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Vanessa Urch Druskat is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of New Hampshire. She is a social and organizational psychologist, an award-winning scholar, and a pioneer of the concept of team emotional intelligence. Vanessa also serves on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Whats the big idea? There is abundant evidence that teams are far better than individuals at making difficult decisions and solving complex problems. In fact, high-performing teamwork has driven every major innovation in human history. But how do you build an excellent team? Thats the challenge. It turns out that its not that difficult once you know the basic guidelines, but it does involve persistent intent and team involvement. Below, Vanessa shares five key insights from her new book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest. Listen to the audio versionread by Vanessa herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Building great teams is not about hiring stars. Many leaders believe that building a high-performing team requires hiring star employees. However, intelligence, abilities, and personalities are poor predictors of how people behave in teams and what they can contribute to a teams success. This evidence has existed for decades, but most people have been indoctrinated into focusing on individual performance. By far, the best predictor of motivation and behavior in teams is the specific norms that a team adopts to define how members will interact and work together. Norms are the patterns of behavior, routines, habits, and rituals that define a teams culture, making each team unique. Norms vary greatly among teams conducting the same tasks. They also affect the extent to which team members intrinsic needs are addressed, which in turn arouses the emotions that influence their motivation and trust in teamwork and collaboration. For example, neuroscientists find that evolution has shaped us to be highly sensitive to signals of disrespect and social rejection. These emotions foster distrust in teamwork and motivate self-protection and conformity driven by egoistic concerns. Teamwork thrives when norms foster and maintain a sense of belonging within a community. On the other hand, neuroscience reveals that our brain craves a sense of genuine acceptance and mutual support within groups. Teamwork thrives when norms foster and maintain a sense of belonging within a community. We found such norms in the highest-performing teams we studied across industries. The reliability of these norms engendered trust, psychological safety, and a shared sense of ownership over team outcomes. Members felt more in control of their own fateand the teams. Formal and informal team leaders establish the norms that govern behavior within teams. Many leaders unknowingly propagate norms that dont support belongingness and trust. Instead, in the name of efficiency, they establish norms that prioritize the direct exchange of information and resources without requiring empathy or mutual support. On the surface, this can seem perfectly satisfactory to leaders. Our research identifies such norms in average-performing teams across industries. The lack of community reduces engagement and collaboration, which are essential to innovation and high-performing teamwork. The disappointment this creates can lead to disengagement and, in some cases, even destructive behavior. 2. Your team needs emotionally intelligent norms. My colleagues and I found that the best teams adopt emotionally intelligent norms. These norms address the innate needs of all team members, thereby creating a productive social and emotional environment that supports active participation, effort, and critical, sometimes heated, debates that lead to successful team decisions and outcomes. The leaders of the highest-performing teams dont just hope that team members generosity and social skills will emerge to support effective collaboration. They intentionally create these norms and routines. 3. Team members need to understand each other better. My colleagues and I worked with a global leadership team that wasnt reaching its full potential because members were working in silos rather than focusing on the teams shared goals. They were competing with one another, rather than collaborating. The leaders of the highest-performing teams dont just hope that team members generosity and social skills will emerge to support effective collaboration. With our help, they decided to adopt norms and routines that enabled them to learn more about each others roles and responsibilities. They even visited one anothers office locations. It boosted their sense of belonging and mutual support, which enabled the sharing of feedback and ideas that benefited the success of each person. Much of this feedback helped increase the emotional intelligence of individual team members, which in turn improved their relationships outside of the team. Think of it this way: No sports team or musical group would assume they could play well together unless they knew something about their teammates unique backgrounds and talents, as well as what that person needed from others to play at their best. 4. You need routine assessments of the teams strengths and opportunities. We worked with a team whose new leader was overly controlling and projected his fear of making mistakes onto his teammates. Team performance declined, prompting the leader to replace two team members. As a result, team members felt undervalued and fearful, which increased competition within the team and hindered collaboration. With the leaders support, they developed a proactive action plan to adopt team norms, which included monthly structured meetings. During these meetings, team members first discussed what was and wasnt working well in the team and brainstormed changes they would incorporate to ensure their teams goal achievement. Their new norms increased their focus on helping and learning from one another. By collaborating to address the teams and members challenges, the team leaders confidence in the team increased, and the team outpaced its competitors within the year. You need to develop norms that engage your team in both optimistic and pessimistic discussions. The team needs to both anticipate problems and create a vivid, hopeful, and motivating view of their ability to achieve shared success. 