Team Emotional Intelligence: The Secret to High-Performing Teams

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1:17And my favorite part is the built in bra. It makes it super easy to wear for yoga or honestly, as an everyday basic. You can find Flow Y Styles in store or online at lululemon.com. team emotional intelligence is when a group of people working together are good at understanding everyone's feelings and using that understanding to help each other and work better as a team you know we talk about often with our work that this combination of awareness and action sort of awareness of the people in the team how they're feeling what they're bringing and then doing something with that awareness. With emotion intelligence, it's creating more of the awareness and the action across the team.

2:01Oh, we must do a challenge and build meeting. The whole point of team emotion intelligence is it has to feel like a routine or a ritual. How regularly do you think that teams should reassess themselves? You can't have loads and loads of rituals and routines because people can't keep up and it's overwhelming and I think there's a balance to get right here. Hi, I'm Helen. And I'm Sarah. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where each week we take something that sparked our curiosity and turn it into some ideas for action for your squiggly career. So far, we've talked about how maps can be useful for your career.

2:40We did. That was one of our weirder weeks. We've talked about a Nobel peace-winning scientist. We've talked about Richard Feynman. We've done various different topics, and we are trying to make those as useful as possible for you. And it is Sarah's turn today to spark our curiosity for our squiggly careers. What are we going to be talking about? So today we're going to be talking about team emotional intelligence. So lots of you might have come across emotional intelligence before, and I had. I'd look at, I've read Daniel Goldman's work, and I think often it's something that is talked about in organisations.

3:14But I'd not seen the concept applied to teams before. So that sparked my interest. And there's a lady called Vanessa Erk-Druskat, I hope I'm pronouncing that broadly right, who's written an article on Harvard Business Review, which obviously we'll link to for everybody in the show notes. So that was my starting point for borrowing some brilliance. But I did go quite ambitious this week and I have used a lot of AI to help us and I've created a quiz, which got very exciting. So what is team emotional intelligence? so it's about the habits routines and norms that you have as a team and whether those habits are helping you to be a high-performing team and so I started off by asking Claude to explain team emotional intelligence to me in a way an eight-year-old would understand and in a single sentence I'd really recommend that as a prompt it's a really useful prompt I actually used it in a workshop the other day but i rather than asking ai i asked my group and they all actually did a really good job um so claude said team emotional intelligence is when a group of people working together are good at understanding everyone's feelings and using that understanding to help each other and work better as a team it's sort of you know we talk about often with our work that this combination of awareness and action and so it's sort of awareness of the the people in the team how they're feeling what they're bringing and then doing something with that awareness I think sometimes you get some people that are good at one or the other you know like for example you're like super high awareness I feel like you're always quite tuned into individuals and you'll often like call me on that and be like oh Helen that happened in that meeting and I think you might have missed it whereas I'm very like just naturally action orientated but I guess what we're looking for is this with emotional intelligence maybe it's it's creating more of the awareness and the action across the team yeah i think that's that's spot on and one of i suppose the payoff or the reason to care is the sort of an individual reason to care and then a collective reason so from certainly um her research it finds that when you've got emotionally intelligent teams everyone's just more motivated because that's that makes sense right because you're all understanding each other and you're also performing better together so the kind of simple why i think here is the whole being bigger than the sum of the parts and her point is that the emphasis shifts from individual performers like individually are we all performing really well to actually collectively are we performing really well so you know that's kind of like all of us is bigger than any one of us that's the sentiment there is definitely crossover when i when i've been reading the work and kind of diving in definitely crossover psychological safety so funny your brain is exactly where I've gone oh hang on a minute because don't we talk about like yeah high trust teams equals high performing teams so how does it work with that one yeah and so there's quite a lot of similarities what I particularly liked about this though is so I read the HBR article and I thought right what what could I do with this how could I start to make this useful for me if I'm going to borrow some brilliance and I've challenged myself to then use Claude my current favorite GPT, which people will know if they've done the skill sprint that that was my, that's my current favorite, to try and create some sort of analysis for our team.

6:42And actually the article really helps you to do that. So the prompts that I used were create a quiz that I could share with my team using these categories. I'll talk about the categories in a moment. Use this for a scoring scale. And actually there's one suggested in the article. So I just used that. I was like, let's be consistent with that. So it's just like a one to five scale. Make the quiz anonymous because I thought, oh, you know, some of the questions people might feel more comfortable as anonymous. And then give me the ability to view the team results without redoing the quiz each time.

