Our world is composed of thousands, perhaps millions, of cultures-ranging from the cultures of nations and ethnic groups to the cultures of corporations, communities, and individual families. From global to local, our cultures determine what we believe and how we act in relation to each other. The Touchstones were born in cultures of the workplace, but they work equally well in all interpersonal settings. They are ground rules for working relationships, meaning both ground rules for relationships in the workplace, and ground rules for relationships that work.
Rather than presenting totally new concepts or ephemeral technique, the book takes these eight widely-valued principles and presents them in a new way. The notions embodied in the Touchstones are familiar to everyone-everyone pays lip service to them, and almost everyone takes them for granted. The apparent simplicity of these principles lulls us into believing they are easier to apply than they really are. As a group, the Eight Ground Rules certainly look familiar enough: Be in the Here & Now Be Open Be Honest Listen Be Constructive Be Non-Defensive Speak for Yourself Participate ...but in practice, these deceptively simple notions are a different story. These Ground Rules are simple in name but often complex and tricky in application. They may seem simple because everyone has heard of them, but seething beneath the familiar names of the Ground Rules are all the emotions, conflicts, confrontations, and epiphanies that are the life of relationships in any organization.
One of the major success variables in business is the quality of our relationships. We've heard a lot about fixing the processes of organizations transforming, re-engineering, down-sizing, right-sizing-but while we've been attending to the processes, we've neglected what absolutely must work well if an organization is to succeed: the relationships between its people. When relationships work, the processes stand a better chance of working.
This book is about eight ground rules-the Touchstones-that make the relationships within an organization work.
Most of us travel through life carrying many or all of these basic notions like a pouch of uncut diamonds-we understand that they are diamonds, that they are bright and valuable, but unless we are able to cut the facets, to mount them, to share them, they are only so much carbon.
We live in a time of unprecedented organizational changes where overnight a corporation can adopt an entirely different hierarchy, morph into a flatter structure, tap unexplored energy by empowering more workers, and germinate a new culture based on semi-autonomous teams. In all this explosive change, we've lost sight of a fundamental fact: it is now, as it has been always, people working together that accomplish the most. Mission statements proclaim that "people are our most valuable asset," yet many leaders don't know the best ways to help their people work together. Thisbook provides executives and the people who work for them the tools theyneed to forge substantial relationships and dynamic collaborations.
