know that when people are in a group and their idea is different than others, what happens to their brain is they get sent an error message. Their brain, because it's prioritizing its need to belong, doesn't want to be rejected, it will stop you from sharing something that's different. Okay? And so you have to override your instinct, one instinct, one emotional reaction, which is, this isn't that important anyway, right? And so that's why the team has to really encourage contributions. We like to think that the kind of belonging we're talking about checks the box. So you're in, you're valuable. We want all of you. We want your authentic self. We want all of your disagreements. We want all of your crazy ideas that you might think are crazy, but we want to hear them. And I can tell you, Michael, that research shows that teams that allow that end up making better decisions again, even if I don't use the information that you share, it helps all of our thinking. Of course, you got to do that within a bounded period of time, right? You can't let things go wild, but, and you can do that, especially the more often you do it, you become more efficient. So anyway, we have that norm, or we try to build that understanding, etc, so that people can check the box of belonging and they don't feel they have to conform to do that. The second way we try to address it is through another norm that right now we're calling support expression, and this is where we have tools, phrases, things that we recommend you repeat over and over and over again that tell folks we want to hear your perspective. We want to hear your disagreements. One of my favorite examples is a leader of hospital here in Boston, they were engaging in a huge turnaround, and he bought a construction cap on Amazon that had lights that you could turn on. He put it in the middle of the room where his team met, and he said, anytime you need to talk, anytime you think there's something that's not being said, or you're not being heard, or you've got some disagreement that you think is just slightly needs to be said. Put that hat on, put the light on, we're going to hear it. And so anyway, that's just an example of a prop you can use that just reminds people that we don't want you to hold back. We want to hear it, right? So anyway, I think that's that's really, really critical in teams. I think, I think I probably said enough. Let me stop right there and let you follow up or move on. You know.
Michael Stern:Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. Maybe we can just go to some questions from the rest of the folks now for our last 10 or 15 minutes.
Hanuman Goleman:Hanuman here, and I'll paraphrase the first question from an alum. It goes something like this, Vanessa, I've heard and thought of belonging as a choice, and you were saying the group needs to accept you. So I'm curious, when is it a choice, and when is it not, or is it ever a choice? In your opinion?
Vanessa Druskat:Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that great question. I like to think of it in two ways. If I'm talking to someone like you, I would say sometimes you got to put a protection around yourself, and you can make this choice to declare yourself someone who belongs, right? And there's a lot of proponents of that. Brene Brown comes to mind. I don't know if anybody pays attention to her. I do. I really like a lot of what she says. You know, she's all about, let's just go in there and belong folks, you know. And I love that idea. But when I'm talking to team leaders, I want to tell them that it's their responsibility to build a culture that brings everyone in, because it's so much easier. You have to put an armor around yourself. And frankly, I do this in my current job. I put armor. I walk around like I belong, you know, and it's, it's hard. It takes energy, right? I'd rather put my energy into contributing to things that matter more to me and what we're doing, you know, educating people where I teach. But thanks. Thanks for asking.
Michael Stern:That reminded me of Bob Kegan's work on deliberately developmental organizations, and he talks about how most people at their job, they're really doing two jobs. One of their jobs is what they're supposed to be doing, and the other one of their jobs is trying to fit in the performance of how they're supposed to be to belong, right? I don't know if he uses that language, but just the amount of energy that that takes that you were describing, and how much energy would be released for the real work if there was that genuine sense of belonging there. Yeah, it just made me think of that. Yeah. Okay. Poonam, you want to come on. I'll add your spotlight here, and you can unmute.
Punam Telford:Vanessa, I wondered what your view is on this scenario. So sometimes when I'm working through team performance with organizations, we explore what is it that we can do to amplify belonging or increase it, let's say, by 1% and something that comes up quite regularly as well. I can't be friends with everyone you know, and I don't want to be friends with everyone. I say some of the things that we then have to unpack is that, well, friendship and having a friendship is very different to being a team member and belonging. So I wondered if that comes up in the work that you've done, and what your response has been in that scenario.