7:12Now, I will say I had mixed success. So firstly, I was like, I've done it. It worked. I didn't do all of these prompts at once, which would have been better. So I think I iterated as I went, you know like I built it and then I was like oh no I've forgotten this part so then I was like can you now redo the quiz with this added in can you now redo the quiz again with this added in and so I think I've got about 75 % of the way there with this it definitely works individually I've been able to do it you've been able to do it I haven't quite got the aggregate view working in the way that I would like it to but I think I think I'm really close I was very impressed experiment thank you sarah sent me and sarah sent me the link she's like can you fill this in so we've got some insight for the podcast and i went on i was like have you created this it's like yes i have we would normally use a type form for i think anonymous surveys and it's a great platform but it does take a little bit of knowing it and building it whereas and actually i thought yours looked really good and it worked really well so um definitely wanted to give a go but it's quite a good way of borrowing brilliance right you know when you're sort of taking something and then you're trying to make it your own you know the um what does it mean for me question it helped me quite quickly to go what does this mean for me and because it's team emotional intelligence what does this mean for us in terms of our team emotional intelligence so we both did it independently and the three categories are understanding each other better routinely assessing strengths and opportunities and routinely talking to stakeholders and then as we go into some ideas later we'll we'll go into the descriptions of each of those a bit more because they are really important those descriptions and then there are questions under each of those but I thought we'd start with comparing our scores so you get an overall score kind of out of five mine was 3.19 out of five and actually the scores went down for each of them so I was just over four for understanding each other better 3.3 for the strengths opportunities and two for routinely talking stakeholders i mean i have questions on the the three areas and how they create emotionally intelligent teams but i'm going to hold it until we go through each one yeah um but i'm just going to put out there that routinely talking to stakeholders would not be one of the things that i would i would think made you an emotionally intelligent team but i'm so i'm i'm curious to learn a little bit more about why that why that's in the mix but um our scores on sarah's survey that she created from reading the article are actually pretty similar mine mine's slightly more positive which we decided was quite standard standard but it's basically the same so i think sarah got 3.19 out of 5 for how emotionally intelligent she thought our team was and i got 3.39 um and actually for each category we were in they were in the same order in terms of how we kind of rated them um so yeah we're not too we're not too far away so now i think what you can do is go from the what so what is team emotional intelligence to the so what so we're like so what does that mean for us as a team that's kind of what we've done with that quick analysis to get us started then you're into the now what now what do we do with that data because you've got the sort of current state but then you've got to think about well what what do we do with that data how do we make that data useful how do we turn those insights into action so we're going to go through each of those three areas i'm going to describe in a bit more detail so you all get a feel for what's under that category because i do think some of it is surprising and i got some of it i'd made some assumptions about what would be in some categories actually wasn't right so it's worth understanding those and then the way that i've turned this into action is i've just used what worked well and even better if so i've kind of gone well what's working well in our team at the moment that's helping us to be an emotionally intelligent team and if I was coming up with one even better if what could we try so that's the structure so understanding each other better the one we both gave the highest score to so this is all about understanding each other's needs you know the talents and skills of people in the team again linked psychological safety where you know about people's strengths there's definitely that sense people feel like they're treated with respect um you give each other feedback that help members learn and grow so feedback is in there which i think for some teams um would put the scores down you know there'll be a specific question around feedback hard to get feedback flowing in teams and so my reflection on this one was what's working well for us at the moment i think we're particularly good at strength spotting you know we even did a brilliant because exercise at our recent squiggly staycation um we're doing work on things like job crafting at the moment so that's about working with people's talents and skills to kind of make sure we're using those um and generally i think people are very connected in our team when we talk to people in our team about what matters most about work they use that word connection a lot i think we might we might have shared that before i didn't use that word but everybody else does so everyone else is very kind of connected very kind of collaborative would you have any other observations helen on the what's working well I think we people individually support each other as well I think I see that in our team a lot so we have like this kind of the collective we come together as a team and it all feels very connected um but actually I I'm really proud when I hear about oh I went around to somebody's house and we worked on this together or we met in a coffee shop halfway and we did this because we have a remote team I think that's a particularly nice way that people are understanding each other and demonstrating it in in a remote environment where they're not just kind of sitting next to each other in an office all day and I think part of the respect I was also thinking you know people do their best to support and respect like everybody's priorities and I don't people are not very judgmental and everyone's got different things they care about or different ways of working because everyone our team works so differently I think we do generally have that kind of sense of oh well how one person works is going to be different to somebody else so I think that that means it's just naturally a lot of respect so the even better if suggestion that I came up with was challenge and build.

