The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest

From a pioneer of "team emotional intelligence" comes a practical guide for building high-performing teams.

Great teams can sometimes feel like magic. So much so that it can be hard to pin down why they work so well. But such dynamics are explainable—and replicable. And at their heart is emotional intelligence.

While much has been written about the power of emotional intelligence at the individual level, little has been said about the benefits of this concept for groups. And it's not as simple as putting a number of emotionally intelligent people together and expecting them to work cohesively. Instead, leaders need to build a team culture around agreed-upon norms and habits.

In this book, social and organizational psychologist and professor Vanessa Urch Druskat combines thirty years of research and team development to present a model for building and leading emotionally intelligent teams. She offers practical advice on how to build a team where members:

• Help one another succeed through understanding, caring, and feedback
• Learn and advance together by reviewing team processes, supporting personal expression, building optimism, and solving problems proactively
• Engage stakeholders by building an understanding of the team's impact and developing external relationships

In reading The Emotionally Intelligent Team, leaders and aspiring leaders alike will learn how to develop a strong team culture that motivates and sustains successful collaboration and high performance.

Vanessa Urch Druskat is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of New Hampshire. A social and organizational psychologist, she has spent thirty years researching team collaboration and performance. She is an award-winning teacher and scholar, and her research investigating the differences between the norms and habits of high-performing teams and average ones led her to pioneer, with Steven B. Wolff, the concept of team emotional intelligence. Druskat consults globally with some of the world's most respected organizations and serves on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.