We’re sitting in a Mumbai café next to a long glass window, watching the incessant rainfall outside. It’s been raining for three straight days. What’s strange is the pattern, like someone up there (probably a mischievous child) is playing with a tap: on, off, on, off, on, off…
Maybe the kid is just reminding us that life is like a game to be played with childlike curiosity and wonder.
In this July newsletter, we’re sharing:
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Why some opposite personalities gel beautifully while others create friction
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Book of the month
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Science of Empathy for Leaders
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Our pick of the month LinkedIn post
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8.8 event update (fully booked!)
1. “Why do some opposite personalities gel so well while others create friction?”
We were chatting with an MD and a board member before an Insights workshop when this question came up. Despite their different cultures, temperaments, decision-making styles, and work approaches, these two had collaborated successfully and played a huge role in their business success.
The question wasn’t just casual curiosity. The workshop was specifically requested to support their diverse team leverage their differences to take the business to the next level.
Here’s what we know: Research shows that teams who use friction as a process to refine their ideas, decisions, and relationships share three key characteristics.
A Sense of Belonging
Social and organisational psychologist Vanessa Druskat (a pioneer in Team Emotional Intelligence) mentioned in one of her talks that while psychological safety is essential, it’s not the primary social motivator, belonging is.
Through her 30+ years working with diverse teams, she found that high-performing teams feel connected in a way that even when their ideas get shot down, their egos don’t take a nosedive. In such teams:
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Members are genuinely accepted
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Members are known, valued, and mutually supported
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Members have a sense of control
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Members have real influence in the team
As Vanessa puts it:
“You can’t make yourself belong. It needs to be built in the team.”
This is exactly what that MD was aiming for, and it’s what Insights does best.
A Common Goal
Members know the one big goal that binds them together and understand how their work contributes to it. In other words, they have a strong, values-driven mission that members can align their personal and professional goals with. Companies like Zappos Patagonia, and creators like Ali Abdaal are perfect examples.
Values Alignment
This comes from our personal experience working with high-performing individuals in teams. In truly high-performing teams, leaders and team members have their core values in alignment. These shared values bind them together, even when their working styles clash.
Zappos famously pays new employees to quit if they don’t fit the company’s unique culture and customer service philosophy.
Our team at Victus People is as opposite as day and night. What’s fascinating is that we only started truly leveraging our differences AFTER we understood we were psychological opposites.
The formula: Self-awareness → Team awareness → High performance
2. Book of the Month
Vanessa Druskat (we’re clearly fans! 😊), along with her collaborators, shares her team emotional intelligence model in this book. The model comes from 30 years of research and team development focused on building and leading emotionally intelligent teams.
She breaks down the model into three clusters of team norms:
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Addressing individual needs
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Constant assessment and adaptation
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Reaching outside the team
Disclaimer: We’re getting our hands on the book next week, so full review coming soon!
3. Science of Empathy for Leaders
There’s way more than we could fit on this one-pager. We’ve picked a few favourites and added some reminders for leaders who genuinely care about their teams.
4. Our Pick of the Month LinkedIn Post
Mark Evans uses a visual to frame this powerful question for his coachee:
“What could open up for you if you were willing to take that first step down your staircase into what you don’t yet know?“
Psychologist Richard Boyatzis and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University found in their research that positively-focused questions activate “greater activity in the brain’s reward circuitry and areas of good feeling and happy memories,” while negatively-focused questions trigger brain areas that “generate greater anxiety, mental conflict, and sadness” (Anthony Jack et al., 2013).
We think Evans’ image and text-based positively-focused approach could work brilliantly in team contexts too. We’ll share more when we try it in our upcoming workshops.
8.8 Event Update
Our August 8th event is now fully booked! Thank you to everyone who signed up. For those who missed out, we’ll be announcing our next session soon.
It is truly a joy to be sharing something we believe in and that has proven to be a great tool for creating high-performing teams and an instrument for personal development.
We’ve intentionally kept the forum small for deep engagement, and we will organise more of these open forums in Q4. Stay tuned.
With all the uncertainty that is happening in the north with flooding and at the Thailand Cambodia border, we wish everyone stay safe physically and mentally.
