Psychological safety and polarization

Welcome to episode #1013 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation).

At a time when organizations are wrestling with fractured cultures, hybrid work, and teams struggling to stay connected, it helps to learn from someone who has spent three decades proving that collaboration is not a personality trait but a designed environment, which is why this episode turns to the work of Vanessa Druskat, an award-winning researcher, educator at the University of New Hampshire, and one of the world's leading experts on team emotional intelligence. Vanessa has devoted her career to understanding how teams actually function in the real world, conducting years of field research inside global companies, university systems, and high-pressure environments to uncover the norms, habits, and emotional cues that separate high-performing groups from those that merely coexist. She is a pioneer of the Team Emotional Intelligence (Team EI) model, a framework now used by leaders around the world to build team cultures rooted in shared understanding, psychological safety, and constructive emotional expression. Her latest book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team - Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform The Rest, anchors this conversation and brings together decades of research showing that great teams are not the inevitable result of great individuals but the product of intentional cultures that enable people to listen, challenge, support, and adapt together. In our discussion, Vanessa explores the evolution of emotional intelligence in the workplace, the persistent resistance to emotional concepts in both academia and business, and the growing gap between individual achievement systems and the collective realities of modern work. She explains why leaders must think more like coaches, why norms matter more than personalities, how remote work demands more deliberate emotional connection, and why teams must continually review and recalibrate their dynamics to sustain high performance. Drawing on insights from social neuroscience, organizational psychology, and global fieldwork, she shows how belonging, shared understanding, and a sense of influence are not "soft skills" but hard prerequisites for collaboration in an increasingly polarized and distracted world. Enjoy the conversation…

• Running time: 55:07.
• Hello from beautiful Montreal.
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• Here is my conversation with Vanessa Druskat.
• The Emotionally Intelligent Team - Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform The Rest.
• Team Emotional Intelligence (Team EI) model.
• Follow Vanessa on LinkedIn.

Chapters:

(00:00) - Introduction to Emotional Intelligence in Teams. (04:14) - The Evolution of Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace. (09:45) - Resistance to Emotional Intelligence in Academia and Business. (14:30) - The Importance of Team Dynamics. (19:30) - The Role of Leaders as Coaches. (26:07) - Building a Culture of Collaboration. (31:40) - Navigating Remote Work Challenges. (39:03) - The Power of Eye Contact and Connection. (42:15) - Understanding Team Members for Better Collaboration. (47:27) - Monitoring Team Health and Dynamics. (51:10) - The Impact of Culture on Team Performance.