Vanessa Druskat:Sure. Great question. Thank you. Yeah, it comes up a lot. And one of the good things I can tell folks is that we studied whether or not liking everyone and being friends mattered to the team outcomes. So do we see that more often in high performing teams? That was one of the big questions that we asked. It doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to like everyone in your team. You don't have to want to go out in the evenings or see people outside of work. That doesn't add, that doesn't add. What does matter is that you know the people in your team, and what we find is that when people feel known, when they're asked questions, when they're able to share what's important to them, they feel a greater sense of belonging. They feel like they can continue to be more authentic. So there's some really interesting research that's just now coming out with people asking these kinds of questions. You know, what's the benefit of being known in your team doing a check in at the start of meetings? The benefit is quite huge. It's in the mind of the person who's feeling known all of a sudden, and it's in the minds of the people who now know, you know, I know what you've done in the past. I know what you bring to the table. Now, one of my favorite thoughts here is, you don't see a sports team, you know, let's just say, a group of soccer players. You need to know how to pass the ball to someone. You need to know what's their strongest side, their left side, the right side, you know. I mean, probably in professional both sides are strong. But in general, the more you know about the people you're playing with, the better the team can perform. And it's that kind of information that we find ends up making a huge difference. And one more thing on this, I'm going to say, when you do feel known, you share more information, and that ends up being valuable.
Michael Stern:So we have two more hands up.
Hanuman Goleman:Vanessa, in your book, do you explain how to implement team emotional intelligence?
Vanessa Druskat:First, you got to know why you're implementing it if you're going to make a change. Because, after all, changing norms is a change, as you know, and it can be stressful, and no matter even if you even if you want the change, there's going to be resistance. So what we usually do is we have a session with a team, and it varies in length of time, but where we do an assessment of what their current norms are, and there is a sort of a quick and dirty survey that's in the book, and I use that quite often in workshops and things, and if I only have a short period of time with a team, and we'll look at what people think right now, are you being respected? Is this something we need to work on in this team? Are we evaluating our performance periodically? Are we reaching out? And then I let the team decide, what do you want to work on? It's not the leader that decides it. It's the team deciding together which norms they feel would be most beneficial for their team right now. And we recognize that we can work on some norms now and then, in a few months, we can come in and reassess and work on others later, depending upon where we're at. And then, of course, it's assigning tasks to people to kick off a norm, you have to engage in activities that people want to engage in. So for example, when it comes to defining how we're going to respect or care for one another. One of the norms is called demonstrating care I have. And in the book, I share a list of terms, respect, care, inquiry a bunch, and I list them out, and I have the team say, how do we do this now? How could we do this better? And then come up with some activities and. Some ways that the team is going to do it more often, so that people really do demonstrate respect with one another. There was one team that we worked with where they decided that respect meant you looked one another in the eye and nodded your head up and down. And so they started doing that. It was quite hilarious when they first started doing and it had a huge impact. You know, it was a small act, and they did it for quite a while, and it really people started sharing more information with one another, and they started feeling more connected because of it. So anyway, you have to kick off the norm with some small activity like that, and then you've got to reassess later and see because you do like any change effort, we can slip back, or we can keep moving with this norm and keep it moving along, or let it manifest in other ways.
Hanuman Goleman:Here, an alum asks about a time when she was a leader of a team that seemed to be splitting in two different directions. The question is about the appropriate time to take the reins as a leader. Half of her team was commandeering the group, while the other half was grounded in the original intention. And she asks Vanessa how she would recommend managing that situation.
