 Part 4: How Strong Is the Culture–Performance Link, Really?
We rarely question the line “culture drives performance” – it feels intuitively true. This series asks how strongly that claim is supported by evidence. It is for leaders, HR, and OD practitioners who are making decisions about where to invest scarce time, money, and leadership attention. In this part, the aim is to help you calibrate just how powerful culture appears to be compared with other predictors of performance – and what that means for your priorities. Introduction We rarely question the statement, 'culture drives performance'. It is repeated in boardrooms, strategy documents, and leadership offsites. It feels intuitively correct. But intuition is not evidence. If culture is one of the most powerful drivers of organisational success, we should expect to see a strong and consistent empirical relationship between culture and performance. So what does the research actually show? The Science The CIPD rapid evidence assessment reviewed meta-analyses and controlled studies examining the link between organisational culture and performance. The findings are clear:
That comparison is uncomfortable, because it challenges where we place our attention. Key Findings The evidence suggests several important conclusions:
It also highlights a methodological issue. Much culture research relies on cross-sectional survey data. That makes it difficult to establish:
What Does This Mean in Practice? If culture’s predictive power is modest, several possibilities emerge for practice. First, culture may be a contextual amplifier rather than a primary engine. It shapes how other levers – strategy, structure, leadership, talent – play out day to day. Second, culture may interact with other predictors rather than operate independently. For example, good leadership might have more impact in enabling conditions of psychological safety and trust. Third, we may have under-invested in other organisational-level predictors of performance. The wider research literature suggests paying close attention to:
If You’re a Leader or HR Practitioner, Try This Week To translate this into action, you can reassess where you focus effort:
A Quote to Reflect On “The association between organisational culture and performance is moderate to low.” — Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review A Question to Reflect On If culture is not the strongest predictor of performance: What other variables in your organisation might deserve equal – or greater – scrutiny? If you can name them, your next strategic decision may be to rebalance where you invest effort: treating culture as important context, not the only story. Further Reading
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 Part 3: Can we measure culture – or are we measuring something else?
At work, we behave as if “culture” is something we can capture in a dashboard. We run surveys, plot index scores, and compare ourselves to benchmarks. This series asks what those numbers are actually telling us. In this part, the aim is to help leaders, HR, and OD practitioners distinguish between measuring “culture” in the abstract and measuring concrete constructs such as fairness, trust, or role clarity that you can genuinely act on. Introduction If culture matters, we should be able to measure it. That seems reasonable. Across organisations, we run:
But a more uncomfortable question sits beneath all of this: Are we measuring culture or are we measuring something adjacent to it? The Science The CIPD evidence review examined how organisational culture is assessed across the research literature. Several issues stand out:
In some cases, prominent tools such as OCAI and DOCS were originally designed to measure organisational effectiveness. They were later positioned as culture instruments. This creates a circular problem. If a tool measures effectiveness-related variables and then correlates with performance, are we observing: Culture → Performance Or simply: Effectiveness indicators → Performance The distinction is not academic nit-picking. It goes to the heart of what we believe we are managing. The CIPD review also notes that many studies rely on cross-sectional surveys and self-report data, often completed by senior managers. That introduces further concerns:
Key Findings From the evidence:
It is possible that culture surveys are measuring:
What Does This Mean in Practice? This is where it becomes practical. When you run a culture survey, ask: What constructs are actually being assessed? If employees respond to items about:
If low scores reflect poor role clarity, the intervention is structural. If low scores reflect pay inequity, the intervention is economic. If low scores reflect leadership inconsistency, the intervention is behavioural. If everything is labelled culture, solutions become vague. Measurement clarity forces intervention precision. This does not mean stop surveying. It means: be explicit about what your instrument captures and resist the temptation to let the word culture absorb multiple system variables without differentiation. If You’re a Leader or HR Practitioner, Try This Week To turn this into action, you can take a more forensic look at your “culture” data:
A Quote to Reflect On “Although these instruments have often provided good predictive validity… there is no evidence of construct validity, meaning that it is unclear what exactly is being measured.” Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review A Question to Reflect On When your organisation receives its next culture report: Do you know which underlying constructs are being measured? And do your interventions match those constructs? If the answer is “not really”, your most impactful next step may be to tighten the link between what you measure, what you call it, and what you actually do. Further Reading
 Part 2: If Culture Improves Performance, How Exactly?
