Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People How to Build Emotionally Intelligent Teams: Vanessa Druskat's 9-Norm Framework
Emotion Shapes Team Behavior
- A team's emotional environment dictates its behavior more than individual emotional intelligence skills.
- Emotion is a key indicator of team health, impacting trust, psychological safety, and performance.
How Emotionally Intelligent Team Norms Beat Smarts or Talent Every Time
Emotionally intelligent behavior in teams isn’t about just assembling smart or emotionally savvy individuals. Vanessa Druskat reveals that the team environment and shared norms overwhelmingly determine if emotionally intelligent behavior emerges.
She identifies nine norms within three clusters — focusing on individuals, continuous learning, and external awareness — that top-performing teams share. These norms create trust, psychological safety, and constructive emotions necessary for peak performance.
Norms dictate "how we do it here" at a team level, shaping behaviors far more than individual traits. For example, showing empathy or respect depends heavily on the culture established by people with status in the team rather than individuals’ innate skills.
These findings highlight that leaders must consciously craft and uphold norms to foster emotional intelligence, rather than relying on who’s on the team. Even highly diverse or virtual teams can achieve this by setting clear, supportive behavioral routines.
Three Norm Clusters Define EI Teams
- Emotionally intelligent team norms cluster into three categories: individual focus, continuous learning, and external awareness.
- These norms differentiate top-performing teams from average ones.