13:18So challenge and build is a way of giving feedback, maybe on some of the things that might be harder to hear, or where you really you want to kind of give feedback to really improve something. And the reason that I chose this is we don't use this idea very often in Amazing If, but I have used it lots recently in a workshop. So we shared our pod sheets in a workshop with one of our big learning partners. And I just asked everybody in those workshops and we've done lots of them with thousands and thousands of people um so it's quite a brave thing to do but actually it ended up being very fun so i showed a pod sheet and i said right we're going to do a challenge and build um what's one word you would use to describe that pod sheet and what's one change you would make to the pod sheet and kind of ask those two things so really simple questions to do a challenge and build and if i hadn't done that we i think the pod sheet would be exactly the same today as it was two months ago but by doing that I really quickly got from those groups okay the pod sheet actually does feel overwhelming there are too many words on there we're trying to be useful but actually in our attempts to be useful we've probably just got a bit overwhelming for people and then people were suggesting really useful changes just like you know a few more headers a bit more white space can you make it more visual and some people then started from scratch and came up with completely different ideas but it was just such a quick way of getting feedback on something that is really easy we could have just kept doing in the same way so I think I've already seen that work really well funnily enough it's sort of one of our ideas that then has worked better sort of elsewhere than it has internally for us and I think sometimes that's because we rely on you know like a meeting oh we must do a challenge and build meeting whereas i was starting to think about the whole point of team emotion intelligence is it has to feel like a routine or a ritual so you know like it can't be something you've got to remember so i guess when things become language you know if i'm if i'm in a in a meeting that was already in the diary and i said actually if you've got five minutes can we just do a quick challenge and build on this and so yeah when it becomes less of a task you have to remember to do and more just language that so we talk about i don't know like borrowed brilliance for example has become part of our language what worked well even better if it's become part of our language mistake moments has become part of our language and I think when and when some of these activities just the team identifies with them I guess that's when it becomes part of what makes the team emotionally intelligent yeah and I think maybe what would make this easier so my observation from doing a lot of challenge and build um with these groups who don't know is that well is having a few questions as a frame was a really helpful starting point so if you just said let's just challenge and build on this proposal everyone sort of goes in different directions whereas actually if you if you are the person sort of instigating the challenge and build if you do um what i did which is kind of going right well what's one word that would sum it up what's one change that you would make what's one thing you would do differently you if you come up with those questions or even if you had a set of questions as a team that are like challenge and build questions to choose from could be a longer list and just choose some you could ask ai to come up with some challenge and build questions i wonder if that helps everyone to get started because maybe otherwise it just feels don't know a bit too vague or it could be a bit unwieldy so can i just recap for a moment because i want to kind of make sure i'm following it and everyone's like oh how could i do what sarah has done for my team so the first thing is that you can read the article you don't need to but there is a broader thing about taking articles and turning it into something that you can relate to by creating a survey like you've done so people could create the survey but essentially the survey is a way for you to rate your team's emotional intelligence across three areas and one of the ones is the one we just talked about so understanding each other better and so you get a starter score and ideally that should be a team's view so it's not just my view of how the team's performing it's the team's view and then as a team because again And I'm conscious this is just you and me talking about what worked well, even better.

