ABSTRACT
Respect for colleagues is a fundamental condition for good team work, and lack of respect is frequently an unspoken barrier to building working relationships. An organization providing domiciliary care in the community approached one person because they had recently created a new management team to reflect a wider range of operations but the team was not working well together and there seemed to be a clear lack of respect among them. In a residential centre for mentally ill people, the manager and staff members wanted to work on staff development and, specifically, on the cooperation of the staff in working together. The messenger position in an organization may be illustrated by a creature from Nordic mythology, Ratatosk. Ratatosk is a squirrel whose task it is to connect the top and the bottom of the great tree of life, Ygdrasil, by running up and down, bringing messages to and from the root of the tree, which the snake is gnawing.
