Kris Safarova  01:22

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And today we have with us Vanessa Druskat, who is a multi-award-winning researcher and teacher in the Peter Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Vanessa, welcome.

Vanessa Druskat  02:08

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Kris Safarova  02:12

So let’s dive right into it, since we have just limited time together, and we are going to talk about emotionally intelligent teams. Very important topic for all of our listeners. Let’s start with what do you think it takes for people to feel safe enough to challenge assumptions that everyone else accepts?

Vanessa Druskat  02:30

Yeah, that’s a brilliant question, and that’s really at the heart of building an emotionally intelligent team. So my research has has been on the context that you create, the environment that you create in a team. And what I find, and what I found in 30 years of research, is that the most important thing to build into that context text is a sense of belonging. So let me define what that means. There’s a lot of false assumptions about what belonging means, but belonging is it’s our number one social and emotional need, and it drives a lot of behavior in teams. It basically means that you are, you feel genuinely accepted, known and valued, and so when that, when you can tick that off, when people feel that way, they feel safe enough to be courageous in the team. You see belonging. You know, we’re wired to want belonging. We don’t necessarily realize we need it, but we realize when we don’t have it. So what I’ve found with teams is that you can’t ask your team members if they want belonging you have because they don’t know they do. It’s an innate, involuntary need. Lots of research has been done on belonging, and it’s belonging, the sense of belonging, that enables you to feel safe enough to not just speak up, but to disagree and to fully engage without feeling like you have to protect yourself.

Kris Safarova  04:10

How common is it for people within large corporations in the United States to feel a sense of belonging?

Vanessa Druskat  04:17

Well, I can tell you in the highest performing teams I’ve studied, it’s extremely common. So my research has always been about focusing on the very best teams in an organization and the average teams. And so I’ve gone across industries for 30 years, and I go into organizations. For example, I went into Johnson and Johnson drug development teams. We got the very best drug development teams. We got the average ones in the very best teams, they feel a sense of belonging. It’s what allows them. And there’s much more to to this, but it’s the initial it’s the most important thing. So. Allows you to feel safe. Safety, it not only allows you to feel safe, so let me say this psychological safety is critically important. It allows you to speak up, but it doesn’t motivate you. Belonging motivates you because you feel part of something. You feel like you’re in. You feel like what you what you what you contribute, is valued. And so anyway, I see it all the time in top performing. I only see it occasionally in average. So how common is it? I would say not that common. But it’s not so hard to build. That’s my message.

Kris Safarova  05:37

So let’s talk about how to build it, sure.

Vanessa Druskat  05:41

So most teams, most people stepping back, we don’t really teach leaders how to build teams. We teach them how to build individual skills, and we teach our leaders how to build individual skills. So we somehow think that people can build emotional intelligence or build social skills and create their own sense of belonging or control their their need for for feeling valued, or, you know, act mature, but that it doesn’t work that way. It’s what belonging comes from. The way people in the team interact. Teams are about interactions. So the way my leader treats me matters, but it also matters how everyone else in the team treats me. And so that’s why environment matters, because, because the biggest influence on people’s behavior in groups is not their individual skills, it’s the norms, it’s the routines, it’s the way we do it around here. So my research has been about going from team to team to team to team, observing, studying, videotaping with permission, surveying the culture in each of these teams, doing the same task, you know, with good leaders. But in some environments, the leaders have been able to create this interaction among the team members that creates a sense of belonging. And so that, again, it’s about the the environment, and I can tell you more details about exactly what they do, what I’ve learned from these great teams, if you’re interested, or whatever else you’re interested in.

Kris Safarova  07:30

Yes, of course. Let’s dive into it.

