Managing Oneself: Work Relationships.

Organizations are built on trust, and trust is built on communication and mutual understanding.

Just as it is important for you to know your own strengths, work styles, and values, it is also important that you learn the strengths, work styles, and values of the people around you. Each person is an individual, and there are likely to be great differences between yourself and others. But such differences do not matter. What does matter is whether everyone performs. Consistent group performance can be achieved only if each person within the group is able to perform as an individual. And to help make this happen, you must build on other people's strengths, other people's work styles, and other people's values.

Once you have identified your strengths, work style, and values, as well as what your contribution should be, you must then consider who else needs to know about it. Everyone who depends on you and on whom you depend needs to know this information about how you work. Since communication is a two-way process, you should feel comfortable asking your coworkers to think through and define their own strengths, work styles, and values.

ACTION POINT: List the people who depend upon your contributions and the specific contribution each person requires. List those people on whom you depend and the contributions you require from each person. Inform both groups and be sure each person is served properly, including you.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Ray Bradbury

Create with the heart; build with the mind.

Criss Jami

Proportion is the heart of beauty.

Ken Follett

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.

What it's going to be, I don't know.

Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

And maybe knowing isn't the point.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

Chuck Palahniuk

The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its...

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