A (3:34)

I'm thinking about what you just said and how I think I've often thought about teams and I think a lot of us think about teams is we want to get the best people together in the teams and by best, like raw talent and then people who have really good interpersonal skills together. And I thought it was really interesting, like thinking about your work. And one of the findings in the research is that the raw talent of team members and the interpersonal skills of individual team members don't predict team performance, do they?

B (4:07)

They don't. And I can tell you why. Because what really matters in teams are the team norms. So coming back to my farming experience, it was a norm. It was just how we did it that we helped one another. It was a norm that we would check in on one another and make sure everyone was okay and that we were ending together, that we're all ending on a high note. That was a norm. You didn't have to have interpersonal skills. You didn't have to be top talent to do that. Now let me say this. In the workplace, let's say we're talking about a team of engineers. You do want really good engineering talent on your team. But what really determines what whether a team is well functioning are the norms, the routines, the habits. So are you listening to one another? Do you know one another well enough to know how to pass information off or to give one another feedback, that kind of thing. So that's what really matters. And by the way, I'm not the only one, I'm not the only researcher to find this. It's just that you don't hear it very often. Everyone focuses on composition and no one focuses on how do you build, build a great team. And that's why I wrote my book.

A (5:27)

And when we think about emotional intelligence and Daniel Goleman's work, who by the way, wrote the forward to your book, that oftentimes we think about it through the lens of an individual. How do I get better at my emotional intelligence? And a lot of us have, have read that over the years we've worked on those skills. And I think what's interesting is while that's important for us individually, like what really matters in teams is interactions, as you say, what is it about interactions that's so significant?

B (6:02)

Well, first of all, let me say this first. I am a huge proponent of emotional intelligence and building emotional intelligence, I think it's really important. But I have just found over the years that hiring emotionally intelligent people is not the way to build a great team because teams are social systems. And what that means is that it's about the way people interact, it's not about the individual skills in the room. So for example, I can be the most empathetic person. I can have strong empathy skills. But if you're not interacting with me in an empathetic way, or if you're not stopping to help me, chances are I'm not going to use my empathy when I interact with you. And so what really matters is the habits and the routines, the norms that you create as a team that help the system move well. And that's true in any kind of system. But in the human system, every interaction has a reaction. But we know that every interaction generates emotion. So if I interact with you in a way that puts you down or that just doesn't listen to you or indicates to you that your point doesn't matter, it generates a kind of emotion in you that's going to impact, that's going to be contagious in the team.

A (7:27)

You talk about the critical nature of the word belonging and you write in the book for leaders who want to build high performing teams, I firmly advise you not to embrace the view that belongingness is an idiosyncratic need that people should satisfy on their own. Tell me more about that. What is the trap we fall into?

B (7:49)

Sure. This is such an important topic for me, so I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. I took a deep dive at some point in my career, I took a very deep dive into the concept of belonging. And there is just such a rich literature on it. Mostly it's been studied at the individual level level. Meaning what is your need to belong? How strong is your need to belong? But if you look at the neuroscience literature and you take a deeper look at more recent information and you look at what social psychologists say and have been saying for decades, you learn that it's actually an innate Involuntary need. So it turns out that it is the biggest need we have when we enter a team environment. So it's basically, you know, I'm a fan of the Lord of the Rings and they talk about the all. Well, belonging is the social need that rules them all. In other words, everything that's underneath it. The need for control, the need for validation, there's the need to know. There's just many different social needs we have. But they all feed into our need to belong, our need to be a valuable known member of the team, of the group. And if you trace it back to, if you pay attention to sort of evolutionary theories, psychologists who study evolution, biologists who study evolution, they all talk about tribal behavior. And if you ever got kicked out of the tribe, if you ever were excluded, what have you, you were dead. So our ancestors, the ones who survived were those who passed on this involuntary need to belong. So we all have it. We do have it at different levels. Some have it more, some have it less. But the data strongly shows that we all have it, although we're not aware of it. We're only aware of it when we don't have it. And so that's part of the dilemma is that we don't need to, we don't need to know to ask for it. So to tell us to try to meet it on our own is not a good idea. Because let me tell you, and this is something that I haven't mentioned yet about teams. Team success is not about the interaction between the leader and the member. It's about the members interactions with one another. It's how they interact together. So that's where the skill comes in. And who tells you whether or not you belong. It's not the leader, it's the other members. So the other members need to treat you like you add value, like you matter. They need to know you.

