ix
Preface
Over the course of writing this book, I have been asked
many times why I am doing this. I have given the mat-
ter a lot of thought, and here’s why I believe a book like
this needed to be written.
As a human resources and management consultant,
I am frequently asked by clients to help them address
some fundamental breakdown within their organiza-
tions. Sometimes it’s because a senior executive is not
managing his team well or keeping his promises. Often
it’s a seasoned customer service representative who
is refusing to support a new salesperson. And almost
every case involves people just not playing well in
the sandbox. More often than not, this breakdown is
between conicting functional areas, such as between
sales and customer service, sales and operations, or
creative and operations management. In a well-run
organization, managers are inevitably going to have
to navigate disagreements between these groups. So I
have written this book as a way to explain why these
breakdowns occur and what to do about them.
x ◾ Preface
There is no one magic bullet that solves team con-
ict, but there are a number of strategies that truly
work to help teams collaborate better and more pro-
ductively. This book presents tools that any front-line
manager could deploy to help individual members of a
team identify challenges objectively and take responsi-
bility for improving the team dynamic.
Having the right tools is just part of the puzzle.
Knowing how to use those tools is the other. This book
describes not just the tools to improve collaboration, but
also how to deploy them from the perspective of one
manager who puts to use each of the tools presented.
The book shows the reader how to facilitate conversa-
tions, address breakdowns in trust, and confront prob-
lem behaviors.
While many of the strategies presented in this book
exist in a diverse library of academic journals and busi-
ness management books, I believe that busy managers
need an easier way to access them and to understand
how they might work in practice. By using a narrative
approach—one based on a collection of real-life situa-
tions we have encountered in our consultancy and as
HR executives—I have tried to connect the dots so that
managers can more easily identify potential sources of
their troubles and know what tools to deploy.
All of the story lines compiled in this book are
based, in some part, on actual experiences. This book
presents ctionalized accounts of actual conversa-
tions, interventions, workshops, client challenges, and
implemented solutions. I wrote this book in order to
Preface ◾ xi
tell these stories so that others might be able to learn
from them and nd solutions to their own workplace
challenges.
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