17:25If ideally it's a team conversation, what do we think we do well? If that's the definition of understanding each other better, what do we do well? Which is your point about strengths, for example. And what's at least one thing that we think we could do even better? And so, you know, your framing there was challenge and build, but adding that into things that are already happening rather than it being another meeting. yeah because it has to end up as a ritual or a norm for it to sort of contribute i think to team emotional intelligence is the way that i've understood it yeah um and kind of if it's not it probably won't won't do that so the next one is assessing strengths and opportunities which is not quite what you might imagine it wasn't quite what i thought it was going to be so i was like oh is that about strengths of individuals in the team that's not what it's about it's more about your strengths as in your ways of working so how effective are you how efficient are you are you always reviewing processes and performance like always getting better actually when you read that description it's about like always building better it's probably the words that we would use and it's a mixture of anticipating problems and challenges so kind of looking ahead I think quite a lot of critical thinking when you really like look at this one um so that's the kind of the anticipating the being kind of critical they're kind of striving to be better risks like thinking about the risks that might happen and then there's when problems do happen which they will um do you take quick actions to solve it so it's more about like strengths and opportunity spotting as like a group around like the work that you do and how you work rather than at an individual level that makes sense your definition makes sense yeah but i get why that title can be it could take you to the wrong place yeah you know like sometimes it is where you like you do actually need the detail or you could go a bit wrong okay so what did you well i thought we were i think we're really good fast fixers so as a team when things do go wrong everybody is pretty responsive people want to help um probably because everyone's really supportive and we do fix to fast like we in the main we i think we resolve things and kind of get under the skin of why it's wrong and what's wrong and what we need to do and it probably does help us that we have a value as a company of being work in progress so because you're work in progress you go well we don't want to stay in a steady state we do want we experiment we're good we're much better now than we used to be experimenting and a lot of those experiments are around the effectiveness of what we do so I thought oh the podcast actually we've really looked a lot more at the last year the effectiveness of the podcast for effectiveness for us would be usefulness and then we are going like right how do we make it more efficient how do we make it more effective for us but also for our listeners um here i think the ebi um the even better if is we have a very optimistic team so when we've done things like profiling and things in the past you've got lots of people who um you know glass is always half full and it's all going to be fine um and you're very enthusiastic um and you're very like this as well um so we don't have a team where people are naturally about spotting problems i don't think it's kind of a natural skill set that we've got or natural critical thinkers so for people who've done things like you know the color profiles before that's sometimes described as like the the blueness critical thinkers you spot you spot problems before they even arise i think i'm the most blue person like in our team it's not even my first one in terms of my kind of profile i was at a museum i mean museum is a very grand word for what i went to um i went to the paradox museum oh yeah yeah and it was really funny i mean i i'll leave my views of the full experience for another day but um as i was going around there was a lady who was in front of me who was what I would describe as a very blue person so there was a lot of like yellow people who were just excited about playing with all the random things that were in there like yeah um and and then there was this one lady who kept going around and she obviously had some kind of like science background and she just kept going because I was sort of following her around and she's like well that's not a paradox and then she proceeded to explain in a very critical way why that wasn't a but she was and she wasn't being particularly negative because I actually was quite intrigued but I was like, well, I'm kind of here to learn and I'd quite like to work out why that isn't a paradox.

