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Key Highlights

• Common goals vs. common ground: While we naturally gravitate toward people who share our interests or backgrounds, focusing on what we're building together creates stronger, more sustainable relationships than waiting for personality clicks
• Effort matters more than ease: The relationships that required the most work to build often become the deepest and most trusted - don't assume that natural or easy connections are automatically better
• Incremental trust building: When relationships are damaged, create small, shared goals with quick wins rather than attempting one big conversation - trust builds through repeated small promises kept, not dramatic gestures
• Organizational impact of leader relationships: When leaders have tension, it forces team members to pick sides and creates psychological unsafety - people have to watch what they say and consider political repercussions
• Building collaboration muscles: Start with deliberately created shared projects, even if they're not mandated from above, to develop habits of communication and accountability that transfer to future collaborations

Notable Quotes

• "If you focus less on commonality and more on common goals - what are we building that we can share together - that ends up actually unifying us more over time than waiting for some magical click to happen."
• "Effort matters, and that's actually completely controllable, because we can control the amount of effort we put into a relationship. It doesn't have to be this mystical personality match."
• "Trust happens incrementally. Trust doesn't happen in big, dramatic swoops - it's small, incremental promises that were made, kept, and followed through."
• "When leaders have tension, we're subtly telling people around us that you gotta pick a side. That makes people feel less safe because now they have to watch what they say."
• "Just by the fact of signing up to say 'I'm committing to doing this, it's not natural, it's not easy, but I'm committing' - that's what actually makes the relationship start gelling together."

Featured Speakers

• Diana Hong is a Partner & Executive Coach at CRA | Admired Leadership, specializing in organizational change and relationship dynamics. With extensive experience coaching senior leaders through complex interpersonal challenges, she brings practical insights on building trust and collaboration in high-stakes environments. Her approach emphasizes actionable strategies over theoretical frameworks.
• Wes Bender serves as a facilitator and thought leadership coordinator at CRA | Admired Leadership, helping to connect practical leadership insights with real-world application through webinars and educational content.

Resources Mentioned

• Field Note on finding common ground vs. common goals