Left: Cover of “The Emotionally Intelligent Team” book. Right: Author Vanessa Druskat (Photos Courtesy of Vanessa Druskat)
For Vanessa Druskat, teamwork has been a lifelong fascination. As a teenager, she found meaning and belonging on farms where she worked summers and on athletic teams in high school. But when she entered the professional workplace after college, something was missing. “I just felt like the teams were not what they used to be,” she recalls. “It was a lot more competitive than collaborative.”
That disconnect sparked a career in researching and teaching others how to build successful workplace teams. Now an associate professor at the University of NH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, Druskat is an internationally recognized expert on leadership and team performance. Her work has been cited in Harvard Business Review, where her article on emotionally intelligent teams remains one of the publication’s most reprinted pieces.
This July, Druskat released her latest book, “The Emotionally Intelligent Team: building collaborative groups that outperform the rest.” The book distills three decades of research into practical advice for leaders who want to build healthier, more effective teams. At its core, the message is simple: Strong teams aren’t built by heroic leaders or gritty individuals, but by creating cultures that foster trust, accountability, and mutual support.
“There’s a belief that if we just build a leader’s emotional intelligence, they will magically know how to build a team,” Druskat says. “Actually, the way you build a team is by building healthy interactions among the members of your team.”
Her research has taken her into manufacturing plants, drug development groups at Johnson & Johnson, and engineering and banking teams. Manufacturing settings proved especially valuable, she says. “There you could measure performance directly, such as how many units a team produced, how much waste they reduced. It was striking how much better the emotionally intelligent
teams performed.”
Druskat’s book challenges myths about workplace success, including the idea of the “problem employee” dragging down team performance. “Every team has one,” she acknowledges. “But research shows that so-called troublemakers are often the ones with unspoken ideas who are sometimes the key to innovation. Scapegoating doesn’t help. Building norms that allow everyone’s voice to be heard does.”
Her book offers practical strategies businesses can apply right away. Among them: start meetings with a quick check-in to determine what’s working, what’s blocking progress, and how team members can help each other. Then, evaluate team processes together and regularly bring in customer and/or client perspectives.
“My most important message,” Druskat says, “is that we need to start teaching people how to build teams, not just how to perfect themselves. No one succeeds alone.”
