Quotes About Teamwork

If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody's going to get anything done.

As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: "To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision."fn3

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only, and fast. These words get in the way of healthy communication. They are red flags that introduce animosity, torpedo good discussions, and cause projects to be late.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It's completely exhausting.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally, and that mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.

To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision."‡

As a business owner, you should share everything you know too.

Ironically, you'll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you'll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.

Hay algunas palabras que no deberían emplearse nunca en las empresas. Y no nos referimos a mierda o joder. Se trata de imprescindible, obligatorio, imposible, fácil, sencillamente, sólo y rápido. Son rayas rojas que si se cruzan crean malestar, sabotean las discusiones saludables y provocan retrasos en los proyectos.

No one is as smart as all of us. -Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur

The bottom line is that you shouldn't hire people you don't trust, or work for bosses who don't trust you.

It's also a lot harder to bullshit your peers than your boss. In talking to a project manager without tech chops, programmers can make a thirty-minute job sound like a week-long polar expedition, but if their tall tale is out in the open for other programmers to see, it won't pass the smell test.

If you absolutely have to work on long-term projects, try to dedicate one day a week (or every two weeks) to small victories that generate enthusiasm. Small victories let you celebrate and release good news. And you want a steady stream of good news. When there's something new to announce every two weeks, you energize your team and give your customers something to be excited about.

At 37signals, we've found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team.

The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration

Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you'll see that it's the work—not the clock—that matters.

You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough. You need to know how far you can push someone. You need to know what people really mean when they say something. So hire slowly. It's the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers.

The important thing is that everyone—or at least a sizable group—feels those trade-offs together. Otherwise, it's too easy just to focus on the negatives. When everyone else is still at the office, how

If you decide you absolutely must get together, try to make your meeting a productive one by sticking to these simple rules: Set a timer. When it rings, meeting's over. Period. Invite as few people as possible. Always have a clear agenda. Begin with a specific problem. Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes. End with a solution and make someone responsible for implementing it.