21:51Why is it not a paradox? But that would have been a bit weird if I was just following her around, listening and learning. But it was that, you know, she was a blue person because she was critically evaluating the experience and just identifying where it could have been better and what wasn't quite working. But she wasn't being negative. Yeah, so I don't think that's what our team would do. I think they would just go around and really enjoy it. Yeah, I think you're right. I'm just here for the experience and kind of this is great I would probably do I'm probably not smart enough to know about all the different paradoxes but I would definitely I struggle to not think how would this be better like I think I do think in that way and so Helen and I were chatting about this so we were like oh so what would we what would we then do as a team like practically what could become a routine or a kind of ritual and we were like actually we are quite good at taking a current state and iterating so you know like what we've done before like how do we make it a bit a bit better so that bit we're okay at what we probably don't really do is any scenarios and I think if you do scenario planning or kind of scenario imagining you think really differently but you also get to some very different kind of answers and so then you get into more improving rather than just iterating and so like we were thinking about like for example let's say when we do our next sprint next skill sprint which we will coming soon everybody not that soon soonish um so when we do our next sprint probably our natural inclination as a team is just go how do we make that sprint that bit better next time like we've done a few now we'll just keep iterating and we do we do make things that bit better next time but probably what we don't do is just pause and imagine all of the different scenarios around that sprint and then say well what would we do if or how about this happened what would our kind of response to that be we probably don't very often talk about worst case scenarios what if no one signs up to the next sprint because actually something in the world happens that week that means then no one can do it i mean that's not that yeah unrealistic based on the last five years you know like based on some of the things that you're like that that could happen and then we might have designed something that then no one can use you know what if someone really famous says i'm gonna sprint and suddenly you get double the amount of people like we break our website or something yeah yeah who knows who knows um but i think that's it's probably not something that we've really experimented with as a team and again i just wonder whether as part of when you're already planning something whether you could a i think ai can help you with scenarios so if you if you're struggling to come up with them i think you could describe what you're going to do and you could say to a gbt okay come up with a best and okay and a worst case scenario based on this and i think it would give you something as like a springboard to start with so it might even be about adding it into agendas like let's have a discussion around a best okay and worst case scenario when we're kind of planning something big um it might also be about i think i wonder for our team if i was being really realistic i wonder if it's how do you help people who want to be positive to be able to talk about these things in a way where they don't feel bad because i don't they don't it doesn't make me feel bad but i think if you're naturally very enthusiastic people don't want to talk about worst case scenarios because they because everything's going to be fine right and so i was like oh how do you the thing I would have to think about a bit more I think for our team is how do you make this fun and how do you because it still needs to be sort of optimistic yeah in a sort of scenario way otherwise I think people won't enjoy it and it won't ever become a ritual or routine yeah I don't know if I've cracked that either but you know statements like what could break the business or yeah I don't think people in our team would like that it's a bit too a bit too disaster disaster yeah i i think people would like you and i could probably do that because i think we probably have done some of those things before but i think maybe people could you've got to test it right maybe this is a good example of like sometimes you just got to test some of these questions or something like that just yeah just just to get playful like for the next 10 minutes let's like like write down all the things but i guess the the bigger point and i i hadn't thought about this which is like the emotionally intelligent teams are the ones that can they can both proactively spot problems and they can respond to them promptly like because your point is we're really good at responding to problems promptly because we're quite a highly reactive supportive team but the really emotional intelligent ones spot the problems before they need sorting it's because you're good at sensing right it's because you're i think if you are emotionally intelligent you sense and you look ahead and you're probably quite good at imagining and because you you have a feel for what might go wrong you know it's like some of it's like judgment i think as well you know like sensing and judgment um so yeah i think i'll be a fun one for us to have a play with because i do also i feel this is like my own point of view i haven't read this around team emotional intelligence is you've also got to work with the dna of the sort of team that you have and so you know that was kind of my point around if we were going to do like what could what could break our business I think we would have to do that in a really fun fun way yeah otherwise I think our team either would just find it hard to contribute but what if that does happen yeah what if it does happen what if Helen and Sarah do fall out what then well they just won't contribute or they were just like but that's not going to happen yeah but that's you sort of then you're like oh but that's not we're not going to learn if we can't have a play with it so the last one that we screwed ourselves badly on um or not as what should we say not not not as good um an area for improvement an area for intelligence in the team yeah so like you said this would surprise me a bit but then actually when you start to get into it i'm like okay this makes sense so this is about building relationships with stakeholders and as a team do you speak to and build relationships with other groups or departments that are going to then affect your performance and i think probably you need to think about this both inside and outside of your business depending on what kind of business you are so actually when I took myself back to big company world I was like oh of course because emotionally intelligent teams don't act as a silo and in most big companies you get loads of silos and then you're not you don't understand all the interrelationships the cross-functional nature of what you do how if this team aren't doing the thing that they need to do that you can't do what you need to do and no team is an island you know like every team has those interdependencies so I think what they are describing here is kind of going beyond your team and thinking about well like who else who else impacts our performance and are we actively building those relationships um are we really thinking about kind of partnering with those people like understanding what's going on in their world because part of being emotionally intelligent is being empathetic and you can only be empathetic if you understand what's happening like for other people um so i think this is about escaping silos kind of being empathetic being quite meerkat like you know we talk about being having like meerkat moments like popping your head up and seeing what's going on in the world and i think in a big company actually probably easier to understand because i think a lot of people would recognize siloed working i think in a smaller company like ours when i was answering these questions i was actually thinking do you know what we still have examples where parts of our team don't talk to each other so i was like eve eve that has definitely happened in the last year so even in a small company that's happened so there's a bit about like are we working together as one overall team or lots of mini teams and then for us we've also got all of the learning partners that we work with and we work with about 100 companies all across the world and actually going are we proactively building relationships with those people that we work with because if you go back to that bit of affect our performance those learning partners our ability to build those relationships with those people really affects our ability to do our job to design and deliver really good learning experiences to keep doing that to kind of keep building our business i have some thoughts on our what worked well even better ifs on this one okay you go for it Well, I think on our What Went Well, you know, you talked about, oh, even in our team, sometimes we're not connected.

