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- [00:00]
A
Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast. And before you listen to today's episode, I just wanted to let you know about some news that Sarah and I are very excited about, and that is that our new book, Learn Like a Lobster, is ready to pre order now. We really care about everybody learning and growing 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. The book takes three inspiring and surprising abilities of lobsters in terms of how they grow and applies it to how we can learn at work. So if you want some inspiration and you need some practical insights to support your learning, growth and development, this is the book for you. And if you pre order now and send your Pre order to helloearnlikealobster.com you can join the Lobster Library where we have a community of lobster learners ready for you to learn with some live sessions. And this will all happen before the book arrives. So pre order the book now, send it to hello@learnlikealobster.com and and get started with your learning straight away. Now let's get onto today's episode.
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B
Team Emotional intelligence is when a group of people working together are good at understanding everyone's feelings and using that understanding to help each other and work better as a team.
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A
You know, we talk about often with our work that this combination of awareness and action, sort of awareness of the people in the team, how they're feeling, what they're bringing, and then doing something with that awareness. With emotional intelligence, it's creating more of the awareness and the action across the team.
- [01:36]
B
Oh, we must do a challenge and build meeting. The whole point of team Emotion intelligence is it has to feel like a routine or a ritual.
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A
How regularly do you think that teams should reassess themselves?
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B
You can't have loads and loads of rituals and routines because people can't keep up and it's overwhelming. And I think there's like, there's a balance to get right here.
- [01:59]
A
Hi, I'm Helen.
- [02:00]
B
And I'm Sarah.
- [02:01]
A
And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where each week we take something that sparked our curiosity and turn it into some ideas for action for your squiggly career. So far we've talked about how maps can be useful for your career.
- [02:15]
B
We did. That was one of our weirder weeks.
- [02:18]
A
We've talked about a Nobel Peace winning scientist, we've talked about Richard Feynman, we've done various different topics and we are trying to make those as Useful as possible for you. And it is Sarah's turn today to spark our curiosity for our squiggly careers. What are we going to be talking about?
- [02:35]
B
So today we're going to be talking about Team Emotional Intelligence. So lots of you might have come across Emotional Intelligence before and I had, I'd look at, I've read Daniel Goldman's work and I think often it's something that is talked about in organizations but I'd not seen the concept applied to teams before. So that sparked my interest. And there's a lady called Vanessa Erk Druskat, I hope I'm pronouncing that broadly right. He's written an article on Harvard Business Review which obviously we'll link to for everybody in the show. Notes. So that was my starting point for borrowing some brilliance. But I did go quite ambitious this week and I have used a lot of AI to help us and I've created a quiz which got very exciting. So what is Team Emotional Intelligence? So it's about the habits, routines and norms that you have as a team and whether those habits are helping you to be a high performing team. And so I started off by asking Claude to explain Team Emotional Intelligence to me in a way an 8 year old would understand and in a single sentence. I'd really recommend that as a prompt. It's a really useful prompt. I actually used it in a workshop the other day, but I, rather than asking AI, I asked my group and they all actually did a really good job. So Claude said Team Emotional Intelligence is when a group of people working together are good at understanding everyone's feelings and using that understanding to help each other and work better as a team.
- [04:07]
A
It's sort of, you know, we talk about often with our work that this combination of awareness and action. And so it's sort of awareness of the people in the team, how they're feeling, what they're bringing and then doing something with that awareness. I think sometimes you get some people that are good at one or the other, you know, like for example, you're like super high awareness. I feel like you're always quite tuned into individuals and you'll often like call me on that and be like, oh Helen, that happened in that meeting and I think you might have missed it. Whereas I'm very like just naturally action orientated. But I guess what we're looking for is this with Emotional intelligence, maybe it's creating more of the awareness and the action across the team.
- [04:46]
B
Yeah, I think that's spot on. And one of, I suppose the payoff or the reason to care is the sort of an individual reason to care and then a collective reason. So from certainly her research, it finds that when you've got emotionally intelligent teams, everyone's just more motivated because that makes sense.
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A
Right?
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B
Because you're all understanding each other and you're also performing better together. So the kind of simple why I think here is the whole being bigger than the sum of the parts. And her point is that the emphasis shifts from individual performers, like individually are we all performing really well? To actually collectively, are we performing really well? So, you know, that's kind of like all of us is bigger than any one of us. That's the sentiment. There is definitely crossover when I. When I've been reading the work and kind of diving in, definitely crossover. Psychological safety.
