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Emotionally Intelligent Teams With Vanessa Urch Druskat – This Week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel Conversation

Episode #1013 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast) is now live and ready for you to listen to:

At a time when organizations are wrestling with fractured cultures, hybrid work, and teams struggling to stay connected, it helps to learn from someone who has spent three decades proving that collaboration is not a personality trait but a designed environment, which is why this episode turns to the work of Vanessa Druskat, an award-winning researcher, educator at the University of New Hampshire, and one of the world’s leading experts on team emotional intelligence. Vanessa has devoted her career to understanding how teams actually function in the real world, conducting years of field research inside global companies, university systems, and high-pressure environments to uncover the norms, habits, and emotional cues that separate high-performing groups from those that merely coexist. She is a pioneer of the Team Emotional Intelligence (Team EI) model, a framework now used by leaders around the world to build team cultures rooted in shared understanding, psychological safety, and constructive emotional expression. Her latest book, The Emotionally Intelligent Team – Building Collaborative Groups That Outperform The Rest, anchors this conversation and brings together decades of research showing that great teams are not the inevitable result of great individuals but the product of intentional cultures that enable people to listen, challenge, support, and adapt together. In our discussion, Vanessa explores the evolution of emotional intelligence in the workplace, the persistent resistance to emotional concepts in both academia and business, and the growing gap between individual achievement systems and the collective realities of modern work. She explains why leaders must think more like coaches, why norms matter more than personalities, how remote work demands more deliberate emotional connection, and why teams must continually review and recalibrate their dynamics to sustain high performance. Drawing on insights from social neuroscience, organizational psychology, and global fieldwork, she shows how belonging, shared understanding, and a sense of influence are not “soft skills” but hard prerequisites for collaboration in an increasingly polarized and distracted world. Enjoy the conversation…

You can grab the latest episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel here (or feel free to subscribe via Apple Podcast or whatever platform you may choose): #1013 of Thinking With Mitch Joel (formerly Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast).

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.