Own Your Armor

Book excerpt: Working with other people is supposed to make things more productive and efficient but, too often, work gets bogged down by the bad dynamics that develop on teams. It's so easy for undercurrents of tension and poor communication in the workplace culture to affect everyone's motivation and productivity, and when the culture gets really bad, people leave.Own Your Armor by Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different way of approaching the difficult problem of ineffective workplace dynamics. Dr. Brody is an executive coach who gets called in to help teams when the people dynamics have gotten too disruptive that they can't be ignored. In this book, she shares the true causes of why teams experience bad culture and shows a practical way to talk about moving a team toward greater health.Own Your Armor is meaningfully different from other books about team behavior because it uses a visual method, which employs drawings and diagrams that provide a normalizing, lighthearted way to rapidly deescalate conflict, engage responsibility, and achieve real resolution by focusing attention on the underlying dynamics rather than surface content.While both leaders and team members want things to change, fixing an unhealthy culture at work is very hard problem to solve. Our good intentions often backfire; reasonable interventions bring about defensiveness and greater frustration. Own Your Armor takes team members - at all levels - beyond good intentions to reap good results.