Vanessa Druskat  07:33

Okay, so first thing about being about belonging is, well, let me, let me say this, there’s three categories of norms that make a team emotionally intelligent and belonging is in the first category, mostly in the first category. The first category of norms is about our relationship. It’s about getting to know one another. So one of the most powerful and simplest norms in the model, the teambi model, is getting to know one another. So again, remember, belonging is about feeling known. The first step in that is feeling known. If you don’t know what I bring to the team, if you don’t know me, what I care about, you know how to treat me because of my sensitivities, etc, then it’s hard for me to feel a sense of being part of this team. So the first step is getting to know one another, and so what I it’s always what I begin building. When I coach teams, I don’t even ask them if they feel like they’re part of the team, but when I do, it’s surprising. If you’ve got status, you always feel like you belong. I mean, status inoculates you from the need, or if you’re been been around for a while, you’re fine. But if you don’t have everyone belong, you don’t hear not everyone has the courage to jump in and add and I gotta tell you, what matters most in teams is that you hear from everyone. The group is smarter than the individual, so you really got to hear that. So the first thing we got to do is get to know one another and the skills one another brings. And there’s a bunch of activities you can do for that. You can do check ins in the beginning, you can do, you know what I’ve I, when I work with teams, the teams decide how they want to do this. Sometimes they decide they’re going to do lunch dates. They surveys of, you know, personality instruments are perfect. And most leaders that I know like to do personality instruments with the teams. There’s a ton that are out there. They’re all good. They all check a little bit of the box, but it’s just one piece of it. You got to keep people change. Their priorities change. There was a coach that’s been called the trillion dollar coach because he coached the CEO teams of apple and all of the all the main, you know, Google and Microsoft. And he what he did. He started. Every meeting with what he called trip reports, which is kind of like a check in. And so everybody in the team would go around and talk about where they’d been, what they’d learned. And so what happens is, when you hear from everyone, you start to see how they view the world. You start to see what they care about. You learn more about them. You start to see their skills. And this is fundamental to belonging. It’s also fundamental to be able, being able to tap into those skills. Two more norms matter for belonging. One of them is something that we call caring, and this is basic respect. So how you communicate respect? Non verbals are everything about respect. Do you, do you look people in the eye? Or, you know, do you pick up your phone? One of my, one of the things I see all the time and in organizations, is pick people, pick up their phone. When certain people, certain people talk, that’s that’s a major indicator. We look at those non verbals to decide whether or not we’re respected. And respect is huge. Means everything. When we feel respected, we actually get a dopamine hit in our brain that motivates us to give more when we feel disrespected, which happens a lot. It’s a whole other story. We lose motivation. We become self protective, which makes us less courageous. The final norm is about giving feedback to one another. So you know what I like to say is, can you imagine being a member of a sports team or band where team members would see something about a member and not give them the feedback? So what we found in the best teams is they figure out a way to give one another the feedback they need that can make them the best they can possibly be. So in fact, you know, I like to consider this whole first set of norms. You know, how we help one another succeed, how we treat one another. So it’s not just about belonging. Belonging comes along with that.

Kris Safarova  11:58

When you do that, what are some of the most effective ways for people to get to know one another?

Vanessa Druskat  12:02

Listening, talking and listening, and so asking questions, asking open ended questions. It’s it’s the way you build trust. There’s no way around it. Everybody knows how much trust matters, and the the fuel that trust creates, everything slows down when you don’t have trust, when you don’t have belonging, things slow down. The big fallacy is that that you can, you know, you can do the work without taking the time to get to know one another. I’m telling you, every outstanding team I’ve ever worked with takes the time to get to know one another. It’s critical. And by the way, when you’re known, we research basically shows that you feel, you experience more trust. You’ve become more authentic, you know, become more open. So when people ask one another questions. Now, teams vary. Some teams I work with. Only want to talk about the work so that in that case, I would say so. Kris, what are your former jobs been? You know, where are you most you know, where have you been most happy? You know, what kind of work, what’s your background? You know, where’d you do? Where’d you go to school? And what keeps you up at night with your current job? What are you most excited about? And so you ask these questions of one another, and it fills in the blanks, and you don’t judge one another anymore, and you get to feel like you can be more more authentic. And so this ticks the box for ticks the box for belonging. It begins to build trust, and it is the only way. It’s the only way, and it speeds you up in the long run.

Kris Safarova  13:42

And a lot of it has to come from leadership.