- [05:40]
A
It's so funny. Your brain is exactly where I've gone, oh, hang on a minute. Because don't we talk about, like, high trust teams equals high performing teams? So how does it work with that one?
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B
Yeah. And so there was quite a lot of similarities. What I particularly liked about this, though, is, so I read the HBR article and I thought, right, what could I do with this? How could I start to make this useful for me if I'm going to borrow some brilliance and I've challenged myself to then use Claude, my current favourite GPT, which people will know if they've done the skill sprint, that. That was my. That's my current favourite, to try and create some sort of analysis for our team. And actually the article really helps you to do that. So the prompts that I used were create a quiz that I could share with my team using these categories. I'll talk about the categories in a moment. Use this for a scoring scale. And actually there's one suggested in the article. So I just used that. I was like, let's be consistent with that. So it's just like a 1 to 5 scale. Make the quiz anonymous. Because I thought, oh, you know, some of the questions, people might just feel more comfortable. It's anonymous. And then give me the ability to view the team results without redoing the quiz each time. Now I will say I had mixed success. So firstly I was like, I've done it, it worked. I didn't do all of these prompts at once, which would have been better. So I think I iterated as I went, you know, like, I built it. And then I was like, oh, no, I've forgotten this part. So then I was like, can you now redo the quiz with this added in? Can you now redo the quiz again with this added in. And so I think I've got about 75% of the way there with this. It definitely works individually. I've been able to do it. You've been able to do it. I haven't quite got the aggregate view working in the way that I would like it to, but I think. I think I'm really close. I was saying it was a really good experiment. Thank you.
- [07:27]
A
Sarah sent me. And Sarah sent me the link. She's like, can you fill this in? So we've got some insight for the podcast. And I went on and I was like, have you created this?
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B
It's like, yes, I have.
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A
We would normally use Typeform for, I think, anonymous surveys, and it's a great platform, but it does take a little bit of knowing it and building it, whereas. And actually, I thought yours looked really good and it worked really well. So definitely want to give a go.
- [07:48]
B
But it's quite a good way of borrowing brilliance.
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A
Right.
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B
You know, when you're sort of taking something and then you're trying to make it your own, you know, the what does it mean for me? Question, it helped me quite quickly to go, what does this mean for me? Because it's team emotional intelligence. What does this mean for us in terms of our team emotional intelligence? So we both did it independently, and the three categories are understanding each other better, routinely assessing strengths and opportunities, and routinely talking to stakeholders. And then as we go into some ideas later, we'll go into the descriptions of each of those a bit more because they are really important, those descriptions. And then there are questions under each of those. But I thought we'd start with comparing our scores. So you get an overall score kind of out of five. Mine was 3.19 out of five, and actually the scores went down for each of them. So I was just over 4 for understanding each other better, 3.3 for the strengths opportunities, and 2 for routinely talking to stakeholders.
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A
I mean, I have questions on the three areas and how they create emotionally intelligent teams, but I'm going to hold it until we go through each one. But I'm just going to put out there that routinely talking to stakeholders would not be one of the things that I would think made you an emotionally intelligent team, But I'm curious to learn a little bit more about why that's in the mix. But our scores on Sarah's survey that she created from reading the article are actually pretty similar. Mine's slightly more positive, which we decided was quite standard. Standard. But it's Basically the same. So I think Sarah got 3.19 out of 5 for how emotionally intelligent she thought our team was, and I got 3.39. And actually for each category we were in, they were in the same order in terms of how we kind of rated them. So, yeah, we're not too. We're not too far away.
