Stewardship means accepting your responsibilities. Historically, a steward is a person who receives responsibility and authority from an owner to look after their property in the owner’s best interest. In short, a steward is a manager. Unfortunately, stewardship is not a business term; it is not discussed in business textbooks or corporate boardrooms. As a result, few businesses even today are willing to take on the role of stewardship. Stewardship in business, however, is essential.

Overconfidence bias is a personal tendency to hold a false and misleading assessment of our skills, intellect, or talent. In short, it’s an egotistical belief that we’re better than we actually are.

Communicating well builds the essential ingredient of any successful team—trust. So, take the time to establish clear expectations around how you and your team are communicating. Then, discuss where it’s working best and when your communications break down.  Then work to fix it.

We need to learn a better approach to disagree. Using conversational receptiveness in our language, parties who disagree can more effectively communicate their willingness to engage with each other’s views. This method involves using language that signals a person is genuinely interested in another’s perspective.