30:23I think one of the things that we have done that I think other companies could copy or other teams could copy is we sort of borrowed that flywheel concept. So, yes, the flywheel concept comes from Jim Collins. And we can we can maybe link to that on the pod sheet if you want, if you're listening or watching. He's been on the podcast. He has an episode that I absolutely loved. I mean, there are some funny stories about that. That was a good episode. It was an intense episode for Sarah. But the flywheel concept that I think helps us to connect as a company and see things from each other's perspectives is it's how our business grows and it is how everybody's roles connect to each other.

30:58And we have tied metrics to that. We talk about it every month. So there is a lot of clarity and transparency in our company about how roles are connected and how everyone's roles is helping kind of squiggly to grow bigger and better. So I think that's a good thing that we should say we kind of work well. We work well there. Or did you add as well for what worked well on this one? I think we get good feedback from the partners that we work with, that they really trust us, that we are kind of on their side. And they sort of believe that we're like an extension of their team. I mean, I would say generally that's not feedback about us.

31:35That's feedback about everybody else in Amazing If. Yeah, in our team. That's not us. We sort of turn up and do the learning. But we do get that feedback. So I was like, that's a good data point. in terms of you know talking to our stakeholders understanding kind of what what they need I think we do that well um I actually saw this in action as an even better if even yesterday obviously it was on my mind and then something happened yesterday where I was like oh that's because we don't do this so we were for our new book learn like a lobster we've got this virtual lobster library where there's accelerators like workshop accelerators that we're doing and we did the first one yesterday and we forgot to include our own team so we had invited hundreds of people to come to this accelerator to do the first one and it suddenly occurred to me that is one of our biggest priorities this idea of learning like a lobster is one of the biggest priorities for our company it goes way beyond a book it's really important that everybody sort of understands the key concepts not everyone will have read that book yet cover to cover in our team the single best way to upskill everybody on that is for everybody to come to those half an hour accelerators and we didn't do it and you know it's a good it's a good even better if it's a good mistake moment but it is a example of how we're not kind of thinking across the company what we really focused on was we had an accelerator we needed to run for some external people so had we set the tech up right what were we going to deliver and I think I asked the question I think I thought of it 24 hours before and obviously by then a couple of our team had proactively sorted themselves out great but obviously if you've if you've not put in your diary by then you probably you probably can't come so it did mean that like 50 % of our team missed out on a moment where actually we would have been kind of connecting all together so what's the I'm trying to think about what is the question that people could take there to apply to their team like what are the moments that matter this month that we want everyone to be involved in is it that kind of a that kind of a prompt i think if it's your because i think there are two things i actually i think to make this practical you've got to think internal and external so that's an internal prompt what are the you know the the moments that matter most for our team that we all want to be involved in great and we would have said that if we had asked that question at the start of a month we would have spotted that yeah we would have been that's good i do think there's an external or certainly for us as a company there's an external thing about who are you proactively building relationships with that are not just you know the meetings that pop up in your week so i think people are very good at building relationships that are just there as part of their day job they almost couldn't get their job done without those conversations but then there's you know the there's the relationship building where you're more asking questions about what's going on in someone's world you're working out what's important to people they are they might still have an agenda but they're more curious and they're more about being intrigued and again as a team I don't think we're that good at doing those and this was actually an example that I did read from the article where one team set a target where they said every single person in the team every month is going to meet one new person from outside of the company and then you have to then go into they'd done like a teams channel um and it was like who we're learning from i think i don't need to quite call it that that's probably me using an amazing phrase but it was that kind of sentiment and you had to share who you had met and like what you had learned so that that's a good example of going yeah oh um it's kind of curious conversations it's not necessarily curious career conversations because i think team emotion intelligence is about team performance so this wouldn't be about going to have a chat about your career it would be me saying oh well I've gone to have a conversation with um a HR director that I've not met before this is who I met um this is what we talked about this is just kind of what I noticed or like what I observed and I was thinking oh we could all probably do that in our team that would probably be a good thing for our team as well because everyone does work remotely to like keep the connections going but a different kind of connection and also I'd be really interested to read those I'd love to read you you did a version with your ceo thing i was thinking a while ago that's our prototype the idea that i had there so the routinely talking to stakeholders what you could do to make that even better as a team i think you can have a really useful team conversation which i'm just going to call mapping and mattering for now where you could map your stakeholders that could affect the performance of the team um and you know that inside and outside of the business and then i I think against each person, I think you need to know and write down at least, well, what do we know that matters to that person?

