The Investment Matrix

Too many relationships at the top of organizations leave leaders feeling anxious, frustrated, and depleted, rather than energized, confident, and supported. The result? What BusinessWeek journalist Michelle Conlin calls “a new frontier in productivity: emotional inefficiency, which includes all that bickering, backstabbing, and ridiculous playing for approval that are a mark of the modern workplace.”¹ Much of that bickering and backstabbing is a direct result of failed relationships. All told, those failures create huge organizational costs: people withhold or distort information; the right information doesn't get to the right people on time; constant quibbling and quarreling slows everything down; products fail to make it to market on time; key decisions either don't get made or get made poorly.