- [09:44]
B
So now I think what you can do is go from the what, so what is team emotional intelligence to the so what? So we're like, so what does that mean for us as a team? That's kind of what we've done with that quick analysis to get us started. Then you're into the now what? Now what do we do with that data? Because you've got the sort of current state, but then you've got to think about, well, what do we do with that data? How do we make that data useful? How do we turn those insights into action? So we're going to go through each of those three areas. I'm going to describe it in a bit more detail so you all get a feel for what's under that category. Because I do think some of it is surprising. And I got some of it. I'd made some assumptions about what would be in some categories actually wasn't right. So it's worth understanding those. And then the way that I've turned this into action is I've just used what worked well and even better if so I've kind of gone well what's working well in our team at the moment that's helping us to be an emotionally intelligent team. And if I was coming up with one, even better if what could we try? So that's the structure, so understanding each other better, the one we both gave the highest score to. So this is all about understanding each other's needs. You know, the talents and skills of people in the team, again, linked psychological safety, where you know about people's strengths. There's definitely that sense people feel like they're treated with respect. You give each other feedback that help members learn and grow. So feedback is in there, which I think for some teams would put the scores down. You know, there'll be a specific question around feedback. Hard to get feedback flowing in teams. And so my reflection on this one was, what's working well for us at the moment? I think we're particularly good at strength spotting. You know, we even did a brilliant because exercise at our recent Squiggly staycation. We're doing work on things like job crafting at the moment. So that's about working with people's talents and skills to kind of make sure we're using those. And generally, I think people are very connected in our team. When we talk to people in our team about what matters most about work, they use that word connection a lot. I think we might. We might have shared that before. I didn't use that word, but everybody else does. So everyone else is very kind of connected, very kind of collaborative. Would you have any other observations, Helen, on the what's working?
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A
Well, I think we people individually support each other as well. I think I see that in our team a lot. So we have like this kind of the collective. We come together as a team and it all feels very connected. But actually, I. I'm really proud when I hear about, oh, I went round to somebody's house and we worked on this together, or we met in a coffee shop halfway, and we did this because we have a remote team. I think that's a particular nice way that people are understanding each other and demonstrating it in a remote environment where they're not just kind of sitting next to each other in an office all day.
- [12:24]
B
And I think part of the respect. I was also thinking people do their best to support and respect everybody's priorities. And people are not very judgmental. And everyone's got different things they care about or different ways of working. Because everyone on our team works so differently. I think we do generally have that sense of. Or how one person works is going to be different to somebody else. I think that that means there's just naturally a lot of respect. So the even better if suggestion that I came up with was challenge and build. So challenge and build is a way of giving feedback maybe on some of the things that might be harder to hear or where you really. You want to kind of give feedback to really improve something. And the reason that I chose this is we don't use this idea very often in amazing if, but I have used it lots recently in a workshop. So we shared our pod sheets in a workshop with one of our big learning partners. And I just asked everybody in those workshops and we've done lots of them with thousands and thousands of people. So it's quite a brave thing to do. But actually it ended up being very fun. So I showed a pod sheet and I said, right, we're going to do a challenge and build. What's one word you would use to describe that pod sheet? And what's one change you would make to the pod sheet? And kind of ask those two things. So really simple questions to do a challenge and build. And if I hadn't done that, I think the pod sheet would be exactly the same today as it was two months ago. But by doing that, I really quickly got from those groups, okay, the pod sheet actually does feel overwhelming. There are too many words on there. We're trying to be useful, but actually in our attempts to be useful, we've probably just got a bit overwhelming for people. And then people were suggesting really useful changes, just like, you know, a few more headers, a bit more white space. Can you make it more visual? And some people then started from scratch and came up with completely different ideas. But it was just such a quick way of getting feedback on something that is really easy. We could have just kept doing in the same way. So I think I've already seen that work really well. Funnily enough, it's sort of one of our ideas that then has worked better sort of elsewhere than it has internally for us. And I think sometimes that's because we rely on, you know, like a meeting. Oh, we must do a challenge and build meeting. Whereas I was starting to think about the whole point of team emotional intelligence is it has to feel like a routine or a ritual. So, you know, like, it can't be something you've got to remember.
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A
So I guess when things become language, you know, if I'm in a meeting, that was already in the diary and I said, actually, if you've got five minutes, can we just do a quick challenge and build on this? And so when it becomes less of a task, you have to remember to do and more just language that. So we talk about, I don't know, like borrowed brilliance, for example, has become part of our language. What work? Well, even better if it's become part of our language, mistake moments has become part of our language. And I think when. When some of these activities, just the team identifies with them, I guess that's when it becomes part of what makes the team emotionally intelligent.