At work, we often say “culture drives performance” as if the pathway is obvious. This series explores what the evidence actually shows about that claim. It is for leaders, HR, and OD practitioners who are under pressure to “use culture” as a performance lever and want more clarity before investing time and money. The aim of this part is to help you move from culture as a slogan to culture as a clearer cause-and-effect story you can scrutinise and, where appropriate, act on. Introduction We often hear that culture drives performance. It is said with confidence:
How, exactly, is culture supposed to improve performance? What is the mechanism? Not the slogan, the mechanism The Science The CIPD evidence review explicitly examined the assumed logic model linking organisational culture to performance. Their conclusion is striking. It is unclear how organisational culture enhances performance. The claim that culture affects performance rests on three assumptions:
But when researchers look for a coherent, unified theory explaining how culture produces performance gains, they do not find one. Instead, what exists is a collection of loosely related hypotheses. For example:
These are plausible stories. But plausibility is not the same as causal clarity. There is no single, integrated model explaining:
Key Findings The evidence on culture and performance shows:
When something works, we attribute it to culture. When something fails, we diagnose a culture problem. But that may be post hoc reasoning. What Does This Mean in Practice? In HR and leadership conversations, culture is often treated as a performance lever. The implicit model looks like this: Define desired values → Communicate them clearly → Align behaviours → Improve performance But if the mechanism is unclear, the intervention pathway becomes fragile. So before launching a culture initiative, it may be worth asking:
If You’re a Leader or HR Practitioner, Try This Week To move from slogans to mechanisms, you can run a few focused experiments:
These steps will not produce a perfect logic model. But they will force you to be clearer about how you believe culture connects to performance - and where you might be relying on story rather than evidence. A Quote to Reflect On “The logic model for the culture–performance link is not based on a single coherent theory, but rather a number of separate, loosely related hypotheses.” — Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review A Question to Reflect On When you say culture drives performance in your organisation: Can you clearly articulate the mechanism? or are you inferring cause from correlation? If your answer is closer to the second, your next step may be to pause the next broad “culture” initiative and first map the specific pathways you are actually trying to change. Further Reading
 Part 1: What Do We Actually Mean by Culture?
At work, we talk about culture as if it is obvious, powerful, and always worth investing in. This series takes a more evidence-based look at those assumptions. It is for leaders, HR, and OD practitioners who are being asked to “fix the culture” or “build a high-performance culture” and want to be more precise. Across the series, the aim is to help you make better decisions about when to work on “culture”, when to work on systems and structures, and how to connect the two in practice. Introduction I have written about culture before. I have facilitated culture conversations. I have believed culture was a primary lever of organisational success. But reading the evidence more closely has unsettled me. We talk about culture as if it is obvious. As if everyone knows what it is. As if it can be strengthened, shifted, or engineered with enough intention. Yet when you step into the research, certainty fades. Before we ask whether culture improves performance, perhaps we need to ask a more basic question: What exactly do we mean by culture? And if you are a leader, HR, or OD practitioner, an equally practical question follows: When you say “culture” at work, what specific behaviours and system signals are you actually pointing at? The Science The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted a rapid evidence assessment examining the link between organisational culture and performance. Their findings are sobering:
1. Schein’s model Culture is a pattern of shared underlying assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide behaviour. It is deep, embedded, and difficult to change. 2. Traits–strength models Culture is a profile of measurable characteristics (for example clan, market, hierarchy, adhocracy) assessed via surveys such as Competing Values Framework (OCAI), Denison Organisational Culture Survey (DOCS), Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) or Organisational Culture Profile (OCP). The problem is not that these models exist. The problem is that they are conceptually different. If scholars cannot agree what culture is, measurement becomes unstable. And when measurement is unstable, management becomes uncertain. Key Findings The CIPD review highlights several important issues:
This does not mean culture is imaginary. It does mean it is conceptually fragmented. And that fragmentation matters. What Does This Mean in Practice? In HR, we routinely:
When we say: “We have a high-performance culture.” What are we actually referring to?
