What if everything we’ve been told bout compromise is wrong? During the 2004 election – I was part of two groups in my community. One was conservative, the other was liberal. They both considered me as one of them, so I got to hear their unfiltered assessment of the other side. I got a whole earful about “those people,” those people who don’t share our values and who are trying to derail our country. When you stripped away the specifics, both sides were saying essentially the same thing: they were accusing the other side of having a self-serving malevolent purpose. But I knew these people, and I knew what was in their hearts. I knew them to be kind hearted, loving generous, and patriotic. And I knew that their assumptions about each other were wrong. While this was happening in my personal life, I began to notice a similar dynamic in business. I’m a consultant, I work with sales teams and leaders, I’ve observed hundreds of interactions, I began to see that the my-agenda-versus-your-agenda problem was pervasive. I saw it in the salesperson who is so focused on making their quota that they view their customer as just a number. I saw it when the VP Operations, with an efficiency mindset tries meets with the VP of Marketing who comes from a more creative space. They battle it out until they began to see each other as the obstacle to getting anything done. We’ve been told that when two sides disagree, we’re supposed to compromise, but that never really works. Here’s why: When you compromise, it’s like you’re trading chips. You hold on tight to the ones that are important to you; you give away http://www.mcleodandmore.com/2014/01/31/why-comprise-is-a-flawed-model/