Moe and Adam Galinsky talk about when to cooperate, when to compete, and how to succeed at both.
Friend and Foe — What You Don’t Know Will Hurt Your Relationships
Have you ever had a good friend turn on you? To most of us, that’s a disheartening question to even contemplate, still, there’s hardly anyone I speak with who doesn’t answer with a resounding YES. After the fact, betrayal always hurts, both emotionally and rationally, but after the slightest moments of reflection, most of us are quick to recognize that we should have seen such an occurrence coming. Trust is a tricky thing, its both treasured and craved by most of us, but what I’ve learned from reading the new book by Maurice Schweitzer, (@ME_Schweitzer) and Adam Galinsky, Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both, is that perhaps there’s another lens that most of us tend to ignore when trying to understand the dynamics of relationships.
“Humans are wired to cooperate and compete.” They state, “…Sometimes we cooperate enthusiastically with people and build enduring bonds with them. At other times, we engage in fierce competition with and have little regard for others. Even within a single interaction with the same person, we can oscillate between the two approaches.” Navigating our social world today requires the right balance between cooperation and competition, but as you’ll learn from my conversation with Adam, social comparison has a huge influence of how we make sense of the world.
Here’s what we discuss:
When is a friend a foe and vice a versa
The three forces that shape the tension between cooperation and competition
Bridging the trust gap
The good and bad of social comparisons
How power shapes leadership behavior
How to feel powerful
Becoming a more effective perspective-taker
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