How to Build Emotionally Intelligent Teams: Vanessa Druskat's 9-Norm Framework
Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People
Guy Kawasaki
4.6 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if the secret to high-performing teams isn't hiring the smartest people, but creating the right environment? Vanessa Druskat, organizational psychologist and associate professor at the University of New Hampshire, reveals how emotionally intelligent teams outperform their competition through trust, collaboration, and psychological safety.
Vanessa's research identifies nine specific norms that separate top-performing teams from average ones, clustered into three powerful categories: individual focus, continuous learning, and external awareness.
In this episode, Vanessa shares real-world examples from Johnson & Johnson drug development teams, the Boston Bruins, and even crisis situations involving the FBI and CIA. She explains why stacking a team with emotionally intelligent individuals doesn't guarantee emotionally intelligent behavior, and how team norms—not personality traits—drive performance.
You'll discover practical diagnostic tools to assess your team's emotional intelligence, learn why diverse teams need these skills more than others, and understand how virtual teams can build the same powerful dynamics. Vanessa also tackles the Silicon Valley skepticism around "touchy-feely" team building and reveals how her book "The Emotionally Intelligent Team" offers a roadmap for transformation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you read the emotion in the room, it tells you everything you need to know about a team. |
| 0:05.0 | I learned quite early that emotion is an indicator in teams. |
| 0:09.0 | So later on when EI came out and the focus was on developing emotionally intelligent people, |
| 0:16.0 | just because you stack a team with emotionally intelligent people doesn't mean you get emotionally |
| 0:23.4 | intelligent behavior. |
| 0:25.5 | And the reason for that is that the environment in a team makes a huge difference. |
| 0:35.1 | Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. |
| 0:37.0 | This is the Remarkable People Podcast. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. |
| 0:41.3 | And we found another person in New Hampshire. Her name is Vanessa Druscat. And she's an organizational psychologist, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire. And believe it or not, she co-developed this whole foundational concept of emotionally |
| 0:59.8 | intelligent team. |
| 1:02.5 | And that's what we're going to discuss today about trust and collaboration and performance. |
| 1:07.6 | And I dare say her research has influenced hundreds of thousands of people in teams |
| 1:14.1 | and thousands of organizations so welcome to remarkable people Vanessa thank you guy I'm |
| 1:20.5 | really happy to be here with you I've been on companies that had innovative teams I've had |
| 1:26.9 | companies that had well-performing teams or |
| 1:29.6 | whatever, but nobody ever's guide. That is an emotionally intelligent team you're on. So just as a |
| 1:37.1 | basis, can you tell us what is an emotionally intelligent team? I kind of know what an emotionally intelligent person is. Not that I am one, |
| 1:47.4 | but I don't understand the concept of a team like that. You bet. So to do that, I'm going to have to |
| 1:54.5 | back up a little bit and tell you that when I was in graduate school interested in studying teams, |
| 2:00.2 | I didn't hear anything about |
| 2:01.5 | emotion at all. |
| 2:02.6 | This was pre-emotional intelligence time, 1990s, early 1990s. |
... |
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