[Synthesized] Presentation - Vanessa Druskat's TEI Model
This is a synthesis of Vanessa Druskat's presentation on TEI at the December 2021 Global
Teal Meetup. The article was published on the Human First Works and Lead Together blogs:
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https://humanfirstworks.com/team-emotional-intelligence-and-higher-performa
nce-vanessa-druskat/
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http://www.leadtogether.co/news/team-emotional-intelligence-and-higher-perfor
mance-vanessa-druskat
Vanessa Druskat's Team Emotional
Intelligence Model: A Guide to Team
Connection and Higher Performance
Lead Together Chapter: Leadership Redefined
Excerpt:
What makes a group of talented people a trusting, high-performing team? What norms would
allow them to self-manage? These are some of the questions Vanessa Druskat answers
through her Team Emotional Intelligence Model.
Keywords: Team Emotional Intelligence, emotional intelligence, TEI
Body:
Vanessa's Global Teal Meetup Presentation Summary
What makes a group of talented people a trusting, high-performing team? What norms would
allow team members to manage themselves and build strong relationships with each other?
Is self-management even possible? These are the questions Vanessa Urch Druskat, Ph.D.,
has been finding answers to in her thirty years of research.
Last December, the author of Linking Emotional Intelligence and Performance at Work
and an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of New Hampshire
attended the Global Teal Meetup to talk about the influence of emotional intelligence and
external leadership on self-managed teams and how developing a sense of belonging
impacts collaboration and team performance.
As a doctoral student at Boston University, Vanessa was fascinated with the concept of
people managing themselves. This idea of a team held together by freedom, ownership over
their work, and trust contrasted with her experience studying teams from different
manufacturing plants where people had to ask permission to use the restroom and had
carefully scripted breaks. This interest led Vanessa to study Polaroid's self-managing teams
initiative and then she selected a group from approximately 300 self-managing teams at a
polyester manufacturing plant in North Carolina. In that last experience, she identified ten
teams that were outperforming every other team. They were performing so well that they
were making $9 million more per year than the average self-managing teams in that
organization. What made them more successful than the others? This was Vanessa’s
observation:
I studied the heck out of these ten super teams, and I studied the sample of another ten
average-performing teams. It was just fascinating. The critical finding that I had was that
the [outstanding] teams developed a strong culture, they had really strong norms, and the
norms enabled them to manage themselves. And central to their norms was this idea of
getting to know one another, spending time learning about not just one another's needs
but skills and interests. [And as part of their culture, they had this growth mindset] where
they were constantly learning from each other, they wanted to be independent, they
wanted to be self-managing, and they wanted to succeed. But they were also really good
with their stakeholders, including those that mattered most, which was what I ended up
calling their ‘external leaders,’ the people who were right above them in the hierarchy. So
I quickly discovered that there is no such thing as a self-managing team in this context
anyway. You're always reporting to someone. But if they weren't able to manage that
relationship well, then they weren't able to maintain their freedom in this situation
because the leaders above them had this dilemma of not understanding their role.
Is self-management possible then?
Can a team manage itself? Who manages that self-managed team? These questions
inspired another set of research questions and led Vanessa to tweak her team collaboration
and performance model over the years.
The idea of self-management can inspire some people, but it can also be scary to those in
positions of power, especially to leaders who are insecure or are not ready to let go of
control over their teams. Leaders from typical organizations, those built from rigid structures,
tend to oppose this concept even though self-management practices can increase the
effectiveness and well-being of the whole team. While researching the impact of leadership
on self-managing teams, Vanessa discovered that they benefit from having a strong figure
who can manage their context and hold back forces that try to take control away from them.
But to minimize resistance when applying her model in different kinds of organizations, she
shifted the focus of her model from self-management to building a collaborative team culture.
After her presentation, she explored this topic in more detail in a conversation with Travis
Marsh and the Global Teal Meetup attendees.
Regardless of the terminology, Vanessa is certain that her model can help teams empower
themselves, work well, and create a culture that includes people:
Recently, I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this [Team Emotional Intelligence
Model] works so well, and I've concluded that it's because (...) it creates a culture of
belonging. So, as I dug into the belonging literature, I learned that it requires a couple of
different things that end up getting taken care of in this model.
