Why Your Team’s Emotional Awareness Matters
How can a group of talented professionals be put on a team and then… not deliver? This is one of the most important questions when it comes to productivity and though it has many answers, one of them does not get enough attention.
Why is it so that someone seemingly enters a meeting with one goal, to make everyone else feel bad or dumb? To shoot down any idea, answer, thought, and person. Are they evil and mean, or just unaware?
As someone with many years of working on and leading teams this is something I have seen again and again.
So when it came to writing my master’s thesis, my research question was clear: Can emotional awareness be facilitated in team meetings to improve experienced collaboration?
We talk a lot about emotional regulation and companies spend lots of money on personality tests and workshops on process and workflows. But what I discovered through my research is that the effect of these measures is less when the team does not have a developed emotional awareness.
(Here I imagine some people will say “what about emotional regulation?” and regulation is just as important, but it is hard to regulate something you are not aware of and cannot describe.)
Normally I see teams and organisation blame the process, then hire consultants to implement new frameworks, run retrospectives and team building days.
But because we’re neglecting one significant factor in teamwork, nothing really changes.
The answer to the research question, based on a case study with a Norwegian leadership team, and lots of research studies, is yes, emotional awareness can be facilitated. But the how is more interesting than the yes.
Most of the thoughts, actions, and decisions you make are shaped by an emotion
You might have thought your strategy was based off pure logic and facts, and that your decision to hire one candidate over the other was based on your gut feeling, but emotions also played a part.
Before you’ve even arrived at work, you’ve already moved through dozens of emotional states that are can influence how you show up in you 9am meeting.
The argument you had on the way out the door. The email you read in the car that stressed you out. The child who cried at preschool drop-off. The reckless cyclist you nearly hit. The full commuter train or the 15 minutes you drove around looking for a parking spot.
None of this disappears when you come into the office, it comes with you. And if you are not aware, it can affect how you participate in meetings, speak to your colleagues or make decisions.
This started as an observation. I have spent too many meetings watching people act or speak in ways I hope and doubt they would if they were aware of how it was received by the rest of us in the room. And in teams, where those individual emotional states collide and interact, the collective emotional climate becomes the underlying base of what the team does, or does not do.
When that climate is poor, or when a team simply lacks the awareness and language to understand it, you get personal friction instead of the task friction needed to solve problems and innovate. This isn’t because the people on the team aren’t good enough, but because the emotional awareness is absent.
If you look at this through the lens of Susan Wheelan it can often look like the teams stuck in phase two of her IMGD model, colloquially known as “the spicy phase”. This is where a team has interpersonal conflicts, and time is lost on groups forming and reforming, leadership challenges, and conflict rather than on working together towards shared goals. Being the leader of a group in this phase can be a real challenge.
The problem isn’t the emotions themselves, but the lack of attention they get
Most people can name the basic emotions such as happy, sad, angry etc.
But that’s not precision, and it does not lead to understanding, if a team even attempts moving towards understanding.
We spend so much time teaching our toddlers and children about emotions and emotional awareness and regulation, but when it comes to ourselves we seem to have forgotten it takes practice and deliberate maintenance.
The team I worked with in my research rated themselves a 4.2 out of 5 on emotional awareness before we started. They genuinely believed they were emotionally literate. And then I asked them to label what they were feeling in that moment, not broadly, but as specifically as they could, and what came out was: ready, relieved, grateful, determined.
Not wrong, exactly. And a good first step. But nowhere near the granularity that’s actually useful for understanding and awareness.
What happened next is what Lisa Feldman Barrett (2018, 2006, 2001) calls emotional granularity in action. As we worked through exercises, an emotional wheel in Norwegian (the English one was less useful, which is itself a finding worth noting), storytelling exercises, and affect labelling (naming emotions), the vocabulary started expanding. They began distinguishing between nervousness and anticipation, between frustration and disappointment.
Think of how anticipation and anxiety can feel similar, though one can be positive, which merits the need for granular distinction.
One team member, trying to articulate how they felt at the start of the second workshop, said: “I’m nervous, but it’s not really nervousness, it’s not negative. It’s more like anticipation.” They pondered it for longer and they kept refining it until they found the right word.
This gave the team the start of a new emotion based vocabulary and understanding they could use to understand their emotions and how it was affecting the collaboration on the team.
I would go so far as to say putting a wheel of emotions in meetings rooms can help nudge people towards awareness.
Why naming it actually changes it
Putting feelings into words, what researchers call affect labelling, doesn’t just describe an emotional state. It physically changes it. Lieberman et al. (2007) showed through brain imaging that naming an emotion reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for the stress response in real-time. You name it, and your nervous system calms down.
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This gave me the idea to research methods that could facilitate this kind of emotional calibration in meetings. The team started using a check-in at the start of a meeting (one word, one sentence, how are you actually feeling in this room today and how could it affect the meeting). It’s attempting to calibrate the room before the work begins.
