The Back Story

When I first started working with teams, I was stunned by how many organizations faltered—not because their leaders failed to grasp the need to change, or to come up with the right strategy, or to inspire the troops, or to appreciate the importance of culture—but because their relationships prevented them from doing what they needed to do to succeed.

In each case, the people on these teams kept bumping up against the same problem. They all kept looking to someone else on the team to change his or her behavior before changing their own. Worried that any changes they made might be misunderstood or exploited by others, no one wanted to risk it. Worse, everyone on the team shared the same Conventional Wisdom, which assumed the other guy was the problem.

With no one willing to make the first move, everyone got caught in the same waiting game—the only game where if you win, you lose. Left to escalate, this game made even the most irrational actions look downright reasonable, even inevitable—at least to the people acting. Over time, this sense of inevitability trapped everyone in relationships no one liked but no one knew how to change. 

And there’s the rub. 

Once their relationships took on a life of their own, they seemed to operate independently of anything these people did or wanted or intended. If the relationships went well, everything else went well. If they went poorly, everything else went to hell. Which of these happened, everyone chalked up to a chemistry too mysterious to decode and too difficult to change.

Faced with relationships that made change all but impossible, I set out to see if I could understand and transform those relationships that had the biggest effect on people and their teams. Finally, after years of building, testing, and revising the ideas and tools you’ll find in Divide or Conquer, I’ve come up with an approach that I’m hoping you’ll find both practical and transformational.