Vanessa Druskat  13:46

Yes, yes, it does. And so let’s talk about where norms come from. Norms come from people with status. So when you first, when you maybe you can, maybe your listeners know this first time you enter a new group, you’re looking around. You know who, who’s got the status, who knows how to behave here? Because every group behaves differently, and it’s typically the leader, and anyone who’s been around for a while, anyone who it’s an informal leader, and they get to define the norms. They don’t realize. They don’t recognize it, but you see, they automatically feel belonging. This is why, when you’re an adolescent in high school, you want to have status. I mean, we in high schools where this begins. By the way, we have hormones that kick in in high school so that you start to scan, how do I make sure I belong and don’t get rejected? And you those hormones get you to look for stats. And of course, you want status, and you do crazy things to get status. And most, one of the most interesting studies I’ve read recently is about how different it is in the United States, and you can imagine in all different cultures how different things are to gain status when you’re. Adolescent. And in some Buddhist communities, you gain status by being more compassionate and empathetic. And so you, everybody’s trying to be more compassionate, because that’s the norm, right? That becomes the norm in in us high schools, you, you tend to be risk takers, and sometimes people bully or treat people meanly, right? It’s a risk taking thing, and it’s and and you always want to be you don’t want to be the one who’s rejected from that. And by the way, fascinating study on the importance of norms was done by Elizabeth Pollock at Princeton, who unders has done a lot of research on how it’s it’s norms that change behavior in teams. So she went into high schools, and she took out the the people with high status, the popular kids, and she worked with them on messages that would reduce bullying. She put them back into the schools, and it significantly reduced the bullying in 30 middle schools and high schools. So it’s the norms that are controlled by the leaders, by the informal leaders. Guess what? Doesn’t work, building empathy skills, trying to build everyone’s empathy doesn’t work. Empathy is useless if you go into a system and empathy isn’t valued in the system. It’s not a norm. Hey, if you’re in a Buddhist community, it’s absolutely the norm people. But so this is and so this is another one of the problems in organizations, as we keep trying to build these individual skills, even individual emotional intelligence. Sure, build empathy, hire people with empathy, but when you put them into an environment that where the the people with status are not displaying empathy, that’s not the norm. The norm is rushing through, you know, not getting to know one another, then you don’t, you don’t, you don’t use that skill. It’s the skill has to be in the way we do things around here. Anyway, let me stop you know, obviously I can talk forever. I’m a professor. I get paid to talk.

Kris Safarova  17:15

I really appreciate how passionate you are about this topic.

Vanessa Druskat  17:19

Thanks. I am. I am. My life’s work.

Kris Safarova  17:23

When trust erodes quietly over time, and you see a situation where people feel it is a toxic environment, what can be done to actually change that?

Vanessa Druskat  17:35

What does it take? Well, I can tell you what I do, and I can tell you that, you know, I told, as I mentioned earlier, that there are three buckets of norms that we find that we we call emotionally intelligent norms, because they build this emotionally intelligent environment. And one of them is about the middle bucket is about constantly assessing the team and adapting based on what you learn, so that the team gets stronger and identifies problems before they they get too big. So anyway, I what I do when I coach a team is the first thing I do is I go in and I measure the norms. I find out what’s happening. How are people feeling? Are they feeling heard? And when you see the toxicity in the in the results of the of the survey, you can see it’s there, and then you talk about it, you say, Okay, how are we going to change this? Because you can change your norms. I mean, one of the superpowers of human beings, and this is what neuroscientists tell us, unlike animals that inherit, animals inherit instincts for behavior, humans inherit the ability to adapt. So that’s why we norms. We inherit. We do social learning. We follow social norms from the moment we pop out of the womb, we’re looking to our family to figure out how things work. And this is enable humans to be very malleable and adaptable. And so back to back to teams in your organization, the norms are malleable and adaptable. It’s not always easy to change them, but if you want to, you can. And this is, this is what coaching does. So you go in, you look at what the current norms are, and they’re toxic norms people aren’t I mean, I remember talking to one, one colleague of mine, who the norm during team meetings was that everybody was typing on their computers because they were basically bragging that they didn’t have time to be in this meeting. And they had they were very busy and they weren’t listening to one another. I mean, that’s you have to change those norms. And the beauty of our model is that we basically tell you what to do to change the norm. So we assess the norms, and we say, What would create a what would improve your environment, more respect, more listening. And then we. Get them to build routines where they’re constantly checking in. How are things now? You know, what do we need to do? And some of those norms include being proactive. So thinking about the future, what? How do we want to be in the future? Being very proactive. What’s coming down the pike? How do we need to set ourselves up? Team members love that norm so that, anyway, there’s a bunch of norms in that middle bucket that help the team assess how it’s doing now and make a plan for how it wants to behave in the future. It’s easy. It’s easy once you decide you want to do it, and then, of course, it’s typical change, so you’re going to get resistance. But if you I work with teams all the time that change their norms and change everything.