If different leaders are imagining different things, culture becomes a container word. And container words can obscure more than they clarify. Perhaps the more useful move is not to abandon culture, but to disaggregate it. Instead of asking: “How do we strengthen our culture?” Ask:
If You’re a Leader or HR Practitioner, Try This Week To make this concrete, here are a few small experiments you can run:
But they make your use of the word “culture” more precise, and your levers more visible. A Quote to Reflect On “There is no consensus of what ‘organisational culture’ entails.” — Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review A Question to Reflect On When you talk about culture in your organisation, are you describing shared assumptions, measurable traits, or simply patterns of behaviour? If your honest answer is “I’m not sure”, your next step may not be another culture initiative. It may be a clearer shared definition. Further Reading
 Part 2: The myth of inevitable decline – and the HR policies that quietly reinforce it
One of the most enduring assumptions about cognitive decline is that it is inevitable: ageing equals decline, decline equals limitation, limitation equals withdrawal. Yet both Ellen Langer’s work and the Lancet Commission’s life course model suggest a different story: decline is neither uniform nor fixed, and context matters. If culture shapes behaviour, policy shapes expectation. Many organisational systems are quietly built on assumptions about fragility and diminishing capability that the science does not support. The science, briefly recapped The Lancet Commission highlights that cognitive risk factors accumulate through everyday exposure to stress, inactivity, isolation, and limited learning, many of which are influenced by working conditions. At the same time, risk trajectories remain changeable throughout life, undermining the idea that decline is a one-way path. Langer’s research adds the psychological dimension: when people are treated as capable, choiceful, and engaged, outcomes improve; when systems signal fragility, limitation, or passivity, outcomes deteriorate. Workplaces operationalise these signals not only through culture, but through HR policy. So what myths about cognition are embedded in the way work is formalised? Myth one: cognitive decline is an age issue This myth appears when development investment drops after a certain career stage, or when mid-career roles become narrower rather than richer. Organisational research shows that training and development investment often peaks early in careers and declines sharply after mid-career, based more on assumptions about return on investment than on evidence of learning capacity. Policy shifts could include:
Myth two: predictability is always protective This belief is often embedded in rigid role profiles, static job families, and promotion systems that reward replication over learning. Static roles are easier to design, benchmark, and control, yet job design research shows that when predictability dominates, roles can drift into “passive jobs” (low demand and low control), whereas “active jobs”, which combine structure with discretion, better sustain learning and cognitive health over time. Policy shifts could include:
Myth three: wellbeing sits outside core people processes This myth appears when health, workload, and learning are treated as separate from performance, reward, and progression. A substantial body of research shows that organisations frequently incentivise overwork, speed, and constant availability, even while promoting wellbeing rhetorically. When performance ratings and promotion decisions favour those who tolerate unsustainable load, wellbeing becomes performative rather than genuinely protective. Policy shifts could include:
From myth to design choice If organisations took cognitive health seriously as a long-term outcome, some HR policy choices might look different. For example:
None of these require radical reinvention; they require a shift in what organisations see as legitimate people risks and a willingness to see cognition as an organisational outcome, not just an individual trait. A quote to reflect on “Much of what we call decline is simply the result of how situations are framed.” Ellen Langer. A question to reflect on What assumptions about capability, ageing, and limitation are embedded in your HR policies, not just your culture? Further reading
 Part 1: How everyday work shapes long-term cognitive health
Lasting cognitive decline does not begin at retirement; it is shaped quietly across decades of working life by the environments, expectations, and practices people inhabit every day. Last year, joining the Dementia Compass Advisory Board has widened curiosity about cognitive health not only in later life, but across the working years. One of the most striking convergences comes from the 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care and Ellen Langer’s The Mindful Body. Read together, they challenge three assumptions: that cognitive health is fixed, purely medical, and solely individual. The science The 2024 Lancet Commission estimates that nearly 45 percent of dementia cases worldwide could be prevented or delayed by addressing modifiable risk factors across the life course. Many of these are not abstract lifestyle choices but conditions intertwined with work: physical inactivity, social isolation, depression, hypertension, hearing and vision loss, and limited ongoing education. The Commission argues for a life course approach: risk accumulates across early life, midlife, and later life, yet remains malleable throughout adulthood. Langer’s work adds that expectation, attention, and choice shape both cognitive and physical outcomes, reframing mindfulness as an environmental property: do people have opportunities to notice, distinguish, decide, and engage? Seen through this lens, cognitive health becomes responsive to context, including workplace context. Three workplace insights When this science is viewed through a workplace lens, three insights stand out.
