The Unwritten Rules: The Six Skills You Need to Get Promoted to the Executive Level

Chapter 7. Factor 5: Working Across Organizational Boundaries

Teamwork. Collaboration. A management team characterized by one for all and all for one. That's a laudable goal, and one that many companies set for their executive teams, but it's rarely accomplished by the great majority of them. Rather, leadership teams are usually characterized by some degree of internal tension arising from two main sources: the leaders' personal ambitions and the competing objectives of different groups that in most organizations lead to friction between executives. In this environment of inherent tension, some managers, especially those not skilled in working with others, speak derisively about the need to "play nicely" with their peers and coworkers. Those ...