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B
Yeah. And I think maybe what would make this easier. So my observation from doing a lot of challenge and build with these groups who don't know us that well, is having a few questions as a frame was a really helpful starting point. So if you just said, let's just challenge and build on this proposal, everyone sort of goes in different directions. Whereas actually, if you are the person sort of instigating the challenge and build, if you do what I did, which is kind of going, right, well, what's one word that would sum it up? What's one change that you would make? What's one thing you would do differently if you come up with those questions, or even if you had a set of questions as a team that, like, challenge and build questions to choose from could be a longer list and just choose some. You could ask AI to come up with some challenge and build questions. I wonder if that helps everyone to get started, because maybe otherwise it just feels, I don't know, a bit too vague, or it could be a bit unwieldy.
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A
So can I just recap for a moment? Because I just want to kind of make sure I'm following it and everyone's like, oh, how could I do what Sarah has done for my team? So. So the first thing is that you can read the article. You don't need to, but there is a broader thing about taking articles and turning it into something that you can relate to by creating, like a survey like you've done. So people could create the survey, but essentially the survey is a way for you to rate your team's emotional intelligence across three areas. And one of ones is the one that we just talked about. So understanding each other better and so you get a starter score. And ideally that should be a team's view. So it's not just my view of how the team's performing, it's the team's view. And then as a team, because again, I'm conscious this is just you and me talking about what went well. Even better, if ideally it's a team conversation, what do we think we do? Well, if that's the definition of understanding each other better, what do we do? Well, which is your point about strengths, for example, and what's at least one thing that we think we could do even better? And so your framing there was challenge and build, but adding that into things that are already happening, rather than it being another meeting.
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B
Yeah, because it has to end up as a ritual or a norm for it to sort of contribute, I think, to team racial intelligence is the way that I've understood it. Yeah. And kind of if it's not, it probably won't. Won't do that. So the next one is assessing strengths and opportunities, which is not quite what you might imagine. It wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be. So I was like, oh, is that about strengths of individuals in the team? That's not what it's about. It's more about your strengths, as in your ways of working. So how effective are you? How efficient are you? Are you always reviewing processes and performance, like, always getting better? Actually, when you read that description, it's about, like, always building better is probably the words that we would use. And it's a mixture of anticipating problems and challenges. So kind of looking ahead, I think quite a lot of critical thinking when you really, like, look at this one. So that's the kind of the anticipating, the being kind of critical, the kind of striving to be better risks, like thinking about the risks that might happen. And then there's. When problems do happen, which they will do, you take quick actions to solve it. So it's more about, like, strengths and opportunity spotting as, like a group around, like, the work that you do and how you work rather than at an individual level. That makes sense.
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A
Your definition makes sense. Yeah, but I get what that title can be. Take you to the wrong place.
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B
You know, like, sometimes it is where you, like, you do actually need the detail or you could go a bit wrong.
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A
Okay, so what did you think we did well?
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B
Well, I thought we were. I think we're really good fast fixers. So as a team, when things do go wrong, everybody is pretty responsive. People want to help, probably because everyone's very supportive. And we do fix to fast. Like, we, in the main, we. I think we resolve things and kind of get into the skin of why it's wrong and what's wrong and what we need to do. And it probably does help us that we have a value as a company of being work in progress. So because you're work in progress, you go, well, we don't want to stay in a steady state. We do want. We experiment. We're good. We're much better now than we used to be at experimenting. And a lot of those experiments are around the effectiveness of what we do. So I thought, oh, the podcast, actually, we've really looked a lot more at the last year of the effectiveness of the podcast. For effectiveness for us would be usefulness. And then we are going like, right, how do we make it more efficient? How do we make it more effective for us, but also for our listeners here, I think the ebi, the even better if is we have a very optimistic team. So when we've done things like profiling and things in the past, you've got lots of people who, you know, glass is always half full and it's all going to be fine. And you're very enthusiastic and you're very like this as well. So we don't have a team where people are naturally about spotting problems. I don't think it's kind of a natural skill set that we've got or natural critical thinkers. So for people who've done things like, you know, the colour profiles before, that's sometimes described as, like, the blueness. Critical thinkers, you spot problems before they even arise. I think I'm the most blue person, like, in our team. It's not even my first one in terms of my kind of.
- [20:35]
A
I was at a museum. I mean, museum's a very grand word for what I went to. I went to the Paradox Museum with the kids. Yeah. And it was really funny. I mean, I. I'll leave my views of the full experience for another day. But as I was going around, there was a lady who was in front of me, who was I, what I would describe as a very blue person. So there was a lot of, like, yellow people who were just excited about playing with all the random things that were in there, like, and. And then there was lady who kept going around and she obviously had some kind of, like, science background and she just kept going. So I was sort of following her around and she's like, well, that's not a paradox. And then she proceeded to explain in a very critical way why that wasn't. And she was. And she wasn't being particularly negative because I actually was like. I was quite intrigued by. I was like, well, I'm. I'm kind of here to learn and I'd quite like to work out why that isn't.
