Connecting to Admired Leadership
Finding Common Ground Versus a Common Goal
Episode Summary
A conversation with Admired Leadership Partner & Executive Coach, Diana Hong and Wes Bender from CRA | Admired Leadership, exploring how leaders can build stronger relationships by focusing on common goals rather than just common ground. Drawing from practical coaching experience and real-world examples, this session reveals why shared objectives create deeper connections than personality matches or natural commonalities. Diana provides actionable strategies for repairing damaged relationships, building trust incrementally, and creating psychological safety for teams through intentional collaboration.
Episode Notes
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Key Highlights
- Common goals vs. common ground: While we naturally gravitate toward people who share our interests or backgrounds, focusing on what we're building together creates stronger, more sustainable relationships than waiting for personality clicks
- Effort matters more than ease: The relationships that required the most work to build often become the deepest and most trusted - don't assume that natural or easy connections are automatically better
- Incremental trust building: When relationships are damaged, create small, shared goals with quick wins rather than attempting one big conversation - trust builds through repeated small promises kept, not dramatic gestures
- Organizational impact of leader relationships: When leaders have tension, it forces team members to pick sides and creates psychological unsafety - people have to watch what they say and consider political repercussions
- Building collaboration muscles: Start with deliberately created shared projects, even if they're not mandated from above, to develop habits of communication and accountability that transfer to future collaborations
Notable Quotes
- "If you focus less on commonality and more on common goals - what are we building that we can share together - that ends up actually unifying us more over time than waiting for some magical click to happen."
- "Effort matters, and that's actually completely controllable, because we can control the amount of effort we put into a relationship. It doesn't have to be this mystical personality match."
- "Trust happens incrementally. Trust doesn't happen in big, dramatic swoops - it's small, incremental promises that were made, kept, and followed through."
- "When leaders have tension, we're subtly telling people around us that you gotta pick a side. That makes people feel less safe because now they have to watch what they say."
- "Just by the fact of signing up to say 'I'm committing to doing this, it's not natural, it's not easy, but I'm committing' - that's what actually makes the relationship start gelling together."
Featured Speakers
- Diana Hong is a Partner & Executive Coach at CRA | Admired Leadership, specializing in organizational change and relationship dynamics. With extensive experience coaching senior leaders through complex interpersonal challenges, she brings practical insights on building trust and collaboration in high-stakes environments. Her approach emphasizes actionable strategies over theoretical frameworks.
- Wes Bender serves as a facilitator and thought leadership coordinator at CRA | Admired Leadership, helping to connect practical leadership insights with real-world application through webinars and educational content.
Resources Mentioned