Policy as a cognitive lever Culture is often described as “the way we do things around here”, but culture is sustained through policy choices, not intentions. Policies silently encode what an organisation believes about attention, energy, and capability. Some examples:
A quote to reflect on “When we are mindful, we are actively making new distinctions. When we are mindless, we rely on old categories.” Ellen Langer. A question to reflect on What aspects of your organisation’s work design quietly support cognitive engagement, and which may be eroding it over time? Further reading
 Image generated using ChatGPT Introduction
As a new year begins and organisations reset their priorities, we often focus on what needs to change: new goals, fresh strategies, renewed expectations. But we rarely pause to examine the thing that will ultimately determine whether any of it sticks - behaviour. By behaviour, I mean specific, observable actions people take day to day, what they say, do, and how they interact, not general traits or feelings. I recently listened to a session on behaviour change in organisations by Prof. Rob Briner (I am a huge fan of his work), and it put language to things I’ve instinctively believed for years. Behaviour is not a “soft” add-on; it is the work. As Daniels and Bailey put it, “All organisational results are the product of human behaviour.” As organisations reach for new OKRs and bold ambitions, it is worth remembering that without revisiting the people practices and systems that shape everyday behaviour, very little will change. January is a natural reset point. Before we ask people to deliver more, collaborate more, or “be more proactive,” it is worth asking a simpler question: do we even know which behaviours matter, and are our systems designed to support them? The Science Psychological research in social learning and behavioural economics shows that environments cue behaviours more reliably than attitudes or motivations alone. From the webinar, I learned the following:
Key Findings Drawing on the webinar, three insights stood out: 1. Many organisations are trying to change things that aren’t behaviour. Examples: “be empathetic,” “be resilient,” “be more commercial.” These sound good but are not observable actions. You can’t influence what you can’t define. 2. Behaviour change requires clarity. If we want better performance, we need to pinpoint the behaviours that drive it. For example, improving customer service in supermarkets wasn’t about “being helpful,” it was about three observable actions:
3. Systems support (or sabotage) behaviour. Antecedents (e.g., goals, instructions, feedback, resources) and consequences (e.g., praise, recognition, loss of opportunity) determine whether behaviours show up consistently. A beautifully designed strategy rarely stands a chance if the system - metrics, processes, rituals, leadership habits, pulls people elsewhere. This is behaviour science 101: we get the behaviours we reinforce, not the behaviours we request. What Does This Mean for Organisations in this Year? January is a natural moment to start again, but we miss an opportunity if we only rewrite objectives and not the behaviours that will bring them to life. Here are four practical opportunities for organisations to revisit: 1. Get clear on the behaviours that actually drive your goals. Take one strategic priority and ask:
2. Look at the environment, not the individual, first. Instead of asking why people aren’t doing something, ask:
Across very different industries, a few examples stand out:
3. Reinforce progress, not perfection. The behavioural model emphasises sub-goals and positive reinforcement. People repeat behaviour that is acknowledged and rewarded, even in small ways. 4. Stop relying on attitudes or culture as the lever for change. Engagement surveys are useful, but improving attitudes alone will not drive specific behaviours. Culture, too, is not a cause of behaviour, it’s a description of behaviour. If you want to change culture, change behaviour first. This aligns with the equity lens many organisations now explore. When people perceive inequity, in workload, recognition, pay, development, or opportunity, their behaviour shifts long before their words do. They withdraw, reduce effort, change their frame of comparison, or leave altogether (Adams, 1963). Behaviour always tells the truth. A Quote to Reflect On “Behaviour change emphasises that it is changes in behaviour that cause changes in attitude rather than vice versa.” A Question to Reflect On If your organisation could only change three behaviours next year, which ones would make the biggest difference and what in your environment needs to shift to make them possible? While focusing on behaviour is key, organisations must also address systemic barriers like workload, incentives, or leadership alignment, that affect people’s ability to act differently. Retention, performance, and culture ultimately come down to what people do every day. Design your systems so those behaviours are clear, supported, and consistently reinforced, and watch your organisation transform. Further Reading
 As the year draws to a close, I have been reflecting on what has stayed with me from this year’s writing. Not the output, or even the topics themselves, but the ideas that seemed to resonate most deeply with readers, and with me.