A (10:42)

Yeah. And you go to great lengths to mention that it is the leader's job to set the tone for that. And sort of paradoxically, I think it's interesting that you also highlight that the higher status members of a team are less likely to see that need because they tend to feel more belongingness. Right. And the person who often is the leader is the person who may need that less than everyone else. So it's sort of this interesting paradox of the leader needs to set the tone because if they don't, no one else will. At the same time, they're the ones that are less likely to see the need for it and miss the opportunity in the first place.

B (11:26)

Absolutely. Great, great point. When you've got status, you have an automatic buy you do belong. And so it's not just the leader who doesn't feel the pang of rejection in teams, quite frequently it's members without status and what ends up happening. Let me just link this. Let me tell you why this matters to performance. People are what we call motivated tacticians in teams, and this is something we've known for a long time around. You look to the left, you look to the right, figure out what everyone else is doing, and you behave that way. And when you don't have status, when you don't belong, you guard yourself. You're more careful, so this equals lower performance on a team. You also don't engage in behavior that is generous. So you hold on to information. You don't share everything. You know, you don't want to tip the apple cart, you don't want to make anyone angry. You're very careful and cautious. And so you look to the left, you look to the right and you share just as much information as everyone else. We're really good at this, by the way. We learn this in school, how to make it look like we're in without really sharing what's true to you or without really sharing the problems you really see, et cetera, et cetera. And so we know that when people are actually feeling like they belong, when they don't have to worry about whether they're going to get rejected, they're much more giving in a team. They engage in what we call pro social behavior, which is that we give the information that we know is important and we're more generous in helping others because we're not guarded.

A (13:20)

We.

B (13:21)

When you don't belong, you guard yourself more.

A (13:25)

Yeah, you know, it's. I think we often see it so clearly on the teams we've been in, when we've seen the leader doing something positive or not so positive in our own experiences. And then we get into a role like that ourselves with our own teams, and oftentimes we don't even think about it. And that's why I'm so glad that you highlight in your research nine norms, like nine things to really be thinking about and that, that the framework and the model really establishes for what is emotional intelligence in teams really look like. And I'd love to zero in on the first one you highlight, which is the norm. Understand team members before we get into some of the, like how to do that and some of the tips. What is it that's so critical about this first norm?

B (14:20)

Well, I'm glad you selected that one for focusing in on because frankly, that is the most important norm in the model. Most people don't believe that. And I didn't believe that to start with. I got to tell you, when we discovered it, we kept seeing it in these outstanding, highest, the highest performing teams and organizations that we studied across industries that the members knew one another. So they knew one another's strengths and weaknesses. They knew how to deliver information to one another, they knew how to treat one another, basically. And I couldn't figure out why. I kept thinking, what is it? Why does it matter so much? Well, I started thinking about sports teams and musical teams and how much it matters that you know the proclivities. You know, how do you, if you're, if you're playing, let's say, soccer, everyone loves soccer these days, how am I going to pass the ball to you? Which direction do I need to lean in? When you're the one passing it to me or when I want to signal you that I'm ready to have the ball pass to me? How do I signal it to you in particular? So those are the kinds of things that build a great team. When I interview average teams, so my question is always, what's the difference between the highest performing teams and the average teams? The average team say, yeah, I know, I know who they are and other people in the team know one another. Well, I just think that I'm not one of the ones that's really in the, in there. In the great teams. They. Well, it varies from team to team. Let me say this. In the more masculine teams, the only thing they really want to know is information about the task. So where have you worked before? What's your favorite part of your job? What's your least favorite part of your job? What are you nervous about right now in your area? What are you excited about right now in your area? What do you need from the team? It's this kind of information. It doesn't necessarily have to be information about your outside life in more feminine teams. And by the way, some of my more feminine teams have been teams of engineers or teams in the banking industry. So it's not so you can't stereotype it necessarily in the more feminine teams, they want to know, hey, what'd you do over the holidays? Do you have a partner? Do you have kids? How was your weekend? These are the kinds of things that you fill in the blanks about the person. And let me tell you, this is what's necessary to build trust. A Sense of safety. You can't trust a person until you know a little bit about them. And here's the other thing that's key. Feeling known, feeling understood is part of belonging. So if you want me to really share my talents and really give my energy to your team, that will more likely happen if I feel known and understood in your team.

