Thursday

Four Ways to Better Work Together

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In Judith Katz and Fred Miller's latest book, the authors discuss the importance of individuals having good working relationships and interactions with their colleagues.

The authors have four deceptively simple ways to facilitate such interactions that will fundamentally change the way we work with each other:

1. Lean into Discomfort: Encourage yourself and others to move beyond comfort zones, speak up, do new things, and grow. Go to those places you would normally not go and extend beyond your comfort zone -- speak up and do new things.

2. Listen as an Ally: Don't judge others no matter how much you are tempted to. You are there as a supporter. As such, you will have to listen as an ally first to truly be able to help others.

3. State Your Intent and Intensity: Don't assume that people know your intent or how intensely feel about it. Let people know how committed you are to your ideas.

4. Share Your Street Corners: Get others' points of view and opinions of issues and challenges you are dealing with to realize new options and choices.

2 comments:

Rick Stamm said...

Good suggestions. I am looking forward to reading more. Curious about the Street Corners idea.

In our work we use the DiSC model of behavior to help people open up and do what you seem to be suggesting. The challenge seems to be one of breaking away from learned behavior - those neural pathways that have been developed over decades.

I hope your book also addresses forgiveness. Our work with teams has taught me that we need much more of this in our day to day relationships at work and at home.

BK said...

Good point, Rick. Forgiveness is important. However, this book is focused more on establishing a system first than on particular situations that occur within established systems. That will be the next book!