Top Highlights

• Those great successes are partly a result of having the right people with the right knowledge, skills, and tools. Even more important, however, is the team’s ability to build relationships, communicate, manage conflict, and, especially, make good use of their many differences.
• The varying expertise and objectives of people from various functions forces us to grapple with intentional, necessary business tensions in problem solving.
• Too many managers, Conger says, rush to define a series of steps that they believe constitutes the right way to carry out their initiative. They then circulate around the company and try to impose their solution on others—mistakenly believing that they’re engaging in productive consultation. The result? Resistance and bickering over process details...
• Teammates with low internal self-awareness typically see their beliefs and values as “the truth,” as opposed to what is true for them based on their feelings and past experiences. They can fail to recognize that others may have equally valid perspectives.
• What emotions am I experiencing? What am I assuming about another person or the situation? What are the facts versus my interpretations? What are my core values, and how might they be impacting my reactions?