Sept. 15, 2025

Do You Have an Emotionally Intelligent Team?

Do You Have an Emotionally Intelligent Team?

Is it that they have a brilliant leader or that every team member is a top performer? The truth is that those help, but neither of them differentiates the best teams. Exceptional teams stand apart from others by building an emotionally intelligent ecosystem (not just the EI of leaders or employees). Unlike most, emotionally intelligent teams develop social norms and routines that motivate teamwork by building a genuine sense of belonging among team members. These norms prioritize team member feedback and development, and encourage constructive debate that produces effective decisions and novel ideas

Vanessa Druskat is an associate professor at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. As an internationally recognized leadership and team performance expert, Vanessa Druskat advises leaders and teams at over a dozen Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 companies. Her best-selling Harvard Business Review article (with S. Wolff) on emotionally intelligent teams has been chosen six times for inclusion in collections of HBR’s most valued articles. She is the recipient of multiple research and teaching awards.

For more information, please visit https://www.vanessadruskat.com/

or vanessa.druskat@unh.edu