Kris Safarova  20:45

Have you ever been in situations where you worked within an organization where it’s really toxic and able to turn it around? What were some defining moments when you felt a kid? The shift is happening now?

Vanessa Druskat  21:00

Yes. So I can tell you about one team I worked with that was really toxic, and they were, they were kind of a middle management leadership team, and they they were doing poorly, and they weren’t working together well as a team. And so there, the division was doing very poorly, and their team leader actually got let go because of the problems. So new leader came in, and the team was arguing constantly, very masculine, mean, mean group. You know, we observed them, and then when we went into work, they were just mean to each other. So anyway, the leader brought us in and said, You got to help me, because I it’s been my my, I have to turn this team around. And so we went in, and in the first five minutes, my colleague and I were there to work with them, they started screaming at us. I mean, they were screaming at each other. And so it was like, they were like, Why do you think you can help us? They were clearly very tense. And it was such an interesting thing. So what we did was we stopped and we started an activity where they got to know one another. So we did this activity where we had them complete answer these questions and hang the answers on the wall. And there were questions about things like, you know, again, what’s keeping you up at night? What are you excited about? You know, what? You know, how long have you worked here? You know? What do you care about most in this company or this team? What’s your ideal vision for this team? And they put these all up on the wall, and they walked around, and it was fascinating how the tension started to reduce, all right? And um, what I remember one person said on their their on their form, they said, By the way, I don’t I don’t talk on the phone. I only do texting or emails. And another member said, Oh my gosh, I wonder why you weren’t answering the phone. I’ve been calling you and calling you. And so there were these things that they learned about one another. And so we stopped everything. We started there, and that got them listening to one another. Then we we had measured their norms. We shared with them the the what their norms were, and it showed them how toxic they were. You know, people didn’t feel listened to. People didn’t feel like they wanted to participate, you know, because nobody was listening to them. They didn’t feel like they ever assessed how well they were doing. And they, you know, they anyway, and they weren’t using resources outside the team. So, so we sat and we worked with them for day and a half, and one of the things they decided to change was how they talked to one another. They changed a bunch of things. They decided that they were going to be more proactive. They were going to meet more often in the first next six months, to make more plans so that they could stay ahead of their competition. I mean, there was so much knowledge in the room that wasn’t being used since they weren’t talking, they weren’t sharing ideas. They were working in silos. Okay? So they they figured that all out, but the number one thing that I remember them changing, which changed everything, was that they decided they were going to lean forward, look one another in the eye, and every time someone was talking and they were going to nod their head. And then this was the respect norm, the caring and respect. And oh my gosh, everybody started talking and sharing ideas and it and that was just the seed that helped them build new ideas, get more innovative, and within six months, they were doing far better. They were no longer toxic. But by the way, here’s a critical thing. The leader had to let one person go. There was one member of the team who just was far too angry and couldn’t get with the program. And so early in that process, the leader had to let that person go. It was a very sad thing, but once in a while, you know, I like. To say that you don’t, you don’t need you know, it’s usually not about the individuals, but if the individuals don’t, won’t change the way the team wants them to change. Sometimes you have to let them go.

Kris Safarova  25:10

Can you give us one more example? Because I think what you shared right now was incredibly helpful for people to see how they can implement things in their teams.