A (17:08)

You have some beautiful invitations on how to begin to do this or to begin to do it a little bit more. If you've already started down that path. And one of the invitations is to start meetings with a brief check in. What does a check in sound like?

B (17:28)

Yeah, great, great question. And a lot of people do this already. A lot of people know about its importance. The check in is just where you hear. You try to hear every voice. You can't force everyone to speak. I mean, I like to say you gotta let people be who they are. But you go around and you just hear everyone's voice at the starting of the meeting and you have a question. I typically tell leaders to delegate the question to somebody else in the team. And you can rotate who's in charge of the question, but the question can just be, what's top of mind for you right now? What are you excited about in this team? What are you worried about? Those are my two favorite questions. You'll hear me repeat that over and over again. What are you worried about in the team team right now? Or what are you feeling good about in this team? Or what do you need from us right now? And you just, you hear every voice and it does, it's. It starts to peel the onion and the onion of who these people are. And that happens over time, that the onion gets peeled over time. And so I like to say you don't have to invest a lot of time in this. You just have to do it routinely. So the routine, the habit is that you do it every time you meet. And it's just 20 seconds per person. And you have to be willing to cut people off if they go over. And you gotta keep it short because you don't want to waste too much time, you know, and it's not really time wasted, but people will think it is. And again, I want to tell you that when somebody does that, when I'm in a team, I'm usually like, oh, God, not this again. I'm not necessarily a touchy feely person, but I got to tell you, it works. We know that if you've spoken once in the team, you're much more likely to speak again. And the information you Share again, unveils who you are, huh?

A (19:12)

Fascinating. And one of those thinking about what you said of like, okay, this is quick. It's a quick check in that question you highlighted of like, what are you worried about with this team right now? And someone answers, like, at the start of a meeting that's like, not about that topic. And someone answers that truthfully and says, oh, I'm really worried about something we're doing. How do you keep that from not, like, taking over the entire conversation and all of a sudden derailing whatever the team was going to do? I'm just kind of curious how that plays out tactically.

B (19:40)

You say, thank you. Let's put that over here on. And most of your audience probably knows what a parking lot is, but it used to be a flip chart when we all met face to face. But it's just a log that the leader has to keep, which is that. Thank you for that point. I'm going to write that down. We're going to come back to that. And one of the other norms in the model that I don't think we're going to have time to talk about today, but it's in the model is a model of assessment. You know, what's working, what's not working. And so if you have that norm as well, then you're more likely to hear that constructive stuff or those big complaints, the big complaints in one of those kind of conversations. But if you hear it during this, you log it and you say, thanks for that. You know, it's important information. We'll hang on to that, we'll come back to it later. But at least you know what's on people's minds. You're not blindsided when you hear it later. And as a leader, you're more able to draw attention to some of those issues.

A (20:32)

You encourage us to consider something called gallery walks. What's a gallery walk and what is it that's useful about it?

B (20:40)

Yeah, I love gallery walks. So this is something that's easier to do again when you're face to face. But you can do it online. I've done it plenty of times that way. It's where everyone gets either a piece of flip chart paper or a PowerPoint slide, and they answer questions that you want to pose to them. And we sometimes say you got to answer it with pictures or photos or, you know, you can just answer, answer it in words when you're face to face. Everyone answers these three questions and you put them up on the wall. And again, one of my favorite questions, which I've mentioned a couple times is what do you need from this team right now to perform at your best? Or what does this team need to know about what you need, you know, what your needs or something, and you put that on the flip chart. And if it's a gallery walk, basically it's like an art gallery. You don't have to spend a lot of time on it. Everyone walks through and notices it, and you can comment on it, bring it up later. But people walking around and they can write. If you're, again, face to face, they can write their questions or their comments on your flip chart with a pen. And, you know, you can deal with that later. If you're on a, you know, a zoom call or electronic meeting, then everyone has a PowerPoint slide or some kind of slide and you can show them briefly and then you can just put them in a, on a website or something. People can come back to them and write questions in them. But the idea here is that you don't have to fully discuss this. It's for people to learn about what's on one another's minds.

