Quotes About Teamwork

The leader who tries to change the group's spirit directly—yelling, demanding, disciplining—actually plays into the teenage dynamic and reinforces the desire to rebel.

The lesson is simple: do not confuse a chummy, clublike atmosphere with team spirit and cohesion. Coddling your soldiers and acting as if everyone were equal will ruin discipline and promote the creation of factions. Victory will forge stronger bonds than superficial friendliness, and victory comes from discipline, training, and ruthlessly high standards.

Second, learn to take advantage of other people's work to further your own cause. Time is precious and life is short. If you try to do it all on your own, you run yourself ragged, waste energy, and burn yourself out. It is far better to conserve your forces, pounce on the work others have done, and find a way to make it your own.

With the company, we should look deeply at the organization itself—how well people communicate with one another, how quickly and fluidly information is passed along. If people are not communicating, if they are not on the same page, no amount of changes in the product or marketing will improve performance.

Ask more of them. Expect them to work like adults. Quietly alter the spirit with which things are done. Emphasize efficiency: anybody can be efficient (it isn't a question of talent), efficiency breeds success, and success raises morale. Once the spirit and personality of the group start to shift, everything else will fall into place.

You do not have to know all the details. Sometimes you need to delegate—let your subordinates handle the information gathering.

Be careful in assembling this team that you are not seduced by expertise and intelligence. Character, the ability to work under you and with the rest of the team, and the capacity to accept responsibility and think independently are equally key.

This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups.

Right from the beginning, your troops must see you leading from the front, sharing their dangers and sacrifices—taking the cause as seriously as they do. Instead of trying to push them from behind, make them run to keep up with you.

You may have brilliant ideas, you may be able to invent unbeatable strategies—but if the group that you lead, and that you depend on to execute your plans, is unresponsive and uncreative, and if its members always put their personal agendas first, your ideas will mean nothing. You must learn the lesson of war: it is the structure of the army—the chain of command and the relationship of the parts to the whole—that will give your strategies force.

Un paso crítico en la creación de una eficiente cadena de mando es reunir un equipo calificado que comparta tus metas y valores. Este equipo te dará muchas ventajas: personas entusiastas y motivadas que pueden pensar por sí mismas; una imagen como delegador@, como líder just@ y democrátic@, y un ahorro de tu valiosa energía, que puedes reorientar hacia el panorama general.

If your orders are vague and halfhearted, by the time they reach the field they will be meaningless. Let people work unsupervised and they will revert to their natural selfishness: they will see in your orders what they want to see, and their behavior will promote their own interests. Unless you adapt your leadership style to the weaknesses of the people in your group, you will almost certainly end up with a break in the chain of command.

But there is as much skill in knowing how to handle a meeting of ten as there is in manipulating a gathering of hundreds.

Winning is a wonderful thing if you can help and respect others along the way. But if you stomp on others as you climb the ladder and treat them like losers once you reach the top, my opinion is that you debase your own humanity and undermine your team or organization.

The best bosses do more than charge up people, and recruit and breed energizers. They eliminate the negative, because even a few bad apples and destructive acts can undermine many good people and constructive acts.

Leadership is not a solo act; it's a team performance. 

Being in charge isn't always about telling people what to do. Sometimes, it's about knowing when to step out of the way of people who know what they're doing.

If you tried to solve every problem yourself, you ended by solving none.

The worst sin a general can commit, worse than blundering, worse than losing, worse than anything, is to desert the men who depend on him.

Now it was as if, at a basketball game, one side would argue about whether the court or the ball was exactly the right size until the other team got pissed off and left, giving them the win on a forfeit.

The way we're going to be a better company is by your working on yourself, and helping others work on themselves.

We've got an unbeatable team.- Sauron

To function efficiently, any group of people or employees must have faith in their leader.- Capt. Bligh(ret.)

Robert M. Gates