Team Emotional Intelligence: The Secret to High-Performing Teams

Squiggly Careers

AmazingIf

Business, Management, Careers

4.9 • 838 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on the Squiggly Careers podcast, Sarah and Helen borrow brilliance from Vanessa Urch Druskat’s research on team emotional intelligence, first featured in Harvard Business Review. While emotional intelligence is often talked about at an individual level, this episode explores what happens when you apply it to teams — and how emotional awareness can build motivation, trust, and high performance together. Sarah shares how she used AI (Claude) to turn Druskat’s research into a practical team emotional intelligence quiz, helping teams assess their habits and find simple ways to improve. Episode 508   🦞 Pre-order Learn Like A Lobster: PRH US - https://bit.ly/3KxTeBn Amazon UK - https://amzn.to/3KcRZaR ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 01:35 What is team emotional intelligence and why it matters 03:41 Awareness + action: how teams build emotional understanding 06:30 Sarah’s experiment 09:20 The three key dimensions of team emotional intelligence 10:50 Understanding each other better 13:30 Action idea: Challenge & Build feedback ritual 21:40 Action idea: Scenario planning made simple 33:45 Action idea: Mapping and Mattering*to stay connected 38:00 How often should teams check in on their emotional intelligence? 🎯 What You’ll Learn - What team emotional intelligence means and why it drives performance - How to assess and improve your team’s emotional awareness - Practical tools to create more connection, curiosity, and collaboration - How to use AI to help your team learn and reflect together - Ways to turn feedback, reflection, and stakeholder mapping into routinely rituals For questions about Squiggly Careers or to share feedback, please email helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com More ways to learn about Squiggly Careers: 📩 Download our free career tools: https://www.amazingif.com/toolkit/ 🏃‍♀️ Join the Skills x AI Sprint: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNQl9gsac8BXnWe2qoGuHkLKwsygjP_Ma&si=l7kODG3JpopH0Irz 📮 Get Squiggly Careers in Action in your inbox: https://bit.ly/SquigglyCareersInAction 📚 Read our books: The Squiggly Career and You Coach You: https://www.amazingif.com/books/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast. And before you listen to today's episode, I just
0:05.0	want to let you know about some news that Sarah and I are very excited about. And that is that our new book,
0:09.8	Learn Like a Lobster, is ready to pre-order now. We really care about everybody learning and growing
0:16.2	at work, but we know it is not easy to do. And so we're borrowing some brilliance from lobsters to help you to do it.
0:22.9	The book takes three inspiring and surprising abilities of lobsters in terms of how they grow
0:29.0	and applies it to how we can learn at work. So if you want some inspiration and you need some
0:34.0	practical insights to support your learning, growth and development. This is the book for you.
0:38.9	And if you pre-order now and send your pre-order to hello at learn like a lobster.com,
0:43.8	you can join the lobster library where we have a community of lobster learners ready for you to learn with,
0:50.1	some live sessions, and this will all happen before the book arrives.
0:55.4	So pre-order the book now,
1:00.7	send it to hello at learn like a lobster.com and get started with your learning straight away.
1:03.0	Now let's get on to today's episode.
1:09.8	Team Emotional Intelligence is when a group of people working together are good at understanding everyone's feelings and using that
1:11.8	understanding to help each other and work better as a team.
1:17.3	You know, we talk about often with our work that this combination of awareness and action,
1:23.0	sort of awareness of the people in the team, how they're feeling, what they're bringing,
1:28.2	and then doing something with that awareness.
1:30.9	With emotion intelligence, it's creating more of the awareness and the action across the team.
1:36.0	Oh, we must do a challenge and build meeting.
1:38.3	The whole point of team emotion intelligence is it has to feel like a routine or a ritual.
1:43.3	How regularly do you think that teams should reassess
	...

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