In your role as a leader, working with people is essential, and it takes time. And sometimes, you might be asked to help with something that’s a priority for others, but not for you. The question, says Peter Bregman, CEO of Bregman Partners, boils down to this: How can we spend time where we add the most value and let go of the rest?

After last year’s salmonella outbreak, in which thousands became ill after eating contaminated eggs, a billion of them were pulled from stores. Much of the blame was attributed to poor federal oversight and lack of coordination across federal agencies.

Despite their tumultuous relationship, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards decided in 1989 to thrash out how they would hold their band together. Why? Because they were better together than apart.

When Maestro Wolfgang Heinzel stands before the Merck Orchestra, he may look like an authoritarian leader, commanding musicians from his podium. But Heinzel doesn’t actually know how to play the instruments himself—“in the same way a leader in an organization can’t do everyone’s job,” says Jon Chilingerian. What maestros—and good leaders—understand:

One way you can increase productivity of knowledge workers is by breaking down time barriers. That is, build in time for them to share knowledge. Example: Boston-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals discovered that researchers didn’t have time to share lessons from experiments. So it dubbed a small group of scientists “knowledge intermediaries.”

A little healthy competition can be, well, healthy. Internal competition allowed to go too far, though, can be destructive. Dick Brass, a Microsoft vice president from 1997 to 2004, says that at Microsoft, internal competition has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which big, established groups prey upon emerging teams.