The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform the Rest
Vanessa Urch Druskat
Harvard Business Review Press (July 2025)

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African  Proverb

In the Foreword to this brilliant book, Dan Goleman observes that emotional intelligence (EI) has four parts: emotional self-awareness, emotional self-management, empathy (or social awareness), and applying these strengths to manage relationships well.” What do these separate but interdependent abilities look like on a team? In The Emotionally Intelligent Team, that is the question to which Vanessa Urch Druskat responds with vigor, passion, and eloquence.

As Goleman correctly points out, “While emotional intelligence at the personal level looks like a particular set of abilities, such as [aforementioned] self-awareness or empathy,  in a team the parallel basic unit can be seen in the habitual ways that colleagues interact. Such norms for interaction are the focus of upgrading a team’s performance. Vanessa’s Team EI approach has members decide what norms to build together and exactly what they will entail.”

Druskat and the associates on her team have identified what they characterize as The List, “the perceived characteristics that supposedly make or break a winning team”:

o  Personalities
o IQ
o Work ethic
o Work styles
o Talent, skills, and knowledge
o Diversity among team members
o Team goals
o Differences of languages and culture
o Redmote, hybrid, or in-person

Here is their  working definition of Team Emotional Intelligence:

“Team EI is a group culture created by a set of norms that build a productive social and emotional environment that leads to cooperative interactions, collaborative work processes, and hastens effective performance.”

It is important to keep in mind that Team EI “refers not to the emotional intelligence level of group members, but to the emotional intelligence of the [begin italics] group culture itself [end italics]. That culture is created by a set of nine norms, which are divided into three levels of team interactions and labeled: how we help one another succeed, how we learn and advance together, and how we engage our stakeholders.”

I want to stress three other points about The Emotionally Intelligent  Team. First, this is a preeminent “How to” book, with a heavy emphasis on practical, doable advice. Druskat makes brilliant use of several reader-friendly devices that include evocative chapter titles as well as checklists, step-by-step processes, and direct address. Also, note her almost total reliance on first-person PLURAL pronouns to stress the importance of communication, cooperation, and especially collaboration. Shared emotional intelligence is essential to the organizational health of every workplace culture, whatever its size and nature may be. Finally, it is obvious throughout her narrative that Druskat cares passionately about people. With all due respect to the potential value of various technologies and (especially) Singularity, I cannot recall a prior time when the human element was more important than it is today.

I commend Vanessa Urch Druskat and her colleagues on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence for their brilliant, substantial contributions to thought leadership throughout the global marketplace. I highly recommend this material to all C-level executives and those who aspire to become one as well as to others who are now preparing for a business career or have only recently embarked upon one.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Emotionally Intelligent Team: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the aforementioned Foreword by Daniel Goleman and an especially informative and useful appendix, “Team Fundamentals: A Primer.”

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.