A (22:08)

So the, however you do it, logistically, it's posing a question and it's giving people the opportunity to write and reflect, share something. And then everyone takes some time to walk through, either virtually or in person, and read it and know. And like you said, it doesn't mean that that's going to be the topic of the conversation. We're going to address everything. But it's a, it's a way of like, I know what's going on with you, even if we don't even have a conversation about it, it's building that norm of understanding.

B (22:41)

Yes, great, great description, Dave. Yes, that's it.

A (22:45)

There's also an invitation to share objects that provide responses to a question. And I saw that and I thought, huh, objects. What is it about objects that is helpful?

B (22:59)

Yeah, this is fascinating. People don't always have words for what they're, what they're feeling. You know, you're coming back to the idea of emotional intelligence. Most of us have not been raised in a world where people asked us often how we feel about things, and we don't often even want to share everything about how we're feeling or what we're thinking.

A (23:18)

Right.

B (23:19)

But if you bring in an object. So, for example, let me give you some examples of objects I've seen people bring in. The question would be something like, what's the ideal team for you? And I've had people bring in trophies from when they were on a rugby team or a football team or a golf team and say, this was a great experience for X reason. And they light up when they're talking about it. And it's interesting too oftentimes when we ask people to bring in objects, at least a third of the people forget to bring them. And so they have to quickly think, and these are some of the best. They'll pull something out of their pocket and they'll say, this is my Swiss army knife that my dad. And what I learned about teams is that everyone's different, but each person has a role that's significant when you need them, you know, so those, those. The people will come up with things and it's. That you wouldn't. It's a little more creative and it's fun. That's what I can say.

A (24:15)

Yeah. And. And it's, I think it interesting how sometimes coming at something from a little bit of a backdoor approach of something that's a little bit disconnected from whatever you're talking about, like sharing a trophy or sharing the Swiss army knife or whatever, like asking people to bring an object. How interesting it is that the sort of the everyday nature of something like that, and then having people thinking about it in the context of a bigger topic, like a team and how to work together, how it makes it. It often so much more accessible just to begin the conversation because you've got a starting point on something that's already very familiar.

B (25:00)

Yes, absolutely. It's a great way to describe it, Dave. And as you can tell, it also peels the onion of who this person is. So if I'm going to bring in my trophy, my golf trophy, if I'm going to bring in my Swift's army knife, I mention my dad or I mention, hey, you don't even know I play golf or how much it matters to me. And so again, it taps into multiple parts of us. And that's. I think people want to feel known. You know, we don't talk about this stuff. Nobody comes up and says, hey, boss, I want to feel known or I want to belong more. Nobody says this stuff because they're not even aware of it themselves. You know, there've been a bunch of researchers studying this. Now. It's kind of like one of the things that we. That I've heard others say, the authors, I can never, never think of their name, the authors of the book Crucial Conversation say that respect is like the air. When you have it, you don't notice it, but when you don't have it, it's all you can think about. So we researchers starting to, researchers are looking at this now and saying, why is it that we don't know about our need for respect, we don't know about our need to belong, our need to be known? You know, why is it that we only know it when we don't, when it's not there? And it seems some of the hypotheses are that when back in the day when we lived in tribes or clans, you know, it was taken for granted that people knew each other, you know, when we lived in these communities. And so you didn't, you didn't know you even needed it. It was just taken for granted. And yet you, you knew how fearful it was, how selfish it made you when it wasn't met. So anyway, that's just, I'm fascinated by that.

A (26:44)

Oh, me too. And especially in the world today, where there's so much change happening, so much is virtual. Sometimes we don't even see people at all, or just very occasionally. And when we, our ancestors were all together in the same community and in the same home and needing to figure this out, sometimes you just sort of figured it out because everyone was there and you just had to deal with it. And it's really easy today to just sort of skip over this and to not think about it because it's not in front of us every moment. And the invitation I keep hearing from you is like, it is the job of the leader to get this in front of people and to be thinking about it. It's not the job of the leader to do the, all the belonging and the relationships, of course, as you said, but it is if the leader doesn't set the tone for this and ask the questions and invite the activity or the conversation, at least one of these things, you know, somewhat regular, early, no one else is going to do it.

