Teamwork is not necessarily about being polite, agreeing, or avoiding conflict. Nor does it ensure that everyone will march in lock-step. Quite the contrary! Teamwork is about bringing people's diverse views together and holding them together under time and performance pressure in order to create a breakthrough result that lifts everybody to a new level. (more…)

A while ago, I had the honor of supporting several work groups engaged in mission-critical, exciting projects. In each case, as part of preparing for these encounters, people inside the organizations told me something like this: "The people in this group have huge performance pressures and will want to get right into the issues. They won't have much energy for...