Looking back across the 2025 posts on HR Unplugged, a clear thread runs through them: a growing curiosity about what is really happening beneath workplace behaviour. Less interest in surface explanations, more attention to the underlying mechanics. Much of this year’s writing returned, in different ways, to the neuroscience of better workplaces. How people perceive fairness. How judgement is formed under pressure. How attention, threat, uncertainty, and cognitive load quietly shape decision-making long before policies or values have a chance to intervene. These posts struck a chord because they named something many people recognise but struggle to articulate: that work is experienced in the body and brain, not just on organisation charts. A few reflections stand out. Fairness is processed emotionally before it is processed rationally. Several posts explored how quickly people register fairness or unfairness, often before they can explain why. The brain is constantly scanning for cues: am I safe, am I valued, does this effort make sense? When those cues are inconsistent, people adapt. Sometimes by disengaging, sometimes by conserving energy, sometimes by withdrawing trust. Rarely is this a conscious protest; more often it is a neurological response to perceived imbalance. Judgement deteriorates when cognitive load is ignored. Across the year, there was a recurring focus on how decision quality drops in environments that overload attention, rush choices, or reward speed over sense-making. Under sustained pressure, people default to shortcuts, habits, and assumptions. This is not a moral failure. It is how the brain copes. Organisations that ignore this reality often misdiagnose poor judgement as a capability issue, rather than a context issue. Silence is a signal, not an absence. Several posts examined moments where nothing was said, no challenge was raised, no resistance appeared. Neuroscience helps explain why. When speaking up feels risky, costly, or futile, the brain’s threat system does its job. People stay quiet to preserve energy and safety. Over time, those accumulated moments of silence shape culture far more powerfully than any single incident. Work is shaped by accumulated moments of experience. Not grand interventions, but repeated signals. The meeting where dissent is brushed past. The decision explained late, or not at all. The stretch expectation added without removing anything else. Each moment may seem small. Together, they train the brain on what to expect here, and how to survive. What I take from this year is a renewed respect for how subtle workplace design really is. Behaviour does not change because we ask it to. It changes because the environment teaches the brain what is rewarded, what is risky, and what is pointless. As the year closes, before turning to new ideas in January, this feels like a useful pause. A moment to reflect not on how hard people are trying, but on what their environments are repeatedly asking their brains to do. And in HRunplugged style: A Quote to Reflect On “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” - W. Edwards Deming A Question to Reflect On If nothing about your system changed next year, what behaviours would you confidently expect to see more of? My wish for 2026 is a more thoughtful conversation about work. One that takes human limits seriously. One that designs for judgement, attention, and fairness, rather than assuming endless capacity. Thank you for reading, reflecting, and staying curious with me this year. Wishing you a gentle close to the year, and a purposeful, well-designed 2026.  Introduction
In part one, I explored the conditions that make team emotional intelligence possible: rhythm, fairness, purpose and psychological safety. These conditions create the emotional climate – the shared backdrop against which behaviour plays out. But climate alone is not enough. Without repeated practices, even psychologically safe teams slide back into old habits under pressure. Once the environment supports it, teams need practices that build the muscles of emotional intelligence in action. This second part looks at the deeper practices that help teams read one another more accurately, regulate collective emotions and make better decisions under pressure. It builds on the Squiggly Careers episode, but extends it using insights from organisational psychology, neuroscience and collective intelligence research. Team emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is a performance system. Druskat and Wolff describe team emotional intelligence as the set of norms that shape how a team becomes aware of, understands, and responds to emotions within the team and in its environment. Crucially, it is emergent: something the team does together, not the sum of individual traits. The Science Research on team emotional intelligence shows that high performing teams do three things exceptionally well:
