Quotes About Teamwork

They put every candidate through at least five interviews. They insist on using a core set of behavioral questions, asked in slightly different ways by different people. And then they make all the interviewers get together in a room and debrief." Jamie paused. "They do this for vice presidents, consultants, even receptionists.

humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.

Building a cohesive leadership team is the most critical of the four disciplines because it enables the other three. It is also the most elusive because it requires considerable interpersonal commitment from an executive team and its leader.

identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.

KEY POINTS—BUILDING TRUST • Trust is the foundation of teamwork. • On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people. • Building trust takes time, but the process can be greatly accelerated. • Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.

More than anything else, cohesive teams are efficient. They arrive at decisions more quickly and with greater buy-in than non-cohesive teams do.

One of the best ways to recognize a cohesive team is the nature of its meetings. Passionate. Intense. Exhausting. Never boring.

Well, some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.

I often like to talk with candidates in a room with multiple team members. This allows us to debrief more effectively (e.g., "What did you think he meant when he said . . . ?"). This also gives you a sense of how the candidate deals with multiple people at once, which is a critical skill on a team. Some people are much different one-on-one than they are in a group, and you need to know that.

cohesive teams fight. But they fight about issues, not personalities. Most important, when they are done fighting, they have an amazing capacity to move on to the next issue, with no residual feelings.

What is most important is that team members get comfortable letting their colleagues see them for who they are. No pretension. No positioning.

Once a leadership team has become cohesive and worked to establish clarity and alignment around the answers to the six critical questions, then, and only then, can they effectively move on to the next step: communicating those answers. Or better yet, overcommunicating those answers—over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I have found that it is remarkably helpful for members of a leadership team to spend time talking about their backgrounds. People who understand one another's personal philosophies, family histories, educational experiences, hobbies, and interests are far more likely to work well together than those who do not.

the only thing that really matters is this: are they holding back their opinions? Members of great teams do not.

Members of cohesive teams know one another's strengths and weaknesses and don't hesitate to point them out. They also know something about one another's backgrounds, which helps them to understand why members think and act the way they do.

For cohesive teams, meetings are compelling and vital. They are forums for asking difficult questions, challenging one another's ideas, and ultimately arriving at decisions that everyone agrees to support and adhere to, in the best interests of the company.

Great team players lack excessive ego or concerns about status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit, emphasize team over self, and define success collectively rather than individually. It is no great surprise, then, that humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player. Humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.

Help people realize that when they fail to provide peers with constructive feedback they are letting them down personally. By holding back, we are hurting not only the team, but also our teammates themselves.

What's critical is that team members know that the areas that were identified will not go away, and that they will have to answer for their progress in the not-too-distant future.

and experienced executives than our competitors

That being said, experiential team exercises can be valuable tools for enhancing teamwork as long as they are layered upon more fundamental and relevant processes. While each of these tools and exercises can have a significant short-term impact on a team's ability to build trust

They played, not beautifully but deep, ignoring their often discordant strings and striking right into the heart of the music they knew best, the true notes acting as their milestones. On the poop above their heads, where the weary helmsmen tended the new steering-oar and Babbington stood at the con, the men listened intently; it was the first sound of human life that they had heard, apart from the brief Christmas merriment, for a time they could scarcely measure.

there never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship.

The newly-minted captain is told to let nothing stop him but to do nothing that would risk his ship or his crew.