B (27:45)

Yes, exactly. The leader holds the norms, the leader manages the agenda. So if you think of norms as routines and habits, the leader has the biggest impact on that. And here's the issue. When we teach leaders how to build teams, we don't teach them about the importance of building relationships among the team members. We don't think about the interactions among. We focus so much on the leaders interactions, the individual interactions and the conflict management among maybe a trio or dyads. But team building really is about creating those conditions that build that support for one another and build that esprit de corps, if you will, amongst the members. And here it doesn't always have to be positive. You know, you want Conflict. You want disagreement, and you're more likely to get a disagreement that's constructive if people already have relationships.

A (28:52)

And I think, like, what you're saying, it doesn't. This also doesn't have to be. I mean, yes, there are hard parts of this, but it doesn't really have to be super hard. It's just the starting point. And I think about one of the other things you mentioned that I've seen some teams do and I think is, like, so effective is creating slides for people of, like, their background, their skills, their roles, like a few slides of that. And you invite teams to do that. And the leader sharing an example of that, too. Like just creating some of that awareness opens up a conversation that shares some of that information and again comes back to that. That importance of understanding. Right? Right.

B (29:29)

Yes, absolutely. There's so many things that the leader can initiate like that that are especially important when you're meeting remotely, when you're a remote or hybrid team. There's something that I see. I've been studying those teams and working with those teams for years. It's something I like to call psychological distance. And so you always feel like you're the one that doesn't know. I mean, you may, or your audience may recall that I mentioned earlier about one of the average teams we studied. One of the people said, yeah, everybody else knows one another, but not. I don't. Well, the assumption is that everyone else knows one another and that you're the only one who doesn't. Then that's what you get when you don't turn it into a routine. So, for example, when you don't have, like you were just saying, have everyone. The leader doesn't have everyone. Fill out a PowerPoint slide with the information about them. Best time to contact me. Here's a picture of me doing what I love. Whatever you put on that. And so anyway, you gotta look out for that psychological distance. You gotta make it a routine. You gotta make it especially explicit that this kind of stuff matters when you're in a remote or hybrid team.

A (30:39)

There's one other practice that I thought was really interesting that I hadn't heard before, and a practice, I think it was from Bill Campbell. You mentioned in the book of opening a meeting with something called a trip report. What does that sound like?

B (30:53)

Yes. So there's a fabulous book that I love by Bill Campbell, who you obviously know his work. The name of the book is the Trillion Dollar Coach. He coached a bunch of the teams for, like, Steve Jobs at Apple. And many of the leaders At Google and Microsoft, a little known fact is that those leaders like Steve Jobs had a team coach. You know, they may have been oddballs and they may have been geniuses, but they were smart enough to have. So anyway, Bill Campbell used to like to start his meetings by everyone talking about where they'd been in the last few weeks. And these leaders had been traveling around. And so by trip report, he's saying, tell us where you've been and what you learned in those places. And the idea here is that by listening to them describe where they'd been, you would peel off the layers of the onion. You'd see what do they notice, what do they pay attention to and you learn from them. And so he just loved that as a way of, of starting meetings. The other thing that Bill Campbell did to help people become known in the team is he would coach people individually. He'd say, you got to get out there and say more in those meetings, get yourself out there more. And this is what helped crush the. We, you know, we always talk about silos, especially the higher you get in the organization, the more silos you have between people. And when you get to know one another, when you start to see what the other person can share and teach you from where they've been and what they know, you start to get rid of the silos and you start to become one team rather than so separate. And again, that's all part of what I like to say is one of the benefits of becoming an emotionally intelligent team.

A (32:39)

And comes back to the important message too, of like the leader starting that, setting the tone for that before or after a conversation or a meeting, like making that encouragement to bring something into a conversation, like, what a, what a great starting point for that. So we've looked at one of the norms. There's nine in the book and in the model. I hope folks will get the book so that especially if you're leading a team, which so many in our audience are, I mean, it's just a, a fabulous framework backed by the research of like, how do you really do this better as a leader? And one of my favorite few pages in the book are pages 46, 47 and 48. It's how to change a team's norms. I think it's worth grabbing the book just to go through that process. If you find yourself leading a team right now that you're thinking the norms aren't quite there, it's not quite where we need to be, this is just a wonderful roadmap to follow and go through that step by step and begin that process. So I hope folks will grab that. Vanessa, one other question for you. You've been, as you mentioned early on, you've been doing this work for many, many years. You've now put it together into a book for all of us. As you have gone through the process of putting this together and the model and looking at the research in recent years, I'm curious, what have you changed your mind on in your work?