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B
Why is it not a paradox?
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A
But that would have been a bit weird if I was just following her around, listening and learning. But it was that, you know, she was a blue person because she was critically evaluating the experience and. And just identifying where it could have been better and what, you know, what wasn't quite working. But she wasn't being negative.
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B
So I don't think that's what our team would do. I think they would just go around and really enjoy it. Yeah, I think you're right. I'm just here for the experience and kind of. This is great. I would probably do. I'm probably not smart enough to know about all the different paradoxes, but I would definitely. I struggle to not think, how would this be better? Like, I think I do think in that way. And so Helen and I were chatting about this, so we were like, oh, so what would we. What would we then do as a team, like, practically, what could become a routine or a kind of ritual? And we were like, actually, we are quite good at taking a current state and iterating, so, you know, like, what we've done before, like, how do we make it a bit better? So that bit we're okay at. What we probably don't really do is any scenarios. And I think if you do scenario planning or kind of scenario imagining, you think really differently, but you also get to some very different kind of answers. And so then you get into more improving rather than just iterating. And so like we were thinking about like for example, let's say when we do our next sprint, next skill sprint, which we will coming soon, everybody. Not that soon. Soonish. So when we do our next sprint, probably our natural inclination as a team is just go, how do we make that sprint that bit better next time? Like we've done a few now we'll just keep iterating and we do, we do make things that bit better next time. But probably what we don't do is just pause and imagine all of the different scenarios around that sprint and then say, well, what would we do if or how about this happened? What would our kind of response to that be? We probably don't very often talk about worst case scenarios. Scenarios. What if no one signs up to the next sprint because actually something in the world happens that week that means then no one can do it. I mean that's not that unrealistic based on the last five years, you know, like based on some of the things that you're like that that could happen. And then we might have designed something that then no one can use.
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A
What if someone really famous says I'm gonna sprint and suddenly you get double the amount of people like we break.
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B
Our own website or something.
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A
Yeah. Who knows? Who knows?
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B
But I think that's, it's probably not something that we've really experimented with as a team. And again, I just wonder whether as part of when you're already planning something, whether you could a. I think AI can help you with scenarios. So if you, if you're struggling to come up with them, I think you could describe what you're going to do and you could say to a gbt, okay, come up with a best and okay and a worst case scenario based on this. And I think it would give you something as like a springboard to start with. So it might even be about adding it into agendas. Like let's have a discussion around a best, okay and worst case scenario. When we're kind of planning something big. It might also be about, I think, I wonder for our team if I was being really realistic, I wonder if it's. How do you help people who want to be positive to be able to talk about these things in a way where they don't feel bad because it doesn't make me feel bad. But I think if you're naturally very enthusiastic, people don't want to talk about worst case scenarios because everything's going to be fine. Right. And so I was like, oh, how do you. The thing I would have to think about a bit more, I think for our team is how do you make this fun and how do you. Because it still needs to be sort of optimistic in a sort of scenario way. Otherwise I think people won't enjoy it and it won't ever become a ritual or a routine.
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A
Yeah, I don't know if I've cracked that either. But you know, statements like what could break the business?
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B
Or I don't think people in our team would like that.
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A
Seems a bit too.
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B
A bit too. No.
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A
Disaster.
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B
Disaster, yeah. I think people would like you and I could probably do that because I think we probably have done some of those things before. But I think maybe people could. You've got to test it.
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A
Right.
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B
Maybe this is a good example of like sometimes you just got to test.
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A
Somebody'S what could sink the sprint or something like that. Just to get playful, like for the next 10 minutes, let's write down all the things. But I guess the bigger point, and I hadn't thought about this, which is that emotionally intelligent teams are the ones that can both proactively spot problems and they can respond to them promptly. Like, because your point is we're really good at responding to problems promptly because we're quite a highly reactive, supportive team. But the really emotional, intelligent ones spot the problems before they need sorting.
