the Coaching Studio 🎙️ with guest Vanessa Druskat, Ph.D.
Lyssa deHart Coaching
292 views
In this episode of the Coaching Studio, I sit down with Dr. Vanessa Druskat to talk about something most of us assume has an obvious answer: why do some teams just click, while others, full of talented people, never quite come together?
Vanessa’s answer challenges a lot of conventional thinking. You can put a room full of emotionally intelligent people together and still end up with a dysfunctional team, because emotional intelligence isn’t something a person carries into the room. It’s something a team builds, together, through its norms. We trace how she landed on that idea, back to her own adolescence working on farms, and a childhood spent moving between cultures with her international-educator parents, learning early on to read the unspoken rules of a new environment before anyone explained them to her.
We dig into her Team Emotional Intelligence model, nine norms organized into three clusters: how we help one another succeed, how we learn and advance together, and how we engage our stakeholders. Vanessa shares one of her earliest and most convincing findings, a $9.8 million performance gap between the highest- and lowest-performing teams in a manufacturing plant, driven entirely by how people treated one another, not by who was on the team.
Then we go deeper into belonging, and Vanessa doesn’t let popular advice off easy. She pushes back on the idea that people should find belonging within themselves so they’re not dependent on a group’s acceptance, and makes the case for why that falls short on real teams, especially for anyone in an environment that’s actively excluding them.
We also talk about what this means for leaders. Vanessa is direct about a hard truth: most companies try to build strong teams by hiring emotionally intelligent, self-aware individuals, and that strategy rarely works. What works is designing the conditions, the routines, the habits, the norms, that let ordinary people build something extraordinary together. Her practical takeaway is refreshingly simple: stop trying to fix people, start building culture.
You can connect with Vanessa here
Website: vanessadruskat.com
LinkedIn: LinkedIn: vanessa-druskat
Vanessa's Book: The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest https://amzn.to/4iKU3G3
Dr. Vanessa Druskat is an award-winning researcher and expert in team leadership who advises leaders and teams at organizations such as Ferrari, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson. Her three decades of research on the behaviors that differentiate outstanding from average-performing teams led to her recent book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest (HBR Press, 2025). The team performance model it shares is now used by over 300 team coaches to help leaders build innovative, efficient, higher-performing teams. Vanessa serves on the faculty at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, and on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.
About your host:
Lyssa deHart ditched her therapy practice to become a Leadership Confidence Coach. Along the way she discovered a passion for professional coaching and wanted to find ways to share that passion with the world. Come join her in discovering and meeting some of the most amazing professional coaches on the planet. Her goal is to inspire coaches. Lyssa is the author of StoryJacking: Change Your Dialog, Transform Your Life, The Reflective Coach - a 12 Month Journal, and her newest book Light Up: the Science of Coaching with Metaphors. Lyssa is an ICF PCC Assessor, Certified Mentor Coach, and budding Coach SuperVisor. Lyssa uses her understanding of the ICF Core Competencies, combined with her knowledge of Neuroscience, to work with people to become extraordinary professional coaches. Let's Go!
Where can you find Lyssa?
Website: https://lyssadehart.com/
Book: Light Up: The Science of Coaching with Metaphors - https://amzn.to/42iI74l
Book: Sticky Outcomes: at the Intersection of Coaching, Neuroscience, and Lasting Change - https://amzn.to/4qPkZp4
Lyssa deHart Coaching Academy: https://academy.lyssadehart.com
00:00:01 - Introduction to Team Emotional Intelligence
00:03:31 - Path to Social Psychology
00:09:53 - The Importance of Belonging in High-Performing Teams
00:14:57 - Team Emotional Intelligence Model & Research Insights
00:25:12 - Reading Emotion in the Room
00:29:51 - How Norms Drive Behavior (The School Bullying Study)
00:34:48 - Addressing Remote Work Norms & Multitasking
00:37:58 - AI’s Impact on Team Collaboration and Decision-Making
00:43:45 - Building Team Resilience Over Individual Resilience
00:55:52 - Recommended Reading for Team Coaches & Final Thoughts
1 Comments
the Coaching Studio 🎙️ with guest Vanessa Druskat, Ph.D.
