Quotes About Teamwork

Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance. People grow closer and more comfortable with each other, and consequently do even better work. Meanwhile, rookie teams make rookie mistakes.

there are times when nothing beats talking to your manager in person or sitting in a room with your colleagues, brainstorming

With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone's got to be producing. No one can be above the work.

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.

When a leader fails to provide the proper culture, one will still exist; it can best be described as one of every man for himself, each acting in his own best interests and to heck with the interests of the company.

Poorly led teams "systematically underreported" their mistakes. In layman's terms, they covered up their mistakes.

You have to understand that we're basically a company of misfits and people who didn't fit in anywhere else," he proclaimed. "That's what makes the company so great. We were all lucky to find the place where we belonged.

Doing what you say, leading by example, showing consistency and fairness—these actions all build trust between managers and their teams over the long term.

Pope sees that keeping people on the same page takes total follow-through. "We told the groups though our action," he explains, "that we're not hard-nosed and [it isn't that we] don't care about what they think. We proved to them they have a voice and we ought to listen to it. And we know that if we're really listening we ought to react.

When I was a little kid I used to play with guys twice my age, so, I was the last one picked, so if I picked I knew that I had to get the ball to the scorer if I wanted to stay on the court, so that was pretty much my job.

But feedback is not simply a thing the giver hands you and you receive. The two of you are building a puzzle—together.

If I'm the boss / parent, why can't I just tell my subordinates / children what to do?

People do sometimes worry that we are about to put someone's "face" at risk, but then visibly relax as they realize that we have put a joint problem on the table (from the third story, of course) with no hint of the blame frame.

the larger the staff, the more important it becomes to make sure responsibility is owned by individuals and not by the group.

Just as "good fences make good neighbors," clear delineations of responsibility can prevent the kind of turf battles that break down staff relationships.

To be successful you must recognise your weaknesses and employ people with complementary skills.

Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love.

We stopped in our tracks. I said, "Man, let's not get ourselves killed doing this. Let's discuss this." Scott sat down facing out, looking down at me. I figured, if a big spindrift slide comes down now, we're going to get washed off the face.

How easily men could make things much better than they are – if they only all tried together!' Winston Churchill, 1909

Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Good cops make their bosses look good, and Hector was a one-man beauty school.

Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.

Oblivious of Harlow, for whom they had all a dog's amusedly tolerant contempt for an inefficient human leader, the quintet swept away on the track.

You can accomplish anything," she once told me, "as long as you are willing to let others take credit for it.