It is one thing to resolve a conflict with a fellow marketing employee who works in the same location and for the same division of a firm as you do and who has an educational and ethnic background similar to your own. It is quite a different case if the other person is an engineer (or an accountant) who was born and lives in another country, works

He took information supplied to him at face value; he made assumptions in areas where he had no information; and—most damaging—he never actively tried to clarify what his boss’s objectives were.

The message delivered by educational organizations can be summarized, roughly, as follows:

worked with key marketing personnel to identify some unambiguous measures of short-term marketing performance, so as to avoid later arguments about how well they were doing,

Through a careful assessment of himself, of certain industries and companies, and finally of his job offers, he entered a situation that matched his interests and capabilities rather closely. This fit helped him relate well to the people around him, including the company’s president, which in turn made it easier to develop cooperative relationships

Young employees, in particular, often naïvely assume that “good performance speaks for itself,” which then leads them to undercommunicate with their superiors. That is, as long as they think they are doing a good job and that there are really no problems, they tend to communicate little with their bosses.

The relevant skills are both cognitive and interpersonal in nature. They involve the capacity to assess correctly differences among people in goals, values, perceptions, and stakes; the ability to see the subtle interdependencies among those people; and the capacity to identify the implications of this diagnosis. These skills also involve an abilit

we need people who see their roles as those of actively leading subordinates, peers, bosses, and outsiders to achieve responsible results within their domains of activity.

Corporations that are leaders in their industries and those that help start new industries tend to be full of diversity, interdependence, and conflict, often by explicit design. The people running these firms sometimes purposely create seemingly messy organizational structures, full of complex interdependent relationships.