I’ve been a part of my fair share of painful interpersonal issues within teams. It’s easy to view those situations as failures, hoping to avoid them in the future. A lot of times my advice is the opposite, embrace it. Seek out healthy conflict instead of unhealthy consensus.

I know a lot and one thing I know is that I don’t know everything. I’ve always attempted to surround myself with people who know they don’t know everything, who are genuinely curious. Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his recent book, takes this as far as suggesting that leaders avoid at all costs people who think they know everything. Ultimately, the issue is that people who think they know everything won’t be aware of any facts that conflict with their view of the world. They inevitibly end up in a lonely artificial dark cave.

“When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.