All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

A leadership playbook for leveraging team differences to boost connection, performance, and results.

Look around your team. You see people with different communication styles, perspectives, cultural norms, and capabilities. These differences are expressed in all kinds of ways—a casual gesture in a meeting; a colleague's opinion on a current event; an intense work style—and can often lead to friction, even conflict. You try to manage around them, but what if these differences are the key to your team's success?

In All the Difference, bestselling author and head of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership Susan MacKenty Brady, business negotiation expert Stuart D. Kliman, and retired US Army lieutenant general Leslie C. Smith reveal that leaders must shift their view: Difference is not just noise to tolerate—it's the raw material for creating value. It's true, they argue, that when difference isn't understood or acknowledged, it breeds disconnection, draining performance and potential. What's needed is a leadership strategy for turning human difference into your organization's greatest strength.

With examples from frontline leaders, current research, and insights from their own experiences, the authors provide a framework of six "target actions" that will help you uncover and leverage the productive power of difference on your team: from "Know You—Leverage Your Best Self & Help Others Do the Same" to "See the Full Story and Honor Multiple Perspectives" to "Commit to Action—Demonstrate and Create Accountability."

Our teams have never been more complex, and the challenge of leading them has never been more urgent. All the Difference is your playbook for transforming your team and creating a thriving organization in a world full of difference.

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All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

A leadership playbook for leveraging team differences to boost connection, performance, and results.

Look around your team. You see people with different communication styles, perspectives, cultural norms, and capabilities. These differences are expressed in all kinds of ways—a casual gesture in a meeting; a colleague's opinion on a current event; an intense work style—and can often lead to friction, even conflict. You try to manage around them, but what if these differences are the key to your team's success?

In All the Difference, bestselling author and head of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership Susan MacKenty Brady, business negotiation expert Stuart D. Kliman, and retired US Army lieutenant general Leslie C. Smith reveal that leaders must shift their view: Difference is not just noise to tolerate—it's the raw material for creating value. It's true, they argue, that when difference isn't understood or acknowledged, it breeds disconnection, draining performance and potential. What's needed is a leadership strategy for turning human difference into your organization's greatest strength.

With examples from frontline leaders, current research, and insights from their own experiences, the authors provide a framework of six "target actions" that will help you uncover and leverage the productive power of difference on your team: from "Know You—Leverage Your Best Self & Help Others Do the Same" to "See the Full Story and Honor Multiple Perspectives" to "Commit to Action—Demonstrate and Create Accountability."

Our teams have never been more complex, and the challenge of leading them has never been more urgent. All the Difference is your playbook for transforming your team and creating a thriving organization in a world full of difference.

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All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value

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Available for Pre-Order. This item will be released on July 14, 2026

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Overview

A leadership playbook for leveraging team differences to boost connection, performance, and results.

Look around your team. You see people with different communication styles, perspectives, cultural norms, and capabilities. These differences are expressed in all kinds of ways—a casual gesture in a meeting; a colleague's opinion on a current event; an intense work style—and can often lead to friction, even conflict. You try to manage around them, but what if these differences are the key to your team's success?

In All the Difference, bestselling author and head of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership Susan MacKenty Brady, business negotiation expert Stuart D. Kliman, and retired US Army lieutenant general Leslie C. Smith reveal that leaders must shift their view: Difference is not just noise to tolerate—it's the raw material for creating value. It's true, they argue, that when difference isn't understood or acknowledged, it breeds disconnection, draining performance and potential. What's needed is a leadership strategy for turning human difference into your organization's greatest strength.

With examples from frontline leaders, current research, and insights from their own experiences, the authors provide a framework of six "target actions" that will help you uncover and leverage the productive power of difference on your team: from "Know You—Leverage Your Best Self & Help Others Do the Same" to "See the Full Story and Honor Multiple Perspectives" to "Commit to Action—Demonstrate and Create Accountability."

Our teams have never been more complex, and the challenge of leading them has never been more urgent. All the Difference is your playbook for transforming your team and creating a thriving organization in a world full of difference.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798892791649
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date: 07/14/2026
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 256

About the Author

Susan MacKenty Brady is a global leadership expert, speaker, and CEO of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. She advises organizations worldwide on cultivating high-performing, human-centered cultures and is the coauthor of the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller Arrive and Thrive.

Stuart D. Kliman is a founder and senior adviser at Vantage Partners, a midsize consulting and training organization in Boston. He is an expert in behavioral change management and collaboration and an alumnus of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Leslie C. Smith is a retired United States Army lieutenant general; the Vice President for Leadership, Education, and Programs at the Association of the United States Army; a visiting leadership professor at Georgia Southern University; a corporate board member; and the LV Smith Corporate Group CEO.

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