Short answer
Teams have emotional intelligence separately from their members. Twelve individually empathetic people can produce a climate where nobody says what they feel, conflicts never quite close, and overload stays invisible until someone quits. This audit measures that climate — the shared environment, not the average person — across four dimensions drawn from Druskat and Wolff's research on group emotional intelligence.
↓ See typical profiles & try it yourself below
Figure 1. Illustrative profile: {{ activeProfile.label }}. Values are representative, not your personal scores. Your custom profile — drag the sliders below to explore how each dimension shapes the radar.
Typical profiles
Four climates recur across organizations of every size. Most people can name which one they are in before finishing the preview:
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What this shape suggests: {{ activeProfile.insight }}
Try it yourself
Read it. Try it. Get your result.Three of the twelve items. Answer for the team as it actually is, not as the offsite slide deck describes it.
One rule: answer for the climate, not for yourself. The question is never whether you would speak — it is whether speaking happens.
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Your preliminary lean:
A three-item sketch of the climate. The full audit uses twelve items and the interpretation layer.
Answer all 3 to see a preview, or go straight to the full assessment.
That is the climate's outline. The full report names the profile and prescribes the first intervention.
Take the assessment →Preview only. Powered by FormLM · Results are for self-reflection, not diagnosis.
Best for
This audit is aimed at three kinds of buyer:
- Team leads who suspect the meetings are quieter than the hallway conversations, and want to name it precisely
- Facilitators and HR partners who need a structured conversation starter for a team reset — the report is designed to be discussed, not filed
- Founders and executives doing a post-mortem on a rough quarter where the work was fine and the humans were not
- Any team that has grown past ten people and noticed the culture inheriting itself instead of being chosen
Not for individual development — it measures an environment, and the tools for the person are elsewhere in this zone. Not as evidence in personnel decisions: climate data about identifiable individuals is a misuse. And not for teams in active crisis — if trust has already collapsed, you need a facilitated intervention, not an audit that documents the collapse.
What it measures
The model builds on Druskat and Wolff's work, which argued that emotionally intelligent teams manage emotion at three levels — individual, group, and cross-boundary — through norms the team builds deliberately. This audit condenses the measurable core into four climate dimensions:
Expression Safety
Whether the team can name what is actually happening — frustration, doubt, enthusiasm, resentment — without paying a social tax for it. This is the emotional core of what Edmondson calls psychological safety, measured at the feeling level rather than the risk level.
Conflict Recovery
Teams do not avoid conflict — good ones metabolize it. Items ask what happens after the disagreement: the repair conversation, the walk-back, the ability to fight about an idea Tuesday and ship it together Thursday.
Support Signals
Whether struggling is detectable and help is offerable before breakdown. Teams weak here do not lack caring individuals — they lack channels: the overload stays private until it becomes resignation or error.
Emotion Norms
Every team has rules about feeling — which emotions are professional, when enthusiasm is welcome, how much fear is acceptable to show. Teams that never discuss these norms did not avoid having them; they just inherited them by accident.
Explore the dimensions
Drag any slider — the radar above updates in real time.
Click "Try it" to drag the dimension sliders and watch the radar chart reshape in real time.
How it works
- Twelve items rated 1 to 5, three per climate dimension, phrased as statements about the team — never about you.
- The instrument is written for this audit. It paraphrases the research constructs; it does not reproduce any published team-EI inventory.
- Scores produce one climate read across the four dimensions, mapped to one of four recurring team profiles.
- The paid report adds an interpretation layer: for your weakest dimension, the specific norm-installing intervention the research supports, sized for a team meeting.
- The report is designed to be shared with the team — a climate audit that stays private changes nothing.
- Nothing is stored; the report is generated in your session and belongs to you.
What it cannot tell you
One person's climate reading is one witness's testimony. Useful, directional, and not the verdict.
The audit's honest boundaries:
- This edition is a single-respondent read. Climate is shared reality; one witness sees it from one chair, usually with one bias. The honest version for decisions is three or more respondents, averaged.
- Respondents rate the climate they experience, which is shaped by status: leaders systematically read more safety into a room than members do. If a leader takes this, treat the member-reality as likely lower.
- Teams in transition — new hires, reorgs, a recent departure — produce unstable readings. Wait for the dust to settle or take it twice, a month apart.
- The four-dimension model is a condensation of a richer research program. It captures the actionable core, not every norm Druskat and Wolff catalogued.
- Climate data invites wishful reading: teams under pressure to be healthy produce healthier-looking answers. The report flags implausibly flat high scores for exactly this reason.
Evidence and sources
Team-level emotional intelligence has a smaller but serious literature behind it:
The team's emotional norms are built deliberately or inherited accidentally. There is no third option.
- Druskat, V. U., & Wolff, S. B. (2001). Building the emotional intelligence of groups. Harvard Business Review, 79(3). The foundational argument that group EI lives in norms, not in member averages.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. The safety-learning link this audit's first dimension stands on.
- Barsade, S. G., & Gibson, D. E. (1998). Group emotion: a view from top and bottom. Research on Managing Groups and Teams, 1, 81–102. The case that groups develop emotional states of their own.
- Wolff, S. B., Druskat, V. U., Koman, E. S., & Messer, T. E. (2006). The link between group emotional competence and group effectiveness. In Druskat, Sala & Mount (Eds.), Linking Emotional Intelligence and Performance at Work. Team emotional competence predicting effectiveness in real work groups.
- Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass. A practitioner's pyramid that maps almost one-to-one onto these dimensions from the failure side — which is why the team health check in our Leadership zone pairs well with this audit.
What you take away
The report is a meeting agenda wearing the shape of a document:
- One climate read across four dimensions, with your team's profile named and described from the inside.
- The weakest dimension identified, with the specific norm-building intervention the research supports — sized to fit a single team meeting.
- The failure mode your profile tends toward, written plainly enough to read aloud without softening.
- A comparison with the individual tools in this zone, so the team can tell climate problems from person problems before spending budget on the wrong one.
- A repeat-measurement guide: what to re-take, when, and what change is realistic in a quarter.
Next step
If you want to go deeper, consider these next steps:
- Pair this with the team health check — Lencioni's pyramid reads the same climate from the structural side.
- If the audit surfaces individual gaps, the at-work EQ check is the right individual follow-up.
- For running the team conversation afterward, the alignment conversation guide provides the meeting structure.
Healthy teams are not the ones without friction. They are the ones where friction is followed by repair, in public, on purpose.