- [26:13]
B
It's because you're good at sensing. Right. It's because you're. I think if you are emotionally intelligent, you sense and you look ahead and you're probably quite good at imagining and because you have a feel for what might go wrong. You know, it's like some of it's like judgment, I think as well, you know, like sensing and judgment. So, yeah, I think that'll be a fun one for us to have a play with because I do also, I feel this is like my own point of view. I haven't read this around team emotional intelligence is. You've also got to work with the DNA of the sort of team that you have. And so, you know, that was kind of my point around. If we were going to do like what could break our business, I think we would have to do that in a really fun way. Otherwise I think our team either would just find it hard to contribute. But what if it does happen?
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A
Yeah. What if it does happen? What if Helen and Sarah do fall out? Well, what then?
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B
Or they just won't contribute. Or they were just like, but that's not going to happen. Yeah, but that's you sort of. Then you're like, oh, but that's not, we're not going to learn if we can't have a play with it. So the last one that we scored ourselves badly on or not as, what should we say?
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A
Not as good an area of improvement, an area from brilliant intelligence of the team.
- [27:19]
B
Yeah. So like you said, this would surprise me a bit. But then actually when you start to get into it, I'm like, okay, this makes sense. So this is about building relationships with stakeholders and as a team do you speak to and build relationships with other groups or departments that are going to then affect your performance? And I think probably you need to think about this both inside and outside of your business, depending on what kind of business you are. So actually when I took myself back to big company world, I was like, oh, of course. Because emotionally intelligent teams don't act as a silo. And in most big companies you get loads of silos and then you're not, you don't understand all the interrelationships, the cross functional nature of what you do, how if this team aren't doing the thing that they need to do, that you can't do what you need to do. And no team is an island, you know, like every team has those interdependencies. So I think what they are describing here is kind of going beyond your team and thinking about, well like who else, who else impacts our performance and are we actively building those relationships? Are we really thinking about kind of partnering with those people, like understanding what's going on in their world? Because part of being emotionally intelligent is being empathetic and you can only be empathetic if you understand what's happening like for other people. So I think this is about escaping silos, kind of being empathetic, being quite meerkat. Like you know, we talk about being having like meerkat moments like popping your head up and seeing what's going on in the world. And I think in a big company actually probably easier to understand because I think a lot of people would recognize siloed working. I think in a smaller company like ours, when I was answering these questions I was actually thinking, do you know what, we still have examples where parts of our team don't talk to each other. So I was like, that has definitely happened in the last year. So even in A small company. That's happened. So there's a bit about, like, are we working together as one overall team or lots of mini teams? And then for us, we've also got all of the learning partners that we work with, and we work with about 100 companies all across the world and actually going, are we proactively building relationships with those people that we work with? Because if you go back to that bit of affect our performance, those learning partners, our ability to build those relationships with those people really affects our ability to do our job, to design and deliver really good learning experiences, to keep doing that, to kind of keep building our business.
- [29:47]
A
I have some thoughts on our. What worked well. Even better ifs on this one.
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B
Okay, you go for it.
- [29:51]
A
Well, I think on our. What went well. You know, you talked about, oh, even in our team, sometimes we're not connected. I think one of the things that we have done that I think other companies could copy or other teams could copy is we sort of borrowed that flywheel concept. So, yes, the flywheel concept comes from Jim Collins and we can. We can maybe link to that on the pod sheet, if you want. If you're listening. He had. I mean, there are some funny stories about that. That was a. That was a good episode. It was an intense episode for Sarah. But the flywheel concept that I think helps us to connect as a company and see things from each other's perspectives is. It's how our business grows, and it is how everybody's roles connect to each other. And we have. We have a very. We have tied metrics to that. We talk about it every month. So there is a lot of clarity and transparency in our company about how roles are connected and how everyone's roles is helping kind of squiggly to grow bigger and better. So I think that's a good thing that we should say. We. We kind of work well. We work well there.
- [30:54]
B
What did you add as well for.
- [30:56]
A
What worked well on this one?
