Collaboration as a process in your organization is crucial for success. Motivation and productivity are down and people are wandering down paths that are distractive rather than contributing to the solutions you want. The lack of teamwork contributes to loss of money, loss of direction, slow or shrinking growth and smaller market share. Though today’s business climate is challenging, it also contains opportunities to jump start results.

How you honor or violate another person’s personal space and time will affect the amount of tension or trust between you.

You remember The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Well, that’s a wonderful axiom, as far as it goes. But not everybody wants to be treated the same way you do!

In anticipation of her keynote address at the 2010 Women in Leadership Summit, Linkage sat down for an intimate conversation with Lisa Ling, the internationally-known journalist, special correspondent to the Oprah Winfrey Show, the first woman host of National Geographic Explorer. Topics ranged from the role of women in leadership today to here sister’s captivity in North Korea to her new television show, Inside with Lisa Ling.

Even experienced negotiators are prone to powerful tendencies that hinder their ability to negotiate better deals. A large (and depressing!) body of research suggests that negotiators fail to prepare adequately by thinking through how the other party sees the problem and their alternatives; fail to create as much value as they could; believe that have claimed most of the available value (when they haven’t); believe that others will choose and interpret data in the same way they will; and fail to recognize ways in which the situation powerfully shapes their behaviors and thought processes. But these shortcomings affect other judgments and intuitions as well. Leaders must do five things to enable better decision-making in negotiations…

Learning to improve our persuasiveness is both easier and harder than it used to be. Easier because we’ve now got E-mail and voice mail, CD-ROMs and cellular phones, satellites and skywriting, and a vast array of other tools for communicating. But it’s also more difficult in that the deluge of messages and ill-equipped messengers cheapens them all. So nowadays, it’s more crucial than ever to hone the skills that heighten our power of persuasion.