This builds on the work of Vanessa Druskat and Steven Wolff, whose studies show that team EI is not the sum of individual EI. It emerges from shared norms that guide how people express emotion, confront tension, repair breakdowns and stay connected. Other strands of research support this: Emotion Regulation (Gross) Teams that know how to reduce unhelpful emotional spirals do better under stress. Naming emotions, reframing challenges and slowing the pace of discussion improve accuracy and reduce conflict. Gross’s process model of emotion regulation shows that reappraisal and response modulation change how emotions are experienced and expressed; at team level, shared re-framing and pacing serve the same function under pressure. Collective Intelligence (Woolley et al.) Teams with higher collective intelligence tend to have higher levels of turn-taking, social sensitivity and equitable voice distribution. In other words, emotional intelligence improves the team’s ability to think as a group. Team Effectiveness (Hackman) Hackman found that successful teams use norms to protect time, attention and relationships. Emotional intelligence supports these norms by reducing unnecessary interpersonal friction. Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner) Teams that cultivate a strong shared identity interpret ambiguity as a collective challenge rather than a personal threat. This strengthens resilience and reduces blame. Social identity work suggests that when people experience a strong, valued in-group identity, ambiguity and setbacks are interpreted as ‘our challenge’ rather than personal threat, which buffers stress and blame spirals. Together, these insights show that team emotional intelligence is a set of practices that support stability, clarity and joint problem-solving. Key Findings 1. Teams become emotionally intelligent when they learn to regulate emotions together Emotion regulation is often discussed at an individual level, but teams can regulate emotion too. Effective teams slow down when tension rises. They acknowledge discomfort rather than suppress it. They name what feels difficult so it can be worked with rather than worked around. This shared regulation keeps thinking clear and reduces defensiveness. It also mirrors what happened in the Chilean rescue, where open acknowledgement of fear helped teams stay grounded under extreme pressure. 2. Social sensing improves performance Research on collective intelligence shows that social sensitivity predicts team performance more than individual IQ. Emotionally intelligent teams consciously practise tuning in to one another. They pay attention to who has not spoken. They ask clarifying questions. They track group energy. These small acts reduce misinterpretations and help people feel seen. 3. Teams build emotional intelligence by strengthening repair, not avoiding rupture High trust does not mean the absence of conflict. It means teams repair quickly and respectfully. Repair includes acknowledging hurt, clarifying assumptions and resetting expectations. Repair was a core part of the miners’ underground resilience. It is also central to Edmondson’s work on teaming. Teams that repair well recover faster, collaborate better and show higher long-term performance. 4. Shared identity amplifies resilience A team identity gives people emotional anchors when work becomes difficult. Druskat’s research shows that rituals and shared stories increase belonging and help teams regulate stress. The miners called themselves the 33 Musketeers. That story held them together. In workplaces, team identity can reduce siloed thinking and reinforce collective responsibility. 5. Teams need boundaries that protect attention and relationships Hackman noted that team performance improves when teams protect their time and avoid unnecessary task switching. Emotionally intelligent teams are disciplined about what they say yes to. They protect their attention so they can protect the quality of their interactions. This is not emotional softness. It is emotional strategy. What This Means Leaders often ask how to build emotional intelligence in teams. The answer is found in repeated practice, not personality traits. In practice, emotionally intelligent teams do the following:
These practices help teams sustain clarity, compassion and cohesion. They move teams from individual performance to collective effectiveness. These practices do not remove all conflict or stress, nor do they replace structural fixes where workloads or incentives are misaligned. They do, however, give teams a way to stay connected and think clearly while those systemic issues are being addressed. Emotional intelligence becomes something teams do together, not something individuals are expected to carry alone. A Quote to Reflect On “Teams do not become emotionally intelligent by accident. They do so by shaping norms that help them notice, interpret and respond to emotion in ways that strengthen performance.” Druskat and Wolff A Question to Reflect On Which shared practice would make the biggest difference to your team: regulating tension, strengthening repair, increasing social sensitivity or reinforcing team identity? What is one small experiment you can run in your next meeting to strengthen that practice? Further Reading Druskat, V. and Wolff, S. Building the Emotionally Intelligent Team Woolley, A.W. et al. Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups Edmondson, A. Teaming Hackman, J. Leading Teams Gross, J. Emotion Regulation Theory  Introduction