- [30:57]
B
I think we get good feedback from the partners that we work with that they really trust us, that we are kind of on their side, and they sort of believe that we're like an extension of their team. I mean, I would say generally that's not feedback about us. That's feedback about everybody else in amazing. If. Yeah, in our team, that's not. We sort of turn up and do the learning, but we do get that feedback. So I was like, that's a good data point in terms of, you know, talking to our stakeholders, understanding kind of what they need. I think we do that. Well, I actually saw this in action as an even better, if even yesterday. Obviously it was on my mind. And then something happened yesterday where I was like, oh, that's because we don't do this. So we were. For our new book, Learn Like a Lobster, we've got this virtual lobster library where there's accelerators, like workshop accelerators that we're doing. And we did the first one yesterday and we forgot to include our own team. So we had invited hundreds of people to come to this accelerator to do the first one. And it suddenly occurred to me that is one of our biggest priorities. This idea of learning like a lobster is one of the biggest priorities for our company. It goes way beyond a book. It's really important that everybody sort of understands the key concepts. Not everyone will have read that book yet cover to cover. In our team, the single best way to upskill everybody on that is for everybody to come to those half an hour accelerators and we didn't do it. And, you know, it's a good, even better if it's a good mistake moment. But it is an example of how we're not kind of thinking across the company. What we really focused on was we had an accelerator we needed to run for some external people. So had we set the tech up right, what were we going to deliver? And I think I asked the question, I think I thought of it 24 hours before and obviously by then a couple of our team had proactively sorted themselves out. Great. But obviously if you've not put it in your diary by then you probably can't come. So it did mean that like 50% of our team missed out on a moment where actually we would have been kind of connecting all together. So what's the.
- [33:05]
A
I'm trying to think about what is the question that people could take their. To apply to their team? Like, what are the moments that matter this month that we want everyone to be involved in? Is it that kind of a. That kind of a prompt?
- [33:18]
B
I think if it's your. Because I think there are two things I actually, I think to make this practical, you've got to think internal and external. So that's an internal prompt. What are the, you know, the moments that matter most for our team that we all want to be involved in? Great. And we would have said that if we had asked that question at the start of a month, we would have said it. Yeah, yeah, we would have been. That's good. I do think there's an external or certainly for us as a company, there's an external thing about who are you proactively building relationships with that are not just, you know, the meetings that pop up in your week. So I think people are very good at building relationships that are just there as part of their day job. They almost couldn't get their job done without those conversations. But then there's, you know, there's the relationship building where you're more asking questions about what's going on in someone's world. You're working out what's important to people. They are. They might still have an agenda, but they're more curious and they're more about being intrigued. And again, as a team, I don't think we're that good at doing those. And this was actually an example that I did read from the article where one team set a target, where they said every single person in the team every month is going to meet one new person from outside of the company. And then you had to then go into. They'd done like a teams channel. And it was like, who we're learning from. I think I don't need quite call it that. That's probably me using an amazing phrase. But it was that kind of sentiment. And you had to share who you had met and, like, what you had learned. So that's a good example of going, oh, it's kind of curious conversations. It's not necessarily curious career conversations, because I think team emotional intelligence is about team performance. So this wouldn't be about going to have a chat about your career. It would be me saying, oh, well, I've gone to have a conversation with a HR director that I've not met before. This is who I met. This is what we talked about. This is just kind of what I noticed or like what I observed. And I was thinking, oh, we could all probably do that in our team. That'll probably be a good thing for our team as well, because everyone does work remotely to, like, keep the connections going, but a different kind of connection. And also, I'd be really interested to read those. I'd love to read. You did a version with your CEO thing. I was thinking that's our prototype, the.
- [35:33]
A
Idea that I had there. So the routinely talking to stakeholders, what you could do to make that even better as a team, I think you could have a really useful team conversation, which I'm just going to call mapping and mattering for now, where you could map your stakeholders that could affect the performance of the team. And you do that inside and outside of the business. And then I think against each person I think you need to know and write down at least, well, what do we know that matters to that person? And I think if they're on your map but you don't know what matters.
- [36:04]
B
To them, what matters.
- [36:05]
A
I think that's a bit of a red flag. And you can go then and meet with them, like map matter, meet. There's probably something in there, but I think you should. If we haven't got that clarity, then you can't really like serve and support the stakeholders. So it's probably quite a useful exercise.
- [36:20]
B
For teams to do bit like influence impact mapping.
- [36:22]
A
Yeah.
- [36:23]
B
Which I read, you know, which again, if you Google that, you can just. It's a really easy way to think about your stakeholders and it sort of prompts you just to go beyond, you know, the sort of the waiting to see what happens to you in terms of the stakeholders that you meet versus creating the conversations that matter. I think that I think there's like a waiting versus creating thing here. And I think probably the reason we both scored ourselves and like, as a team, like lower on this one is like, we're probably more. We respond, but we're probably a bit more passive versus kind of creating the conversations that you think, well, we've got gaps here or these are the people that we want to talk to to kind of find out more. So overall, I've loved it this week. I got very into team emotional intelligence.
