Peer pressure and the distaste for letting down a colleague will motivate a team player more than any fear of authoritative punishment or rebuke. - Patrick Lencioni

In order to be the kind of leader who demonstrates genuine interest in employees and who can help people discover the relevance of their work, a person must have a level of personal confidence and emotional vulnerability.

Therefore, it is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their people engage in conflict, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be. This can be a challenge because many leaders feel that they are somehow failing in their jobs by losing control of their teams during conflict. Finally, as trite as it may sound, a leader's ability to personally model appropriate conflict behavior is essential. By avoiding conflict when it is necessary and productive — something many executives do — a team leader will encourage this dysfunction to thrive.

Which would seem to be a good thing — proposing a solution to a problem that people are hungry to solve — except that my view of silos might not be what some leaders expect to hear. That's because many executives I've worked with who struggle with silos are inclined to look down into their organizations and wonder, "Why don't those employees just learn to get along better with people in other departments? Don't they know we're all on the same team?" All too often this sets off a well-intentioned but ill-advised series of actions — training programs, memos, posters — designed to inspire people to work better together. But these initiatives only provoke cynicism among employees — who would love nothing more than to eliminate the turf wars and departmental politics that often make their work lives miserable. The problem is, they can't do anything about it. Not without help from their leaders. And while the first step those leaders need to take is to address any behavioral problems that might be preventing executive team members from working well with one another — that was the thrust of my book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — even behaviorally cohesive teams can struggle with silos. (Which is particularly frustrating and tragic because it leads well-intentioned and otherwise functional team members to inappropriately question one another's trust and commitment to the team.) To tear