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You probably know this feeling. Your team is full of capable people doing meaningful work, and yet something keeps getting in the way.

Meetings carry a lot of tension, decisions take so much longer than they should, and strong contributors end up missing each other instead of collaborating effectively.

The instinct is usually to address the behavior — better communication, clearer accountability, or a difficult conversation to try and produce a different result.

Sometimes that seems to help for a while. More often, the same tension resurfaces in a slightly different shape, because the behavior was never the actual issue.

In this month's podcast episode, Rick tells the story of an executive team where operations and IT had been fighting for years, and how they worked together to dissolve it.

New Podcast Episode:

A Flourishing Team Case Study

What you’ll take away:

• A real-world story that demonstrates why there's no such thing as a well-rounded leader, only well-rounded teams.

• How the Prism Intelligence diagnostic measures the team dynamics most leaders can't see.

• What becomes possible when a team does this work: in this team’s case, increased stock value, regional awards, and conflicts that no longer require a referee to be resolved.

Reflection

Pause to reflect on one of your own teams.

Is there a tension everyone feels but nobody names?

• It might be two people who are always slightly out of step.

• It could be a meeting where the real conversation happens afterward, in smaller groups.

• It might be a decision that keeps getting revisited because it wasn’t fully agreed to in the first place.

Ask yourself what you've been treating as a performance problem, a personality clash, or something people just need to get over. Then consider whether it might actually be a difference in design — two people working exactly the way they're wired to work, with no shared language for understanding, respecting, and receiving one another for who they are.

What can you actually do this week to help people find common ground?

Stay Connected

If this month’s episode surfaced something in your own team’s collaboration or raised a tough question, let us know! We'd love to hear from you.