The team I worked with started doing this every week, and kept running it in their weekly team meeting for four weeks without me in the room. By the time I came back to validate findings, it had become a permanent part of how they met.
The team reported the method as useful in gauging the room before the meeting started. One person said it helped them tune in before a meeting.
The team leader also shared something she had done: she had started using the check-in to notice when someone needed a one-to-one conversation later. When someone’s word in the check-in was off repeatedly, she’d follow up privately and individually. The ritual had become a way to follow up on the team as well as a method for understanding the room before a meeting started.
What happens when we don’t name it.
Erik Lerdahl’s (unpublished) model of the autopilot response, inspired by Kahneman’s work on fast and slow thinking, describes what happens in the gap between a trigger and a response (this will be published and available soon.)
It goes like this: Something happens like a comment in a meeting, an email you weren’t expecting, a decision made without you. That’s the stimulus. Your brain registers it instantly, categorises it as something you want or don’t want, and produces an impulse. And if you’re running on autopilot (which most of us are, most of the time) that impulse becomes your immediate response. You snap back. You go quiet. You agree when you shouldn’t. You dig in when it would be smarter to let go.
The response is real, but it isn’t actively and consciously chosen.
Affect labelling is what breaks this loop. When you can name what you’re actually feeling in the moment, not just stressed but threatened or dismissed or uncertain, you introduce a beat of conscious processing between the trigger and the response. That beat is where better decisions live.
This is why emotional language isn’t a soft skill. It’s the difference between reacting and responding, between a team that runs on autopilot and one that can actually think together under pressure.
And this speaks to the general reaction I get from a team when I say “let’s talk about how we feel today”. Someone once said “urgh, we are here to work, not do group-therapy.” Because everyone thinks they know emotions to some extent and why should we sit in a meeting room talking about feelings when we have work to do?
Because according to Damasceno et.al (2021) a team’s emotional carrying capacity (ECC), meaning their ability to carry both negative and positive emotions, directly impact how well they deliver and their ability to innovate.
It should be obvious that a team where people hold back, feel bad or make others feel bad does not have the psychological safety and trust to explore new ideas, but it seems it is not yet the case. Emotions are dismissed as frivolous rather than acknowledged for what they really are: a big part of the decisions and actions we make, and how we work together.
The leader is the climate driver
None of this happens without the person at the top consistently modelling it.
The team leader in my research modelled vulnerability and shared, opening the room for the team to follow. She named her emotions and explored with the team through the exercises. She was honest when she was having a hard day. When the team did it, no one was punished for showing their human side. And because she did that, the team felt safe doing it too.
And this is what emotional leadership looks like in practice. Not grand gestures or emotional speeches, long days of team building and pop-psychology personality tests, but the daily, unremarkable act of saying “I’m coming in stretched today, and here’s why that might affect how I show up.”
A leader who asks teams to do emotional check-ins but doesn’t do them themselves won’t get the same results.
Maybe it’s time we include emotional knowledge and awareness training in leadership programs.
What you can do today.
It doesn’t have to be time-consuming or fancy, you can start simple with three things:
Start with a check-in. One word or one sentence at the start of each meeting. How are you sitting in the room today? Not “are you ready?”, that’s a closed question with one acceptable answer and we want to invite reflection and introspection. Something that actually lets people look inward before the work begins and which will (hopefully!) mean the external calibrates before the meeting starts.
Expand the vocabulary. Find a feelings wheel in your team’s language and put it somewhere accessible. The difference between stressed and overwhelmed and anxious and apprehensive isn’t semantic. It points to different needs and different responses. It will also give you an overview of how your team is faring.
Model it yourself. If you’re a leader and you want your team to be emotionally aware, the work starts with you. Not with a memo about psychological safety or a five-point culture poster. It starts with you, in the room, saying the true thing about how you’re showing up that day.
The team I worked with has been through a difficult market, commercial pressure that hasn’t eased, restructuring, and rapid change. And yet the team leader said they face that pressure “mer samlet”, “more unified” now.
That’s what emotional awareness aims to actually produce, not softer teams or more feelings in meetings, but more resilient ones. Teams that can take the hit of a hard quarter and still function well together because the relational infrastructure is strong enough. Teams who trust each other and respects each other so that conflict is task focused, not personal.
Because what if all the other factors have aligned, the organisation provides a great working environment and culture, the leader and team has clear objectives, the projects are engaging and the team consists of genuinely capable professionals… and something is still off?
Your team already has all the emotions. They’re already in the room, whether you name them or not.
The question is whether you’re going to give them the space and language to build a healthy emotional team climate, or keep pretending the emotions are not there.
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This article translates a 100-page master’s thesis into something readable over a coffee. It is not the complete picture, emotional awareness is one piece of a very complex puzzle that includes many other factors, and the research field is richer and more nuanced than any shorter article can capture. But it is a starting point for practioners. This article aims to give anyone working on a team or leading a team a new way of thinking. If it makes one team leader think differently about how their team shows up on a Monday morning, it has done its job.
The full thesis is available upon request.
