Q&A with Associate professor of organizational behavior at UNH Vanessa Druskat

Vanessa Druskat, an associate professor of organizational behavior and management at the University of New Hampshire’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, has spent her career observing what makes great companies excel, spending time with hospital units, Fortune 500 companies and professional sports teams.

In her new book, “The Emotionally Intelligent Team,” published by Harvard Business Review Press, Druskat explores the overlooked factor she says separates high-performing teams from the rest: emotional intelligence.

She approaches her work in part from the vantage point of a psychologist which she pursued while earning three degrees in psychology, culminating with a doctorate from Boston University.

Druskat recently appeared as a guest on NH Business Review’s “Down to Business” podcast with Editor Mike Cote and Managing Editor Amanda Andrews. This story is adapted from that interview and was edited for space and clarity.

Please give us an overview of the work that you do both at UNH and the background that went into your book.

This is my 23rd year at UNH, and they hired me here because I’m an expert on teamwork. They realized at the time that they needed that kind of expertise for their students, both undergraduates and MBAs.

I have three degrees in psychology … but I wanted to come to a business school because there’s a lot more freedom in studying the application of ideas.

I’ve always been interested in teams … but I wanted to be able to write about how do you help teams become better. In psychology, we talk about basic stuff like, what is a team? How is this defined?

We have some really awesome students here, and we put them in teams. I’m here to help them learn from that experience. We know that, just because you’ve been on a team, doesn’t mean that you know that you learn a lot from it, that it can help you learn to become a better team member or a better team leader.

How did you come to be in that in this place?

Like a lot of people who study teams, I was an athlete in my youth. I was actually co-captain of the cheerleading squad as my main sport. But I also played soccer, and I just love teamwork. I also started working on farms when I was young. I grew up in a farming community in western Massachusetts, and we always worked as a team when we were out there on the fields.

When I hit the workplace, I discovered that there was competition that kept people from working together and that teamwork wasn’t really teamwork. People say there’s no “I” in team, but there is a “me” in team. And there were a lot of “me’s” hanging out in those teams. And I just was frustrated. I said it could be better. I was even more frustrated with myself, because when the environment was like that, I would get competitive or I would get selfish, and I didn’t like myself in those situations.

That’s survival, right?

Absolutely. In my own research what I really looked at was how the environment impacts your behavior. Every team has a culture, a set of norms, which are what people perceive to be the way they’re supposed to behave in this team.

Other animals, if you think of us as homo sapiens, are born with instincts that tell them how to behave. What’s made humans unique and so good at what we do is that we adapt. We adapt that culture, and we can survive ice ages and all kinds of things because we’ll adapt our culture. My contention is that we’re not stuck with the selfish culture at work. In fact, if we do cooperate more, we do work together, support one another’s success, everyone is better off.

I learned by studying great teams and studying average teams in many different organizations … (that) the greats are far more cooperative, collaborative, unselfish. My quest has been to figure out how they got there, how they did that, and what they do.

What are some of the things that you teach those students about how to create a good team, and how that team is going to change over time?

Some of the things I say include you don’t have to be perfect yourself. You need to have people around you who are good at things that you’re not at. It’s impossible to be perfect at everything. I tell them it’s all about the team you put around you. Your success will depend on the quality of the people around you, but also the diversity in the sense that everyone’s good at different things.

I also teach them that the environment matters a lot. You can take even the most empathetic person, the most emotionally intelligent person, and put them in a team where no one else behaves that way, and they’re going to become as self-centered and unempathetic as everyone else.

I teach them about how to build an environment, routines, habits that will bring out the best in others.