Vanessa Druskat:I think the way I would manage it, if you're midstream, is I would talk to a few folks, do a survey of some kind, and come back to the team and say, folks have advised me that we need to make a decision on this, and as your leader, I'm going to step in and direct us right now. So this is what I'm going to put forward, and this is where I need your help. You would basically be in that authoritative position, authoritative role, which you need to have sometimes, but make sure that on the fringes of it that you've got people adding things empowered to add more. So it's clear that you're not all sudden becoming an authoritarian leader. And one of the things I like to do with teams that I work with is I like to talk about the ways of making decisions, and I recommend that teams put this on their agenda, which is that there's different ways to make a decision. Sometimes the leader is going to have to make that decision. So it's, I'm consulting with you, you're giving me ideas, and I'm going to make the decision, or we're going to vote on it, so it's kind of a democratic decision. Or we're going to work through consensus, which really is overrated, I think, because it can take a long time to come to consensus, but if that's what you think your team needs, then you can do it. One of the reasons I like that is I like the team to realize, and they know this already, but they need to know that sometimes the leader is going to step in and take over and make the decision so that the group can move on. I mean, that's your job. People want a leader. I like to think of it as a ship captain that knows where they're going and that can step in when things are off course. It makes them feel more secure. And there's times for it. Let's say the very first meeting is a lot of research that shows in the first meeting, when you're meeting with a team and you're new, that you're a little more authoritative than you are later on. So anyway, I hope that's helpful. It's not an easy answer, and I get asked that a lot, a lot of people have tough time knowing when to be authoritative and when to be more empowering and democratic. And it's not an all or nothing thing.
Hanuman Goleman:The alum brings up subversive side conversations within the team that she was not initially aware of and how best to handle the situation where team members were having private conversations that undermined the team she felt her response was more authoritarian than authoritative, particularly when the newest and least experienced team members were creating dissonance through these side chats, she asked about strategies to address such situations more effectively in the future, without killing the group's dynamics.
Vanessa Druskat:Sure, sure, absolutely. And let me say that you won't be the first leader to be sidetracked by side chatter. One of the hardest things is that side chatter, and it's a good reason why you want to get information from people. You want to do assessments periodically. You want to find out what's working, what's not working. I like to call this a plus delta, where you can just at the end of a meeting, periodically, you could send out a survey monkey, what's working well on the team right now, what needs to change. So you're constantly getting feedback, and you're role modeling this desire for feedback, and you can get a sense of the overall pulse, but I got to tell you, you know, you're not going to be liked by everyone all the time, and that's it's easy to say that so hard when you find out. I mean, I'll never forget the first time I found out that the team I was leading were talking about me behind my back, and it's not good, it happens, but you got to know you. There's a point at which you have to trust yourself, and you have to not let it sideway up. I mean, this is where your emotional intelligence comes in, right? I mean, you collect the data, and you move in a direction, and you're willing to shift, but you're taking heat. You know you're the lightning rod when you're the leader.
Michael Stern:Okay? Vanessa, thank you so much for being with us. Any closing remarks or reflections you want to share before we wrap up?
Vanessa Druskat:Um, I just want to thank you all for your great work. I just think you're doing such important work in the world, and I just appreciate you. So let me know how I can be helpful. And I'm in the middle of putting more material on my website, vanessadruskat.com. I'm adding things to it constantly. I'm going to have a bunch of material on there that you can use, and I really want you to take this out. That's my intention. I've got slides, I've got all kinds of things that you can use that. You can take off and use any way you want to continue to make a difference in the world the way you are so thank you
Michael Stern:Amazing. Thank you for that generosity, Vanessa, and also want to honor the many years of research and testing that has gone into this model, and your patience and perseverance and dedication to this, which I think we would all agree, is so crucial and needed so thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you for putting it out there. Congratulations on the book. Thank you for spending time with us today.
Vanessa Druskat:Thanks for inviting me, Michael. I appreciate it.
Michael Stern:Thank you all for being here. May we all continue to be a force for good in the world and have positive ripple effects wherever we go.
Daniel Goleman:And thank you for tuning into this podcast and for bringing EI into your own life.
Hanuman Goleman:If you're interested in developing your ei skill set and joining the alum community, find the courses at Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence.com