Vanessa Druskat  25:19

Sure, you bet I had a team of of leaders. There were a couple of levels down from the CEO of the company, and they just weren’t on the same page. Again, they were working in silos, and they couldn’t agree. There were some that wanted to be more relational. And some were very high tech, very you know, and they just thought, this is a waste of time. I don’t want to do this. They’re completely on. People would show up late to meetings. People were rude to one another, again, slightly in their non verbals, you know, in this team, they were, they were, this was an international team, so every member was from a different country in the world, but and so we got in there, and we first just, we showed them the team AI model, and we said, here’s the here. These are the norms that we’ve seen the most outstanding teams constantly, constantly, constantly engage in which of these do you think you want to use? And so they started talking about the norms, and they, um, they had to have a lot of debates. Are they gonna get to know one another, or is that a waste of time? And but we’d set up some ground rules where they had to really listen, and so we helped facilitate those debates and etc, etc. And finally, they came up with a list of norms that they would use, and there were some people who didn’t get their way, but everybody got hurt. They also talked about why they realized that they were sending out different messages to their teams, and their conflict was dribbling down to the teams below them that they led, and the teams below them were having conflict and they realized they in this conversation. You know, when we talked about, you know, one of the things we say was, Well, why do you want to change? Because if you’re going to change your norms, you got to have a reason, right? I mean, in the last team I talked about, it was obvious they had a toxic team, and the performance was down. In this one, it was really more about, you know, the leader brought us in because the leader said, this just something’s wrong. This is not these were all outstanding team performers in individual roles. Why aren’t they getting along? That’s what the leader had said. So anyway, they realized that the organization below them was getting different messages because of their different siloed ways of you. So they decided to create norms where they get together and they start every meeting with you know, this is our goal, this is what we’re aiming at. And so they changed their norms, and they loved it. They if people who didn’t have voice, all of a sudden have voice. Now, you got to remember, the people with status always have voice. It’s the people. And so there were a couple of members of that team who were in really good with the leader who so the people without status started having more voice. Then we measured their norms, you know, six months later, and we saw what it looked like. And so then they they just started blooming. Everything started getting better and they kept they it turned out their leader ended up leaving, and another leader came in and they said to their leader, look, we’re happy you’re here, but we need to have these TV I know they’re holding us together, and they’re keeping us, you know, out of our silos, and sending messages down below us. And everyone’s doing better since we’ve been doing this. And so really, just put people on the same page. And again, you got to remember in the middle, the middle bucket of norms is all about constantly assessing, how are we doing? What do we need to tweak? What norms do we need to change? Do we know each other well enough this team gave each other a ton of feedback, they agreed that as part of that first bucket, and people got promoted out of the team because of the feedback, and so there was a lot of good luck, and we continued working with them for years. And was good thing. I know that’s that’s helpful. I can give you more stories.

Kris Safarova  29:16

But I would love to ask you, what does it take to have status in a typical organization in the United States.

Vanessa Druskat  29:24

Oh, that’s a good one. It’s not my, really, my, my topic of um research. But um, people always rise up for status. There’s always, there’s no such thing as as, you know, having equal status in the team, you have to recognize that first, we tend to we like to have people to have status, because we’re kind of wired to want to know who to look to in an emergency. So one of the first things the team does is size up. You know, things go wrong. Who are we going to look to? And it’s usually somebody who’s really an expert on the topic. Like, or someone who’s been there for a while, or they’ve got the role, you know, you can have, you know, what we call referent power, which is you’re just, you’re just, like, a magnetic personality, or you can have what we call legitimate power, which means you’ve got the role, or you’ve been doing it for a while, but if you’re not, if you don’t, if it’s a false thing like so sometimes, what I find is that when teams first get together, they’ll look to the extroverts, the people who talk a lot, who seem to know what they’re doing, and they’ll have status early on, but teams will eventually find the people who they really do feel they can look up to. And it happens in every team, you know, one of my early career I studied what we call self managing teams. So these are teams without technically a leader. And so, you know, in these kinds of teams, what you do is you rotate the leader, or, you know, what have you. They all had a different way of, you know, because you always have to have somebody who’s managing, managing the schedule, or making sure things are on, on time and stuff like that. But and status, it was so clear who had status. Just because it’s a self managing team doesn’t mean you get rid of status. And one of the big things I found in self managing teams was if the people who had status would develop good, productive norms, right? So they cared about the people and they cared about the the task, the norm that self managing team would be high performing, or if the people with the status were wanted to just play around and didn’t care so much, didn’t then that’s what would happen, and the team wouldn’t be as high performing. So status always exist. You can’t get rid of it, and it’s usually some attraction of some form of power, either, you know, relational or or knowledge or role.

Kris Safarova  32:04

Let’s talk about remote teams. How can teams maintain a sense of connection and collaboration when working remotely or in hybrid models?