To feel that sense of belonging that frees you up in a team, the first thing you have to
have is self-worth. You should feel understood, heard, and know that people care about
you and value what you bring to the table. That's fundamental. But you can't maintain
that unless you have a voice in how the team operates. The second piece that you have
to have is a voice in what the team culture is about, what the team's currently doing, how
you can get better. You need to constantly check in with how you are doing now, how you
need to change, how do you improve. Everyone's voice has to be heard. And third, not
only is everyone's voice heard, but everyone feels that they have a sense of control in
that team. So those are the three buckets that I found to enable a person to feel like they
belong, and I think that that's what drives this model.
After telling us about what motivated her to study team dynamics and the vast range of
experiences she had, Vanessa dove deeper into her Team Emotional Intelligence Model and
what could transform a group of technical people into a trusting, highly engaged, and
effective team. Here's how she explained it:
This model started in that manufacturing plant in the southeastern US. The bottom part,
what we call Team Fundamentals, was something that I built after taking this research to
many, many different organizations. I discovered that in order to be an even
average-performing team, you had to have a clear, engaging purpose and goals. You
also had to have someone who knew how to facilitate meetings, someone who made
sure there was an even flow of information and didn't let people dominate. And finally,
people had to know what their roles and responsibilities were. They had to be very
clear. So these were fundamental, but alone, they wouldn't kick you into this high level of
performance. And what we found were these social norms. These norms, this culture had
several buckets. And we call these Team Emotional Intelligent Norms because they
built this socially and emotionally comfortable environment.
The next set of norms falls into three buckets. Level one is How We Treat One Another.
The second is How We Operate and Adapt as a Team, which is how we continually
improve. And third is How We Engage Our Stakeholders. So these are empirical and
came out of that initial research. I had these three buckets, and then the norms
underneath them were tweaked slightly over the years.
The first one [in this bucket] is understanding the people because you can't feel like
you belong if you don't feel known and understood. For me, this is one of the most critical
norms in the model. People have to know who you are, what you want, and what you
care about. They can't trust you unless they know you. That's fundamental to building
safety and trust. Then we have to be able to address what I've started calling
'unhelpful' behavior—nobody likes the word "unacceptable" in many places in the
world, as you can probably relate. And something I found in self-managing teams is that
they often give each other feedback in pretty caustic ways, but it was better that way than
just giving someone the cold shoulder. In the lousy teams, if someone did something that
you felt was unhelpful, like showing up late, not doing what they said they were going to
do, cutting people off, or being dominant—whatever that might harm the team—, people
just give them the cold shoulder or ostracize them as a way of trying to control them. And
it didn't work. It just created negativity in the team. So this would be the ability to give
feedback in a way that's acceptable to the team. And finally, respect. We listen, we care
about one another, and that builds belonging.
In the second bucket, we step back periodically in a systematic way to review how we're
doing, our norms, and our culture. That is what great self-managing teams constantly
did. You have to check in. They didn't have a leader to necessarily do this for them, to tell
them what to do, so they had to say, well, how are we doing? And they did that
periodically, and it would work well. Supportive expression is something that we added
after that initial study because we discovered that in great teams, they make it easier to
speak your truth when you're reviewing the team. So they have a way of lowering the
hurdle to make it easier for people to take the risk. When you're reviewing the team and
people are speaking their truth, they can sometimes feel negative. So what I found was
that self-managing teams had a way to come around, to be optimistic, and say, "we're
great, and this is how we're going to do in the future. This is how we're going to create
momentum." And lastly was this fourth norm that fell statistically into the third bucket, but
theoretically fell into this [second] bucket, which was being proactive, being strategic, if
you will. So thinking in advance about what could go wrong gives [team members] a
sense of control. That often requires going out and getting information from stakeholders.
So these stakeholders that were in the self-managing teams were customers, but more
important to their ability to maintain their self-managing status was managing the people
above them in the hierarchy and teams at the same level of the hierarchy. People were
handing things off to them, and I had story after story of how they would go out of their
way to understand what was going on up the hierarchy and around them and how
they built relationships so that when they needed someone, they were there. Being
able to manage their teams mattered to them.
And finally, we call all of this the Team Social Capital, which is essentially psychological
safety and trust, team identity, and constructive dialogue. That led teams to this high
performance.
To discover how Vanessa's work links to the core principles of Teal, Holacracy, and other
dynamic organizational structures, we invite you to watch December's Global Teal Meetup
on the Human First Works YouTube channel. If you prefer, you can also read the HFW
transcript of Vanessa's presentation and conversation with Travis.