#ebbf25 – Tales from the city – Unity, collaborative leadership and culture
Michael Spiegel and Ralph Blundell, offered the first Friday afternoon keynote. They met in 2008, starting to work together: Michael was one of Ralph’s cutomers.
Michael’s challenges were turning around the disfunctional team and surviving to the functional team.
They found the same common ground in values and it resulted in a good experience. There was a high level of unity.
They defined values, without communicating them, and they started to behave on them. Mutual accountability was another component nneded fot a high performing team. Resistance and disagreement foster unity.
“We need to have a mix of leadership styles, authority is not always bad”, Michael says, “it can foster people to colaboration.”, Ralph explained, “Focus does generate results”.
“It is useless to have teamwork without an objective, some pressure is needed”, Michael concluded.
https://cosyanna.de comes to mind reading about Michael and Ralph defining values without formally communicating them, since that implicit alignment is often what makes a shared space feel cohesive before anyone spells out the rules. The idea that resistance and disagreement actually foster unity struck me, because I've seen teams where surface harmony hid real problems that only surfaced once someone was willing to push back. It makes me think the mix of leadership styles they mention is less about finding one right approach and more about knowing when to step back and let accountability do the work.