Vanessa Druskat  32:15

Yes, yes. You do it because you have to. You have to do it more intentionally so. And in fact, I’ve been working with remote teams for 15 years. You know, a lot of global teams have been remote. And so I think my colleagues and I had the first, soon as zoom came out, we were able to move from Skype to zoom. We had, like, the first, you know, count of zoom you could have, because we used it for teams, for team building sessions and things. So everything has to be more intentional. There’s this thing that I like to call psychological distance in remote teams. So everyone thinks that they’re the one who’s not, who doesn’t belong, or they’re the one is not heard and and in fact, the further you are away. So, so you’re, you know, you’re, you know, in Europe right now, I’m in the US. But if one of us was in China, okay, then you and I would feel closer than, than the person who’s in China, just because, by virtue of this distance, we’re closer. And so you you there’s cycle. There’s a whole psychology around this kind of stuff that’s been shown in research. So what you have to do is you have to do this stuff really intentionally. And so you have to, like I always recommend, to build the belonging. You know, so many of these activities, like the activity I talked about putting things on the wall, getting to know one another. You can do that with slides. You know, I always have the teams come up with information about one another and share it with everyone. I do a lot of stuff with pictures. So share a picture of what you did over the holidays. You know, you know what. And you have to do more conscious check ins, and you have to do you have to it be put it this way, it becomes more important than ever to to create clear, emotionally intelligent norms. And you know, so I’ve talked about two of the buckets of the norms. One is about creating that belonging, helping one another feel valued and be valued and succeed. Second one is about assessing and adapting and being proactive and positive about your norms. The third one is about knowing what you don’t know and reaching out and getting information, because no team has everything they know. And so these great teams that we’ve studied go out and get information. And so again, when you’re a remote team, you need to know. You need to come together and find out what you do know and what you don’t know. You. And all this, this happened, and you got to be willing to bring people into your virtual meetings, and everything has to just be all the more intentional. So during the during the pandemic, for example, the teams that we were working with that already had some of these norms in place. Boom. They were ready. They came in. You know, they had though, how are we going to change our norms now that we’re working remotely? You know what? They and they started talking. They knew it was important to get to know one another. They knew it was important to right away what’s happening in your situation. They didn’t consider that a waste of time. They did it right off the bat so that they didn’t waste the time. And then they were in. They were into it, right? Um, and, and then, you know, I just, I don’t know, maybe you have a follow up question for that. I can say more if you want.

Kris Safarova  35:46

If you had to pick just one habit that you would want a remote team to have to build stronger relationships, sense of belonging, trust over time, especially, what would that be?

Vanessa Druskat  36:00

I’ve said it over and over and over already. It’s this getting to know one another. And I got to tell you, every time I bring it up to a team, they think it’s a waste of time. I’ve had leaders say to me, these are not children, these are adults. They don’t need this. Every time you start to do it in a team, they say, Come on, we don’t have time for this. We know each other well enough already. It’s like we don’t know we need it to build trust. But what happens is, you waste talent, and if people don’t feel known, they don’t contribute. It’s it’s hard. I cannot emphasize the importance of it enough, and yet it’s often it’s too simple to really matter. That would be because I just know safety is rooted in this psychological safety is rooted in in feeling known, and all of that stems from getting to know people. We judge people less, we listen better once we know them. There’s so many team dynamics that come out of that that are valuable for outcomes. And by the way, I just want to emphasize that my whole life I’ve studied team effectiveness, team performance. That’s always the outcome I’ve looked at, you know, when I went into Johnson and Johnson and was studying those drug development teams, they didn’t care about anything, but which were the teams that were getting their drugs to market faster and, you know, so when we came up with these kind of emotionally intelligent values and norms that matter, they they were, you know, they, you know, it’s like you, you start to realize that collaboration, collaboration is where you, where you, Your performance lies without the full collaboration of the team. You don’t get that high performance out of a team. And collaboration is a human endeavor, and it’s not about the team leaders relationship with the individuals. It’s about the relationships among the team members. It’s, it’s, and that’s something that most leaders don’t fully understand. Every interaction generates emotion. We know that from emotional intelligence research and every every interaction generates emotion. And so you have got to attend to the emotional needs of the members, and they want to be known, they want to be respected, they want to be valued. It all begins with getting to know who the people are.

Kris Safarova  38:29

What are the most overlooked ways seems accidentally erode trust, even when intentions are good?