- [37:06]
A
May I ask you a final question on. Because Sarah has sort of really dived into it and I've just been learning through the conversation, really. And the last question that I have is how regularly do you think, having gone into this, that teams should reassess themselves?
- [37:24]
B
I actually think not too often because the risk would be. And you say this to me sometimes because I think because I'm ideasy, that the potential risk is like initiative overload, you know, like you can't have loads and loads of rituals and routines because people can't keep up and it's overwhelming. And I think there's like, there's a balance to get right here. And as you described, we already have quite a lot. You know, we have mistake moments. What worked well, even better if there's quite a few that we can name. We talk about borrowed brilliance links to learn from lots of ways that. That they are definitely our kind of team norms. So I think you've got to be really mindful of not having too many is like the first thing. So like the volume of them. I also think it's okay to experiment and see what Sticks. So it doesn't really talk about that in anything I've read. But personally, from what we have seen, better to just experiment and try stuff out. And the stuff that sticks is the stuff that becomes your norm. You know, rather than over designing a norm, like now, I'd almost rather just try something and be like, oh, that stuck. That didn't. That's probably a norm. That probably is not. I would say probably every six months, I think every six months to kind of go, you could redo the questionnaire, but you could also just. I would probably just use the. What worked well, even better if. And you could just have a team conversation where you keep coming back to this. Because this will like any of this sort of work. I think it's never about going, we're aiming for the perfect 15. 15 out of 15. Like no team is that good. I think the teams that are really good are the ones that just continually improve and continually keep learning. It's not like they reach this heightened state of perfection and excellence, but they keep coming back and they're like, oh, we tried that, that didn't work. Oh, this half worked. Or half of the team have done this, but actually the other half of team have not. Like, why not? What's got in the way? So I think that's. It's kind of the conversation, it's the actions, it's the reflection that then probably feels really useful. And I really like it as a concept.
- [39:21]
A
The research does. Yeah. It provides a structure for the reflection and a structure for the conversation. I think what you've done is added a bit of a what worked well, even better, if amazing if ness to make it easy then to apply.
- [39:34]
B
And I will give her book. So I haven't read her book. So I'm very mindful with Borrowed Brilliance that we don't want them all to be books. I have got into this enough that I have bought the book and also I wanted to be supportive of her work because I was like, I feel like I've borrowed a lot of brilliance from. From Vanessa, who I've not met. So this is what her book looks like. Very nice, very nice cover. And it's called the Emotionally Intelligent Team. I have started it and there's a really good forward. Actually, I don't usually read forwards, but there's a forward by Daniel Goleman. So they have made the explicit link between individual and team, which I think is interesting to read the difference. So I think with some Borrowed Brilliance, you know, you kind of go, I've got enough now, whereas other times you do think, I do want to dive a bit deeper. So it has made me think like, actually, I am going to read the book, I'm going to get the book interested enough. But the other thing that this week just really showed me was like, you know, you can take. Actually, probably the thing that I loved the most was taking one thing, an article, and turning it into something different. It was the using Claude to then make this useful for our team. It's the what worked wells even better if that's where all the value has come from. So I actually don't think you necessarily need to read the book. I think you can just read the article. You can come up with your own quiz. You can use what we've talked about today.
- [40:44]
A
And what we'll do is I'll put in the Squiggly Quiz in Action, which is our weekly newsletter. I'll put some screenshots of the survey that Sarah created so that if you want to create.
- [40:53]
B
It nearly works.
- [40:54]
A
It nearly works. It's fine. It nearly works. Good enough for now. But just so that you can see if you want to create your own team survey in Claude, or you can use Typeform or whatever you want, but you can just see kind of what, what that looks like. So we'll put that in Squiggly Quiz in Action. And if you are not signed up for Squiggly Quiz In Action, that's our weekly newsletter. The link for that will be in the show Notes. If you can't find that, just email us helenand sarahquigglycareers.com and we will send you the link for Squiggly Careers in Action.
- [41:21]
B
But that's everything for this week. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you're finding them useful. I'm back with you again next week. Bye for now.
- [41:28]
A
Bye, everyone.