Six Leadership Actions To Leverage Employees' Differences To Strengthen Teams

The new book, All The Difference: Six Leadership Actions To Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value, teaches how leaders can turn their team's individual differences into deeper trust, greater creativity, and winning results. 

“The greatest risk of unmanaged difference isn’t conflict: it lies in the ideas, insights, and opportunities that may never surface,” explain the book’s authors, Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Leslie C. Smith.
 
They suggest that you look around your team to fully see people with different communication styles, perspectives, cultural norms, and capabilities. These differences are expressed in all kinds of ways, such as casual gestures in a meeting, a colleague's opinion on a current event, or an intense work style.
 
Often, those differences can lead to friction, even conflict. You may try to manage around them. But, for you and your organization to fully leverage the strengths of your team’s differences, you must leverage these differences.
 
Based on current research, with examples from frontline leaders and insights from their own experience, the authors provide a framework of six "target actions" that will help you leverage your best self as a leader, honor multiple perspectives, and turn difference into strength on your team. The six leadership actions are: 

1. Know Yourself – Self-awareness enables leaders to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and their actions’ impact on others.
2. Return to Respect When it Matters Most – This involves restoring respect when tension, triggers, or conflict pulls you off course.
3. Activate Honesty: Tell the Truth and Listen to Build Trust – Leading with open, authentic communication allows team members to feel safe and free to express their thoughts openly.
4. See the Full Story and Honor Multiple Perspectives – Expanding understanding through curiosity, empathy, and perspective-taking.
5. Ignite Togetherness: Harness the “We” – Building collective problem-solving and leveraging seen and unseen differences for innovation and better outcomes.
6. Commit to Action: Be Accountable and Bring it All Together – Leaders must hold themselves and their teams accountable for creating value from difference, ensuring that actions align with collective goals. 

The authors teach you how to use these six target leadership actions to overcome the following four hidden "landmines" that often create havoc for leaders trying to navigate difference. The landmines can distort decisions, suppress critical perspectives, and fracture trust. 

1. Certainty: Believing you are right and others’ views are simply wrong.
2. Inconsistency: The gap between what you say you value and how you try to behave and how you actually behave.
3. Emotional Reactivity: How, why, and even when you and others react emotionally are differences that impact on how you show up and, thus, how you navigate people and work.
4. Justification: This landmine lies underneath the other three landmines, making them more likely to explode and adding to their overall power to destroy. On its own, justification locks you into defending your choices rather than learning from them. It transforms what could have been a moment of repair into a cycle of blame. 

Some of my favorite learnings from the book are:

Listening well is different from agreeing. Strong leaders know that engaging with different perspectives doesn’t require them to adopt every suggestion. But it does require openness, curiosity, and a willingness to reflect.

When leaders are consistent and handle tension with curiosity instead of defensiveness, they make it safer for difference to surface. This is not about avoiding disagreement, it is about using it well. When people see that their input leads to better thinking and real outcomes, they engage more fully.

Trust is built or broken in the accumulation of small moments. It is the consistency between what leaders say and what they do.

All the Difference is an indispensable guide for transforming your team and creating a thriving organization in a world full of differences.

The authors share these additional insights with us:
 
Question: Why is this a good time for leaders to read the book?
 
Brady/Kliman/Smith: Because leaders today are navigating unprecedented complexity, speed, division, and change, many of the traditional ways of leading are no longer sufficient.
 
Organizations are filled with differences: different generations, perspectives, communication styles, experiences, expectations, and now increasingly, different relationships to technology and AI.
 
The challenge is not difference itself. The challenge is that most leaders were never taught how to navigate difference in ways that create trust, unlock innovation, and accelerate performance rather than diminish it. All the Difference offers practical leadership actions that help leaders turn difference into a strategic advantage instead of a source of friction.
 
Question: Of the six target leadership actions, which is the most important and why?
 
Brady/Kliman/Smith: If we had to choose one, we WOULDN'T, but one of the most important factors is respect. It is the fulcrum of the entire framework because it is often the first thing lost under pressure. When people feel dismissed, judged, ignored, or devalued, trust erodes quickly and communication narrows. Curiosity disappears. Defensiveness rises. Teams stop telling the truth.
Returning to respect does not mean avoiding hard conversations or lowering standards. It means creating conditions where people can work through tension, disagreement, and difference productively enough to create better outcomes together.
 
Question: Of the six target leadership actions, which one do most leaders struggle to master and why is that the case?
 
Brady/Kliman/Smith: Many leaders struggle most with Seeing the Full Story because it requires interrupting certainty — and certainty can feel very comfortable, especially under pressure. Leaders are often rewarded for decisiveness, expertise, and confidence. But in complex environments, certainty can quietly become a liability.
 
We all have a tendency to interpret situations through our own experiences, assumptions, biases, and preferred ways of working. Seeing the Full Story requires leaders to slow down long enough to ask, “What might I be missing?” It takes humility, curiosity, emotional regulation, and the willingness to hear perspectives that may challenge our own.
 
Question: What is the best next step for a leader to take after reading the book?
 
Brady/Kliman/Smith: Start small but start intentionally. Leadership transformation rarely happens through one dramatic moment; it happens through repeated choices and behaviors over time.
 
We encourage leaders to identify one relationship, one team dynamic, or one recurring tension where difference is currently creating friction instead of value. Then practice one target leadership action consistently in that space. Maybe it’s returning to respect during difficult conversations. Maybe it’s activating honesty by naming what feels hard. Maybe it’s seeing the full story by becoming more curious about perspectives different from your own. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to build the habits and relational conditions that allow people and organizations to thrive together.
___

 

Susan MacKenty Brady is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University and the first Chief Executive Officer of The Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. The Institute develops the mindset and skills of leaders at all stages of life so they can foster gender parity and cultures of inclusion.
 
She has keynoted or consulted at over 500 organizations around the world.

Stuart D. Kliman is a seasoned advisor who has spent over three decades working with leaders and organizations to collaborate more effectively in high-stakes, complex environments and relationships. He is a founding senior adviser partner at Vantage Partners. He is an alumnus of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

 

Lieutenant General Leslie C. Smith, U.S. Army (Retired) serves as the Vice President for Leadership and Education at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA). He is also a visiting leadership professor at Georgia Southern University’s Parker College of Business, a corporate and nonprofit board director, and the CEO of LV Smith Corporate Group, LLC.

At AUSA, Smith builds coalitions across all components of the Army, AUSA’s 122 chapters, industry, and academia—strengthening trust and advocacy for Soldiers, Army Civilians, and the defense industrial base.
 
Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.