Vanessa Druskat  38:35

The biggest one is when we do something that’s called scapegoating members. Maybe you’ve heard that term. People have heard that term, it comes from. I think I’ve heard various stories about where it comes from. But one story is that it came from Greek Greece, where in small villages, they would put all the everything bad on on a one goat, and then they they kill the goat and eat it. And there goes the all our bad things. Well, what happens in teams is very similar things. If we’ve got problems, we tend to blame it. We tend to find somebody to blame it on. And so the number one of the number the two questions I get asked all the time. I can tell you the second one later, if you’re interested, but one of them is, what do I do with this one problem team member we have, and so this person gets blamed for everything, and they hold the negativity. But what? What leaders don’t realize is that as soon as you get rid of that person, somebody else pops up. So remember when I was telling you that somebody, the one member of this one team, got let go, that wasn’t the scapegoat. That was for a reason. That was because that person couldn’t get on with, couldn’t, couldn’t accept that the team was changing. But the scapegoated member is, it is, is common, it’s, it’s like a psychological thing. So. You can’t fix the scapegoat, because what we now know is that once you’re treated badly by others in the team, it’s usually the person who’s not treated like they belong. It’s the disrespected. Once we decide who that person is, we start treating them badly. And all the research shows that in that kind of environment, you lose your ability to control your emotions, and so first you try to ingratiate yourself back in, and it doesn’t work. You can’t you can’t make yourself belong. You have to be invited. The team has to create a dynamic and let you in and value you. You can’t ingratiate yourself into belonging. So what happens in these meta analyzes? Studies of studies show that they lose control and they behave badly, and so they end up creating more attention. And but there, I think there’s something within team members where they realize that if it can happen to them, it can happen to me, and it always. It doesn’t end well in it, it, it’s blaming individuals, rather than looking at the system and saying, How are we contributing to this? I think is very overlooked way of creating toxicity, because that one bad apple will spoil the whole bunch. And nine times out of 10, the team creates that bad apple because they want to put all their their problems into one person who seems who been then behaves badly because they can’t get out of this cycle.

Kris Safarova  41:36

Next, I want to ask you my favorite question, stepping away from this topic. Over the last few years, or even throughout your entire lifetime. What were two, three aha moments, realizations that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Vanessa Druskat  41:54

Good one. Well, I can start with how I got interested in this topic in the first place, which is I was a child. So this is my parents were international educators, so you’ll appreciate this, since you’re obviously a traveler. So we moved from culture to culture when I was a kid, and that was when I started looking at social norms. So I started seeing how norms were different, you know. So my favorite story is about when we lived in Kenya and we had field day at my school when I was five or six, and I was winning all the races. I was very competitive, and I was, you I was so happy. I was waiting, and the principal came over and said, you know, don’t do that. It’s not polite. We don’t celebrate like that here, you know, we don’t make people feel badly when we win. And so, you know, it was whole, totally different than the so anyway, my whole early life was looking at the norms and trying to fit in. So that’s the first thing. My second thing, I would say, is when I was in graduate school and I was in love with teams, because I knew how good they could be, and when I got into the workplace, they were so bad, so I went back to graduate school to learn teams and everything focused on personality. Personality is easy thing to study, or social skills, but mostly personality. So all the research was about personalities that would create a good team, and it just didn’t fit for me. There was nothing about norms and culture. So what I did was I started going out of my graduate school program and started taking all these team training programs out in the real world with, you know, a practitioners and people who facilitated teams. And that’s where I learned about the power of emotion, about how emotion, the emotion on the face of the team members, provides information. Emotion is data. This was before anybody had said anything about emotional intelligence. I had been taught by these practitioners that emotion is data, and I still think that emotion is data. I go into a team. I observe a lot of teams. I’ve observed the culture in 1000s of teams, and I’ll tell you, you walk in there, you observe the way they behave. You observe their emotion, whether they’re listening to one another, there’s so much you can learn from that emotion. And so that’s what started me on this path. And then when emotional intelligence research came out, it sort of changed my life. Third one was I was leading a session once of leaders that were very high level. So these were, like CEOs, top people in law firms and or, you know, one minus CEO, and that must have had 30 people. It was. Class. I’d been invited to teach this class, and these were all high level leaders, and I said to them, Do you teach? Do you tell your leaders the truth, or do you sugarcoat what you tell them? And because I had been trying to tell them, they needed to have a norm where they told each other the truth, and they were shaking their head like and I said, Well, what do you mean? They laughed at me, and they said, We never tell our leaders the truth. We tell our leaders what they want to hear. And it was so depressing for me, because I thought, when you’ve got this much power, everybody fantasizes that when they get up higher in the organization, that they’re going to be able to tell the truth. And so I really, really started, started realizing, you know, the power of of leaders, realizing that they had to change that norm. They had to. And so one of the norms in my model is that you use tools to remind your you remind your members you want to hear the truth. You want to hear it from everyone. And so, for example, one of these tools is an elephant that you put, and I’ve learned this, by the way, from leaders. This is not something I’ve made up. You put an elephant there. If it’s a remote meeting, you put it right in front of your screen. If it’s a meeting, you know, you put it on the desk, and you point to it occasionally. Say, I want to know the elephants in the room. So I don’t know if you’re not familiar with that phrase, but that basically means, what does everybody know? What nobody’s talking about? What does everybody know that they’re not telling me? You know, and so you you have to go out of your way, and you have to constantly remind them that you need to know what they’re not sharing. And and I got to tell you, that’s what I see in the great leaders. Other tools. Let me think there’s a great story about a leader, a guy who came in to turn around a Boston hospital, and he had a helmet that he got, like, bought on Amazon or something work like the kind of construction helmet that you would turn on lights on, and so he and he put it on the on the boardroom table, and he had to come in and change, and he didn’t have to do it quickly. And he needed everyone to be truthful with him, you know. And so he said, Look, I’m going to put this helmet, and if you ever a feel you’re not heard in this meeting, that you’re speaking and no one’s hearing you or or that we’re missing something that we’re not talking about, or that I’m missing something, I want you to go over and put that helmet on your head and flip the light on, because it would, you’d have blinking lights on this on this helmet, because it’s so important we hear everything right? And so the helmet sat there constantly. And so these tools, you know, we, we call this the support expression norm, which means you’re it’s a constant reminder that we want to know what you’re thinking. And so anyway, that was my third big so those three things, culture, emotion tells you what you need to know, and then you gotta, you gotta remind people we are wired to be careful in front of our leaders, we’re wired.

