Building stronger team relations

Smith suggests that the interplay between the formal and informal sides of a relationship determines whether it will grow more brittle over time or become more resilient. Many tools exist for managing the formal aspects of a relationship. However, when it comes to the informal side of a relationship, there are few tools and people use intuition as a guide. When people ignore the informal side of a relationship, they are more likely to view problems from an "either/or" perspective. This escalates conflict, harms relationships, and destroys value.

The first step to transforming a relationship is disrupting the patterns of interaction. This requires three steps: assessing relationships, mapping patterns of interaction, and designing action experiments. After breaking ingrained patterns of interaction, people may move to the second stage of transformation: reframing views of one another.

This book would be appropriate for a variety of audiences. The concept is relevant to managers, team members, consultants, and academics. Smith succeeds in showing how transforming relationships can transform performance.

Business Book Review provides hundreds of summaries of business books online for a fee. For full summaries, go to businessbookreview.com.