36:26And I think if they're on your map but you don't know what matters to them, I think that's a bit of a red flag. And you can go then and meet with them, like map, matter, meet. There's probably something in there. But I think you should, if we haven't got that clarity, then you can't really serve and support the stakeholders. So it's probably quite a useful exercise for teams to do. A bit like influence impact mapping. yeah which i read you know which again if you google that you can just it's a really easy way to think about your stakeholders um and it sort of prompts you just to go beyond you know the sort of the waiting to see what happens to you in terms of the stakeholders that you meet versus creating the conversations that matter i think that i think there's like a waiting versus creating thing here and i think probably the reason we both scored ourselves and like as a team like lower on this one is like we're probably more we we respond but we're probably a bit more passive versus kind of creating the conversations that you think well we've got gaps here or these are the people that we want to talk to to kind of find out more so overall I've loved it this week I got very into team emotional intelligence may I ask you a final question on you may because Sarah has sort of really dived into it and I've just been learning through the conversation really um and the last question that I have is how regularly do you think having gone into this that teams should reassess themselves I actually think not too often because the risk would be and you say this to me sometimes because I think because I'm ideasy and that the potential risk is like initiative overload you know like you can't have loads and loads of rituals and routines because people can't keep up and it's overwhelming and i think there's like there's a balance to get right here and as you described we already have quite a lot you know we have mistake moments what worked well even better if there's there's quite a few that we can name we talk about borrowed brilliance links to learn from lots of ways that that they are definitely our kind of team norms so i think you've got to be really mindful of not having too many is like the first thing so like the volume of them um i also think it's okay to experiment and see what sticks so it doesn't really talk about that in anything i've read but personally from what we have seen better to just experiment and try stuff out and the stuff that sticks is the stuff that becomes your norm you know rather than over designing a norm like now i'd almost rather just try something and be like oh that's stuck that didn't that's probably a norm that probably is not i would say probably every six months i think every six months to kind of go you could redo the questionnaire but you could also just i would probably just use the what worked well even better if um and you could just have a team conversation where you keep coming back to this because this will like any of this sort of work i think it's never about going we're aiming for the perfect 15 15 out of 15 like no no team is that good i think the teams that are really good are the ones that just continually improve and continually keep learning it's not like they reach this like heightened state of perfection and excellence they but they keep coming back and they're like oh we tried that that didn't work oh this half worked or half of the team have done this but actually the other half of team have not like why not what's got in the way so i think that's it's kind of the conversation it's the actions it's the reflection that then probably feels feels really useful i really like it as a concept research does yeah it provides a structure for the reflection and a structure for the conversation i think what you've done is added a bit of a what worked well even better if amazing ifness to make it easy easy then to apply and i will give her book so i haven't read her books i'm very mindful with borrowed brilliance that we don't want them all to be books um i have got into this enough that i have bought the book um and also i wanted to be supportive of her work because i was like i feel like i've borrowed a lot of brilliance from from vanessa who i've not met so this is what her book looks like very nice very nice cover um and it's called the emotionally intelligent team i have started it and there's a really good um forward actually i don't usually read forwards but there's forward by daniel goldman so they have made the explicit link between individual and team which i think is interesting to read the difference so i think with some borrowed brilliance you know you kind of go i've got enough now whereas other times you do think i do want to dive a bit deeper so it has made me think like actually i am going to read i'm going to get the book interested enough but the other thing that this week just really showed me was like you know you can take actually probably the thing that i loved the most was taking one thing an article and turning it into something different it was the using claude to then make this useful for our team it's the what worked well is even better if that's where all the value has come from um so i actually don't think you necessarily need to read the book i think you can just read the article you can come up with your own quiz you can use what we've talked about today and what we'll do is i'll put in the squiggly careers in action which is our weekly newsletter i'll put some screenshots of the survey that sarah created so that if you want to create your own it nearly works it's fine it nearly works good enough for now but just so that you can see if you want to create your own team survey in claude or you can use typeform or whatever you want but you can just see kind of what what that looks like so um we'll put that in squiggly careers in action and if you are not signed up for squiggly careers in action that's our weekly newsletter um the link for that will be in the show notes if you can't find that just email us helen and sarah at squiggly careers.com and we will send you the link for squiggly careers in action but that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening we hope you're finding them useful i'm back with you again next week bye for now bye everyone