5. Engaging with stakeholders fosters innovative thinking within teams. One team we worked with adopted a norm of ensuring stakeholder communication and involvement. They developed a stakeholder map that listed their stakeholders and then assigned one team mmber to serve as an ambassador to each. The information they obtained helped them think more strategically about their priorities and ask for resources that would support their performance (for example, support for changes that the team sought). In one manufacturing organization, good relationships with stakeholders enabled a team to receive new and improved equipment. In a pharma team, good relationships allowed the team to receive quicker decisions from senior management. You need to develop norms that engage your team in both optimistic and pessimistic discussions. The highest-performing teams we studied recognized that they did not have all the information and resources they needed to succeed within their teams. I like to say that a team doesnt need to reinvent the wheel if they talk to someone outside of their team to learn that the wheel exists. Building high-performing teams is not rocket science, but it does require leaders to recognize that team building is not about fixing people or hiring for the perfect set of skills. The leader of one of the highest-performing teams we studied in a Fortune 100 company said it best when she told me: No one on my team has A+ skills, but we collaborate in ways that produce A+ work. If there is a secret to building great teams, its the need to develop interaction norms and routines that bring out the best in team members and utilize team members talents. Emotionally intelligent norms arouse intrinsic motivation and build continuous assessment, learning, and adaptation into a teams everyday culture. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Do you ever have those weeks where you feel youve gotten nothing done? You’re staring at your screen, the same paragraph you’ve read three times still making no sense. Your mind drifts to that looming deadline, the difficult conversation with your manager, leaving before 3 to avoid a horrible commute, or the growing pile of unread emails. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Almost half (43%) of Americans report feeling more anxious than they did the previous year, with workplace pressures playing a significant role in this epidemic of stress. The new brand of stress that 80% of workers report centers around productivity anxiety at work according to a recent study. The very stress that pushes us to work harder is now sabotaging our ability to perform well. Understanding this paradoxand more importantly, knowing how to break free from itcould be the key to reclaiming both your productivity and peace of mind. The Science of Stress: Your Brain Under Siege Not surprisingly, the biggest culprit of productivity anxiety is stress. When stress hits, your body doesn’t distinguish between a charging lion and a challenging quarterly review. The same ancient alarm system kicks in, flooding your system with cortisolthe primary stress hormone that can transform from helpful motivator to harmful hijacker. Cortisol levels peak in the early morning as part of the cortisol awakening response, then decrease throughout the day. But chronic workplace stress disrupts this natural rhythm, keeping cortisol elevated when it should be declining. The result? A brain struggling to perform its most essential workplace functions, including just seeing things properly. Research reveals the cognitive toll is severe. One study found that acute increases in corticosteroid levels are associated with cognitive decrements in both attention and memory. Three Ways Stress Sabotages Your Focus 1. The Working Memory Meltdown Your working memorythe mental workspace where you juggle information, solve problems, and make decisionsis particularly vulnerable to stress. Tasks that engage and rely on working memory seem to be particularly sensitive to pressure demands, possibly because working memory requires sustained focus and attention that acute pressure might disrupt. This explains why, under stress, you might forget what you just read or struggle to connect ideas that normally flow effortlessly. 2. The Attention Hijack All theories about choking under pressure involve the reallocation of attention away from the task at hand. Some researchers suggest stress pulls your attention toward the uncomfortable feelings it creates, while others argue it makes you hyperaware of your own performance, paradoxically impairing it. Either way, your focus fractures. 3. The Productivity Anxiety Spiral Since modern workplaces have birthed this new phenomenon of “productivity anxiety,” there has been a significant uptick in employees reporting a feeling that there is always more they should be doing, even if not humanly possible. This creates a vicious cycle where stress about productivity further impairs your ability to be productive, leading to more stress. Stress has a way of taking up your time by making you continuously worry about something that may or may not happen. Perhaps this scenario is best illustrated by my client Tim. Tim manages a large and critical function at an aerospace firm. With 16 direct reports, hundreds more in his organization, and a cadre of contractors, Tim is still the go-to for any technical questions or emergencies that arise. It wasnt until recently that I reminded Tim that a healthy number of direct reports for most leaders is no more than five, with far less technical work, and under far less work intensification that he perked up, realizing much of the problem he is managing is due to poor organizational design. 