Kris Safarova  48:18

Thank you, Vanessa. And the last very quick question is, if you could instill one belief into every listener’s mind and heart, what would it be?

Vanessa Druskat  48:29

Oh, I love that question. Every person can add value to your team. Every person out there has talent and gifts inside of them, and if you take the time to get to know them, I’m telling you, I had a leader once say to me, one of the best leaders. You know, I always know who I don’t know when I’m interviewing them, but I don’t know whether they’re good leaders or not. But afterwards, when I discovered who the good leaders are. This leader said, you know, my team members are not a plus people. I don’t get the best, but when we get together, we are an A plus team, and that requires really pulling the gifts out, recognizing I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have value to add. Doesn’t matter. You know, where they come from. It’s harder to see that people who are different than you, and so you got to take the time to get to know the people, and again, cross culturally, you know, you have to take the time to get to know their values, who they are and and bring out their talents and what they know. Maybe that’s That’s my wish,

Kris Safarova  49:47

Vanessa. Thank you so much. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

Vanessa Druskat  49:53

Sure, um, you can go to my website, which is vanessadrusket.com. You can go to my LinkedIn account, Vanessa Druskat. You can buy my book. So I’m just got a new book coming out, which is, which is called The Emotionally Intelligent Team, and you can get that anywhere you buy your books. And I had a lot of help, you know, basically, the book is a culmination of my 30 years of research on outstanding teams. And it’s a very hands on book that tells you the kinds of activities you can do to build these norms. And so I hope, I hope that people will learn, finally, learn how to build a team by, you know, going to my website or buying the book.

Kris Safarova  50:43

Vanessa, thank you again, so much for being here. Thank you for being so passionate about your line of work. We need to see it more in the world for people to really find something they feel as passionate as you feel about this topic. I really appreciate you for this, and I really appreciate you for being so open and generous today with us.

Vanessa Druskat  51:01

Thank you, Kris. I appreciate you for inviting me on. It’s been my pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Kris Safarova  51:08

Our guest today again has been Vanessa Druskat. Check out her book. It is called The Emotionally Intelligent Team. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free gift we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get another gift, McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. A great example to take a look at compared to your resume, so you can see what you can improve, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And lastly, you can get a copy of our book that we co-authored with our amazing listeners, our amazing clients, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.