Quotes About Teamwork

That's something that's so often overlooked in this game - the dynamics of the locker room.

You know, you don't need a leader to sort of administer something that's going very well. In fact, in one sense, an overly ambitious person in that circumstance can probably screw it up.

In a lot of aspects it's cooler that we don't have a lot of really overly famous people in the band.

One way a collaboration can go wrong is if your connection is inauthentic or overly prescriptive.

Chemar Holder plays Xbox with me online all the time but it's not like any of us are going to be buddy, buddy in the middle. We might make a small joke every now and again but it's not going to be overly friendly because everyone's got a job to do.

Great leadership and great companies aren't built overnight, and they're not built without capital. And capital can sometimes be counter-productive to building a great culture.

You need to have discussions and make sure you guide players towards the collective spirit. It can't be done overnight.

Every time you come out of the team I know you don't just disappear, you don't just become a bad player overnight.

The most overrated thing is that you're a good defensive team because of your coaching. No. You're a good defensive team because you care and because it's important to you.

I'm a firm believer that individual accolades are a bit overrated in this game.

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to.

If you've got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that's a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath.

Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can't be changing. If you need to use a reactive strategy of contract labor, your team will probably never jell. In fact, the workforce you manage almost certainly won't be a team at all.

The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make sense to them, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Significant organizational learning can't happen in isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common boss.

It's not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy.

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.

You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.