3 Evidence-Based Strategies to Reclaim Your Focus 1. Take a Walk Outside The research is compelling: stepping outside for a walk is one of the most accessible and effective tools for combating workplace stress and restoring focus. Studies show that spending at least 20 to 30 minutes immersed in a natural setting is associated with the biggest drop in cortisol levels. Even more impressive, compared to urban walks, nature walks resulted in decreased anxiety, rumination, and negative affect, as well as increased working memory performance. Walks either with or without music have mental health benefits. How to implement: Schedule a 20-minute walk outside during your workday, ideally in a green space. Can’t access nature? Even urban walks help. The beauty is you don’t need to power walkor even walk; both walking and sitting outdoors improve cognitive performance, with elevated levels of relaxation during the intervention being the best predictor of improved performance. 2. Practice Strategic Stress Recovery Individuals who have a higher frustration tolerance, the ability to moderate their responses to stress in the moment, have the capacity to think clearly and effectively work through problems longer and engage in productive decision making. Having an awareness of being triggered by observing physical shifts like heart rate changes, or a sudden burning chest sensation when stress hits, is critical data. Once aware, intentional choices can be made that mitigate reactionary stress behaviors: stepping away from a tough problem temporarily or engaging in deep breathing for a few minutes are both research backed ways of mitigating stress in the moment. Those able to do so expand their frusration tolerance, build the capacity to moderate other stress reactions with confidence, and experience less negative long-term effects from their stress. How to implement: Build recovery periods into your workday, which will start to create muscle memory. When a problem becomes particularly intense, take note to feel in your body where the pressure mounts. Common areas of feeling bodily stress are chest, temples on either side of your head, neck, or stomach. Being attuned to this is critical. Once youre aware of stress building in your body, step away from the problem at hand, and take a break such as a five-minute walk, practice deep breathing, or engage in light stretching. After any intensive work or problem-solving sessions, these micro-recoveries help reset your stress response system. 3. Restructure Your Work Environment for Focus People who are stressed have difficulty focusing and find themselves getting caught in modes of thinking that perpetuate stress, such as worry and rumination. Combat this by creating environmental cues that support focus. Also an organized workspace has positive effects on distractions and ability to focus. How to implement: Establish clear boundaries between high-focus work and administrative tasks. Use time-blocking to protect your most cognitively demanding work for times when your cortisol is naturally lower (typically midmorning after cortisol has subsided). Create a “focus ritual”a consistent set of actions that signal to your brain it’s time for deep work. Once or twice a week, block time on your calendar to clear your space of clutter, take out the trash, process any snail mail that comes in, and regularly delete files and screenshots no longer needed that sit on your screen. Such peripheral clutter cleaning makes clearer thinking possible, and it makes those things you need to find easier to find. Small steps with big impacts Job stress costs U.S. employers more than $300 billion annually due to absenteeism, turnover, decreased productivitybut the human cost is even greater. The good news? You don’t have to accept chronic stress as an inevitable part of modern work life. Start small. Choose one strategy and commit to it for two weeks. Notice not just how you feel, but how you thinkhow ideas flow, how problems untangle, how focus sharpens. Because when you master the art of managing stress, you don’t just survive the workday; you unlock your brain’s full potential to create, innovate, and excel. Your focused, calm, and productive self is waiting. It’s time to clear away the stress and let that person shine through.
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E-Commerce
Since no one ever does anything worthwhile on their own, who you know is important. But what you know — and what you do with what you know — is crucial. Learning, memory, and cognitive skills are a competitive advantage. Here are five neuroscience-based ways to learn more quickly, and even more importantly, better retain what you learn. Best of all, each takes a couple of minutes at most, and one requires no effort at all. Say it out loud. We took the grandkids to surf lessons. They wanted to go back for another session, the instructor was great, so I asked him his name. Problem is, I’m terrible at remembering names. So I said it aloud three or four times. Why? A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that saying words out loud (or even just mouthing the words) makes them more memorable. While the underlying mechanism is unclear, neuroscientists theorize saying something out loud separates and distinguishes