Vanessa Druskat explains why we’re so bad at building teams — and why technology might not solve our biggest problems
Many leaders assume that new AI technology will improve their teams: increased productivity, fresh and innovative ideas, everything faster and better.
However, some thinkers are questioning whether AI can actually solve the most entrenched people problems in the workplace. Will it address the workplace loneliness crisis? Will it increase levels of trust?
It might not even make your team that much more innovative.
The real problems holding back workplace collaboration? They’re not technology problems.
“There’s always been some form of technology that leaders have counted on to improve teams and to satisfy their workers or make things easier and faster and more efficient,” says Vanessa Druskat, author of The Emotionally Intelligent Team and professor at the University of New Hampshire.
“You can’t skirt the people issues,” she says. “It’s people that make or break your team. It’s people that make or break your organisation’s performance.”
More managers are relying on AI
Leaders are already turning to AI technology to guide management decisions, according to recent surveys. In an online poll of 1,342 managers, 64% reported using AI at work, and of those, 94% said they look to AI tools to “make decisions about the people who report to them.”
This trend is likely to grow as a smaller pool of managers becomes responsible for increasingly large cohorts of direct reports. Today, people managers oversee twice as many employees as they did five years ago.
While AI can enhance the work of a team, Druskat warns that companies will miss the mark if they don’t consider human connection and interaction.
“It’s the integration of our skills and our talents and our ideas that produce responses to complex problems or that produce innovation,” Druskat says. “Innovation has always been about people coming together and talking and arguing.”
AI can help you be productive, but it can’t replace human connection. It may be a useful tool in the team, but not having access to your people leader will be a real barrier to innovation.
What drives high-performance teams?
“Leaders don’t really know how to build teams,” Druskat says. Too often, they focus on the individual skills or personalities, which are not good predictors of future behaviour. Instead of trying to remove bad apples from the team to improve performance, Druskat’s 30 years of research suggests that environmental and structural factors are far more important.
“People predictably behave badly in certain situations, and those situations are where they don’t feel like they’re accepted and understood,” she says.
For leaders who want to create high-performance teams in Australia, the answer is to build an environment where employees’ experiences inspire the right outcomes. Druskat gives the example of her research in the 1990s at a biopharma organisation where top-performing teams were generating the equivalent of A$9.8 million more per year in revenue compared to average teams (converted from the original US$ figure).
The difference? How employees felt heard, valued, and respected.
Great Place To Work® research also finds these experiences in the top-performing organisations, such as the Best Workplaces in Australia™, which consistently deliver much higher revenue per employee than the market.
3 sets of behaviours that build better teams
Here are the norms and experiences that allow teams to dramatically outperform their peers, from Druskat’s research:
1. How employees help one another succeed
The first step is to ensure that employees can get to know each other. This shared knowledge allows team members to play to the strengths of others and builds a shared sense of respect.
“Getting to know people is irreplaceable,” Druskat says. “Once you get to know one another, you can start giving one another feedback. The No. 1 norm in my model — it’s linked to performance in every team I’ve ever studied — is getting to know one another.”
2. Involve everyone in conversations about improvement
“The important thing is that everyone feels they have a sense of influence,” Druskat says. Team members want to feel a sense of control, to know that they are part of the conversation.
When feedback is collected from every part of the team, the whole group can take ownership of the final outcome.
3. Recognise that you lack the information you need
The highest-performing teams have the humility to ask for ideas from outside the group. Can you draw on the expertise of others — and have the emotional intelligence to navigate those requests?
“Every time we enter a team, social needs are activated,” Druskat explains. “It’s not rocket science.”
How you can use AI to improve teams
What are some good uses of AI to improve connection in your teams? It might help you design an activity that gets your team talking to each other, Druskat says.
“AI can be used to come up with ideas: ‘What should we do in our meeting? Let’s just do whatever AI says,’” Druskat suggests. AI might also make it easier for teams to embrace an activity that feels silly or embarrassing at the outset.
AI can also be a skills builder. Leaders can practise a conversation with AI first or run ideas past an AI tool to help make them better or anticipate criticism. What won’t work is using AI as a replacement for your own skills.
“I look at people right now who are relying on technology and aren’t building those interpersonal skills,” she says. “Collaboration requires conflict — and that requires a solid relationship where your ideas bump against mine — not my AI bumping against your AI.”