Lyssa deHart Coaching
292 views
In this episode of the Coaching Studio, I sit down with Dr. Vanessa Druskat to talk about something most of us assume has an obvious answer: why do some teams just click, while others, full of talented people, never quite come together?
Vanessa’s answer challenges a lot of conventional thinking. You can put a room full of emotionally intelligent people together and still end up with a dysfunctional team, because emotional intelligence isn’t something a person carries into the room. It’s something a team builds, together, through its norms. We trace how she landed on that idea, back to her own adolescence working on farms, and a childhood spent moving between cultures with her international-educator parents, learning early on to read the unspoken rules of a new environment before anyone explained them to her.
We dig into her Team Emotional Intelligence model, nine norms organized into three clusters: how we help one another succeed, how we learn and advance together, and how we engage our stakeholders. Vanessa shares one of her earliest and most convincing findings, a $9.8 million performance gap between the highest- and lowest-performing teams in a manufacturing plant, driven entirely by how people treated one another, not by who was on the team.
Then we go deeper into belonging, and Vanessa doesn’t let popular advice off easy. She pushes back on the idea that people should find belonging within themselves so they’re not dependent on a group’s acceptance, and makes the case for why that falls short on real teams, especially for anyone in an environment that’s actively excluding them.
We also talk about what this means for leaders. Vanessa is direct about a hard truth: most companies try to build strong teams by hiring emotionally intelligent, self-aware individuals, and that strategy rarely works. What works is designing the conditions, the routines, the habits, the norms, that let ordinary people build something extraordinary together. Her practical takeaway is refreshingly simple: stop trying to fix people, start building culture.
You can connect with Vanessa here
Website: vanessadruskat.com
LinkedIn: LinkedIn: vanessa-druskat
Vanessa's Book: The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest https://amzn.to/4iKU3G3
Dr. Vanessa Druskat is an award-winning researcher and expert in team leadership who advises leaders and teams at organizations such as Ferrari, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson. Her three decades of research on the behaviors that differentiate outstanding from average-performing teams led to her recent book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest (HBR Press, 2025). The team performance model it shares is now used by over 300 team coaches to help leaders build innovative, efficient, higher-performing teams. Vanessa serves on the faculty at the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, and on the executive board of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.
About your host:
Lyssa deHart ditched her therapy practice to become a Leadership Confidence Coach. Along the way she discovered a passion for professional coaching and wanted to find ways to share that passion with the world. Come join her in discovering and meeting some of the most amazing professional coaches on the planet. Her goal is to inspire coaches. Lyssa is the author of StoryJacking: Change Your Dialog, Transform Your Life, The Reflective Coach - a 12 Month Journal, and her newest book Light Up: the Science of Coaching with Metaphors. Lyssa is an ICF PCC Assessor, Certified Mentor Coach, and budding Coach SuperVisor. Lyssa uses her understanding of the ICF Core Competencies, combined with her knowledge of Neuroscience, to work with people to become extraordinary professional coaches. Let's Go!
Where can you find Lyssa?
Website: https://lyssadehart.com/
Book: Light Up: The Science of Coaching with Metaphors - https://amzn.to/42iI74l
Book: Sticky Outcomes: at the Intersection of Coaching, Neuroscience, and Lasting Change - https://amzn.to/4qPkZp4
Lyssa deHart Coaching Academy: https://academy.lyssadehart.com
00:00:01 - Introduction to Team Emotional Intelligence
00:03:31 - Path to Social Psychology
00:09:53 - The Importance of Belonging in High-Performing Teams
00:14:57 - Team Emotional Intelligence Model & Research Insights
00:25:12 - Reading Emotion in the Room
00:29:51 - How Norms Drive Behavior (The School Bullying Study)
00:34:48 - Addressing Remote Work Norms & Multitasking
00:37:58 - AI’s Impact on Team Collaboration and Decision-Making
00:43:45 - Building Team Resilience Over Individual Resilience
00:55:52 - Recommended Reading for Team Coaches & Final Thoughts
I was researching about Engagement in teams and now I see how deeply this connected to Belonging too!
Plus, coincidentally I focus on joy practice with my family members and with coaching clients.
So your question at the end, Lyssa resonates a lot! Made my day🤍
Beautiful upcoming weekend to you !