Listening to the Squiggly Careers episode on team emotional intelligence made me pause. Before any team can practise emotional intelligence, something more fundamental needs to be in place. The episode reminded me of the Harvard case study and article on the 2010 Chilean mining rescue. Thirty-three miners underground, hundreds of experts above ground, and a global audience watching. What looked like a miracle was actually a masterclass in how to create an environment where people can think, feel and act together. It made me wonder: what kind of environment is needed before team emotional intelligence can exist at all? This first part explores the conditions that make emotionally intelligent teamwork possible. Part two will look at the practical habits that build and strengthen it. The Science As this post was inspired by the Squiggly Careers podcast, we will use the definition shared in the podcast. Team emotional intelligence is defined in the Squiggly podsheet as the habits, routines, and norms that help a team work well together. However, those habits only stick when the environment supports them. Several strands of research point to this: Neuroscience Predictable rhythms lower threat responses by reducing uncertainty, which calms activity in threat-related networks of the brain such as the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex. In the Chilean rescue, twice-daily updates and shared briefings kept people calm and coordinated in a situation where uncertainty was constant. Group resilience Teams regulate through shared routines and fairness. The miners’ underground routine and collective decision-making preserved belonging and reduced panic. Although the Chilean rescue is a single case, not a controlled experiment, but it vividly illustrates principles found across resilience and team effectiveness research: routines, fairness, and shared purpose buffer stress and sustain coordination. Collective intelligence Studies on collective intelligence show that equal turn-taking and social sensitivity predict team performance more strongly than average IQ, reinforcing that voice and safety are cognitive assets, not ‘soft’ extras. Amy Edmondson calls this real-time learning, a form of teaming that depends on psychological safety. Purpose and sensemaking Shared purpose synchronises attention and mood. In the rescue case, every group had one goal. Purpose aligned their emotional tone and reduced unnecessary friction. Together, the science shows that emotional intelligence is a social climate as much as an individual skill. Key Findings 1. Rhythm creates emotional steadiness Teams regulate better when communication has a consistent heartbeat. The Chilean rescue team relied on structured briefings to calm anxiety and focus attention. 2. Fairness builds trust Equity signals safety. Whether underground rationing or workplace workload distribution, fairness strengthens connection. 3. Purpose reduces emotional noise Shared purpose quietens conflict. When teams know why they are working together, irritations lose power. 4. Psychological safety fuels collective intelligence Teams become more adaptable when it is safe to share doubts, ask questions and express emotion without judgement. What This Means Before encouraging emotionally intelligent behaviours, leaders need to shape the environment. In practice this means: Create predictable rhythms. Regular check-ins, reflections and update cycles keep teams grounded. For example: a short, same-time weekly ‘state of the team’ check-in that always covers wins, worries, and priorities. Be transparent and fair. Explain decisions, recognise effort and manage workloads openly. Normalise emotion as information. Encourage naming frustrations or hopes without labelling them as weakness. For instance: ‘It sounds like there’s some frustration here – can we name what that’s about so we can problem-solve it. Anchor the team in purpose. Remind people why the work matters, especially when pressures rise. Model humility. Curiosity from leaders invites openness from teams. Emotional intelligence grows when the environment makes it safe and possible. A Quote to Reflect On “There was no super-leader who had all the answers. We were playing with our cards open on the table.” André Sougarret A Question to Reflect On What conditions in your current team help people connect and think together, and what is quietly working against it? What is one small rhythm or fairness change you could pilot in the next month? Further Reading Edmondson, A. Teaming. Leonard, H., Edmondson, A., Rashid, F. The 2010 Chilean Mining Rescue (A). Goleman, D. Emotional Intelligence. Druskat, V. and Wolff, S. Building the Emotionally Intelligent Team. |
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