B (34:02)

It's a great question. The big thing I've changed my mind on is about whether or not you can change the team norms if you're a member versus being the leader. So I used to talk to audiences. I've been talking to team leaders for ages, doing workshops with team leaders, teaching them how to build teams. And sometimes people would say, yeah, that's one thing, but when I'm on a team, how my leader is never going to do this. So how do I change it from being a member? And I used to say, sorry, you're out of luck. Well, I've changed my mind about that because I've had so many people tell me that, no, you can change the norms when you're a team member and just what it, you know, norms are there. Every team has norms, but most teams don't know what they are. And so if you can get a couple other people, a couple of people with you in the team, you just need a little. It's difficult to do when you're alone, but if you can convince a couple other people to make the recommendation to the leader or to the team that you evaluate how the meeting went or why people aren't, why everyone isn't participating, say, in the meeting, you know, that's a norm. We run our meetings and not everybody has to talk any small norm. Let's take a look, look at why that's happening. Well, how can we change that? Because what I find with norms is that they're not mutually exclusive. If you start changing one norm, like let's say, how do we get more people participating? And you open that up to conversation and you say, what do people need? What could we change in the process, the meeting process, that would encourage everyone to speak up. Once that changes, other things will naturally change. And, and so anyway, I've had people come back to me and say, yeah, we changed the norms, we brought it up to the leader, we brought it up to the team, and things changed. It happens a little bit slower if it's coming from the grassroots, but it can happen that way, which is exciting. For me.

A (36:09)

Vanessa Druskat is the author of the Emotionally Intelligent Building Collaborative Groups that outperform the Rest. Vanessa, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.

B (36:19)

It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. Dave, thank you for having me on.

A (36:29)

I recently put out a listener survey and over a thousand of you responded to it. Thank you so much if you did. I will be following up very soon with more details of the findings from the survey and one of the questions that I asked was what are you struggling with right now as a leader? Here was the number one response to that question. Team Management and Leadership Transitions Leading new teams or changing teams is challenging. It's one of the reasons that we keep talking about team leadership so much on the podcast. We'll have many more episodes coming and we've had many episodes in the past looking at this topic. Three of them that if this conversation was helpful to you today, I think you may want to go back and check out. One of them is episode 537 how to engage Remote Teams. Sidal Neely was my guest on that episode. Sidal's work has been looking for many years, long before we were all thinking about remote teams on how to lead effectively in that environment. And one of the things that she points out in that conversation is oftentimes we don't think about being more intentional of taking the time for people to make casual connections in a remote environment. Episode 537 where to start on that and also many other principles. Also recommended episode 6 team collaboration supports Growth Mindset Mary Murphy was my guest on that episode. We talked about the critical nature of growth mindset and oftentimes how we think about either having a growth mindset or not. But in reality there's a spectrum of that not only for each one of us but also for our teams. We talked about how to support that mindset within our teams. Episode 695 and then I of course would recommend the recent episode with WES ADAMS, Episode 735 how to Help People Connect at Work. Of course a key element starting belonging is making those connections. Wes and I talked in that conversation on some of the real practical and tangible things we can do to actually foster those connections within our teams and organizations. Again, that's episode 735. All of those episodes, of course you can find on the coaching4leaders.com website. There is inside of the free membership, an entire topic area on team leadership. We've had dozens and dozens of episodes of over the years more coming on how to lead teams effectively because it is so critical for our work because it is something that so many of us do struggle with and most of us have never received any formal training on how to lead teams. That's exactly why we're doing so much on it. All of that you can find inside of the free membership. If you haven't set it up already and want to dive in on either that or one of the other topic areas, go over to coaching4leaders.com set up your free membership and you will be off and running with us. Plus you'll get access to the weekly guide, all of the free audio courses, my book and interview notes including Vanessa's and so much more inside the free membership. If you haven't set that up, just go over to coaching4leaders.com and you will be off and running with us. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. I will be back next Monday for our next conference conversation. Have a great week and see you then.