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?
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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:

1. They manage emotions inside the team
2. They manage emotions between the team and stakeholders
3. They use emotional information to improve thinking, not avoid it

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:

• Regulate tension together by naming emotions early, especially when pressure rises. e.g. ‘It feels like we’re getting tense – let’s pause for a minute and check what people are worried about.’
• Increase social sensitivity by protecting equal voice and pacing discussions
• Repair ruptures quickly instead of avoiding difficult conversations. e.g. a 10-minute follow-up where someone says, ‘That meeting felt off – did I miss something or step on a toe?
• Strengthen shared identity through rituals, stories and consistent ways of working
• Protect attention by setting boundaries that reduce noise and preserve connection

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.
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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.
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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.