Learning Center

We tend to focus on resolving conflicts and not on what happens much farther upstream.  Forget about resolving conflict, what about those of us who have a hard time facing conflict at all, and when we are forced to, feel furious and awful. For many of us, due to a complex mix of upbringing, temperament, and experiences, disagreeing with someone ...

We spend a high percentage of our waking hours interacting with our work colleagues. Conventional wisdom has it that coworkers don’t have to like each other; they just need to do their jobs. According to some very interesting research coming out of Carnegie-Mellon and M.I.T. (not exactly epicenters of the “touchy-feely” school of business management) conventional wisdom, once again, turns ...

Meetings are important. For better or worse, most organizational decisions are still made in groups. Meetings are a ubiquitous element of organizational life even as teams are now often geographically dispersed and collaborating online as well as in person. A productive meeting energizes, coordinates and galvanizes a team. Dysfunctional meetings, on the other hand, lead not only to bad decisions, ...

It was about an hour before I was supposed to “run” my first therapy group. The clients, ranging in age from 20 to 60, were in various stages of recovery from heroin addiction. I was 26 years old, had never run a group by myself, and was suddenly feeling a little panicky about the assignment. Among them, the group members ...

Meetings are the place where an organization can access the collective knowledge of its members to make the best possible tactical and strategic decisions. Meetings are the place where organizations can work out conflicts, coordinate individual efforts and get everyone on the same page.   Meetings are an inevitable, necessary and ubiquitous element of organizational life. To my knowledge, no ...