it from “mere” thoughts. (You didnt just think it. You also heard it.) That makes the information, idea, or plan you want to remember even more memorable. When you need to remember something, say it aloud, or mouth it to yourself. Your cerebral cortex will help you retain it longer. Then… Do a 40-second replay. Remembering a name is fairly simple. Remembering something more complex requires memory consolidation, the process of transforming temporary memories into more stable, long-lasting memories. Even though memory consolidation can be sped up, storing a memory in a lasting way takes time. A good way to increase the odds is to mentally replay whatever you want to remember for 40 seconds. A 2015 study published in Journal of Neuroscience found that a brief period of rehearsal — replaying an event in your mind, going over what someone said in a meeting, mentally mapping out a series of steps, etc. — makes it significantly more likely you will remember what you replayed. As the researchers write: A brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of one to two weeks. We have also linked this rehearsal effect to processing in a particular part of the brain, the posterior cingulate. A week or two? That should be long enough for you to actually do something with whatever you wanted to remember. Then… Make a prediction. While it sounds odd, a study published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology shows the act of asking yourself whether you will remember something significantly improves the odds that you will remember, in some cases by as much as 50 percent. Thats especially true for prospective memories, or remembering to perform a planned action or intention at some point in the future. Following up with a customer. Checking on a vendor’s status. After you deal with a problem, determining the the root cause. Why playing the prediction game works is also somewhat unclear. Possibly the act of predicting is a little like testing yourself; as research shows, quizzing yourself is a highly effective way to speed up the learning process. What is clear is that the act of predicting helps your hippocampus better form and index those episodic memories for later access. Want to remember to do something in the future? Take a second and predict whether you will remember. That act alone makes it more likely you will. Then… Zone out for two minutes. According to a study published in Nature Reviews Psychology, “even a few minutes of rest with your eyes closed can improve memory, perhaps to the same degree as a full night of sleep.” Psychologists call it “offline waking rest.” In its purest form, offline waking rest can be closing your eyes and zoning out for a couple of minutes. But you can also daydream. Meditate. Clear your mind and think happy thoughts. While none of those sound productive — should you really be wasting time you could be learning? — intermittent lack of focus improves memory consolidation; in simple terms, constantly going from one thing to the next makes it hard for your brain to keep up. As the researchers write: Periods of reduced attention to the external world are a universal feature of human experience, which suggests that spending a portion of time disengaged from the sensory environment permit the reactivation of recently formed memory traces. This iterative reactivation of memory could strengthen and stabilize newly formed memories over time, contributing to early stages of memory consolidation during the first few minutes following encoding. The key is to be intentional about it. First, replay what you want to remember for 40 seconds or so. Then, predict whether you will remember it. Then, close your eyes, zone out, and engage in a minute or two of offline waking rest. As the researchers write, “Moments of unoccupied rest should be recognized as a critical contributor to human waking cognitive functions. And finally… Get a good night’s sleep. Here’s the effortless aspect of improving your memory. According to a study published in Psychological Science, peple who studied before bed, slept, and then did a quick review the next morning spent less time studying — and increased their long-term retention by 50 percent. The underlying mechanism is what psychologists call sleep-dependent memory consolidation: “Converging evidence, from the molecular to the phenomenological, leaves little doubt that offline memory reprocessing during sleep is an important component of how our memories are formed and ultimately shaped.” In simple terms, sleeping on it helps your brain file away what youve learned, and makes it easier to access when you need it. Thats also true where longer-term memory is concerned. Learning, then getting a good nights sleep, and then learning again is an extremely effective way to boost intelligence and skill. As the researchers write: We found that interleaving sleep between learning sessions not only reduced the amount of practice needed by half but also ensured much better long-term retention. Sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but sleeping between two learning sessions is a better strategy. Say youre learning a new sales demo. After a practice session, say the main bullets of your presentation out loud. Then mentally replay key elements of your presentation. Then predict whether youll remember what youve learned. Then take a minute or two to zone out. Then get a good nights sleep, do a quick review the next day, and work on the next chunk of information. Rinse and repeat, and neuroscience says youll spend less time learning — and you’ll remember a lot more. Which means youll be able to do more. Because what you know is only as good as what you do with it. By Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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