Ryan Day Quotes

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

True leadership knows not to go to extremes but knows how to confront and appreciate challenges.

Professional people build relationships by doing the work together.

It's important to work through things in a relationship. You can't just give up because you're frustrated. It's most important to talk things through together. And that, for me, has been the way I've best resolved problems in the past.

My career was always about working with people, and understanding issues and problems and helping them to solve those issues and problems. How you deal with people - that's what diplomacy is all about. So while I'm not a career diplomat, many of the skills I had seemed to directly translate into the diplomatic arena.

Courage means to keep working a relationship, to continue seeking solutions to difficult problems, and to stay focused during stressful periods.

Climbing has worked for me in a number of ways on Capitol Hill. I'm much more inclined to look at what people do, as opposed to what they say. Also, it's about working together - we're all on the rope together, and you don't get to cut the rope if you're not getting along with someone.

I believe you can work with anybody.

We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.

I don't put together cars, I put together people.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Relationships, it seems to me, are timeless. What works between two people always works; what doesn't is always troublesome. Over time, people learn - or not - how to negotiate what's difficult, but that doesn't mean the misfit has gone away entirely.

In running Wilson Sonsini, it's all people-to-people skills. Those people-to-people skills translate into diplomatic skills.

The way you build trust with your team is around super-clear communication in that instant when they say, 'I will be sad if you don't do X.' You have to say, 'We're not going to do X, and here's why, and believe me, you'll be much sadder later if I let you go do it and you spend a bunch of time on it and nothing ever happens.'

Problems should be solved by talking and not in an aggressive manner.

The more people talk directly to each other, the better. Dialogue is the way of solving issues.

In my mind, a good leader would say, 'OK, I need to sit down and talk to the guys who oppose me. Let me let them voice their opinions; let me get their thought process.'

What I've learned - after working for, I guess, some time now - is when you're approaching a relationship like that, like, any working relationship, it's good to be open. To know that someone might have a different way of doing things and listen to them. And hopefully, you come to a common understanding.

Miscommunication is the number one cause of all problems; communication is your bridge to other people. Without it, there's nothing. So when it's damaged, you have to solve all these problems it creates.

You can put my dad in any situation and he's going to figure it out. He's going to figure the people out and how to get along, how to make everyone comfortable.

Conflict resolution, all those things, are important. When you're in a group environment, you have to have those. If you don't, things fester. Have the conversation. Resolve it. Move forward.

Part of being a successful leader is listening and looking for opportunities to bring people together.

I'd like to think my strengths are in connecting with people and the relationship aspect of this business.

Joy and happiness don't strengthen relationships - difficulty does.

You tend to relate to the other person better if you understand their professional needs.