Quotes About Teamwork

The teams that compete at the highest level love the thrill of the contest. They may have winning in their heads, but they have a love for the effort and struggle in their hearts.

The telephone operator and all others who may perform less "important" tasks will not feel important unless you, the leader, teach that them they are valued and explain how their contribution helps the company as a whole. Individuals who feel they don't matter will perform their jobs as if they don't count.

The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

EXPLAIN TO EACH TEAM MEMBER PRECISELY HOW HIS OR HER CONTRIBUTIONS CONNECT TO THE WELFARE AND SUCCESS OF THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION

The joy and great satisfaction I derived from leadership—working with and teaching others, helping them reach their potential in contributing to the team's common goals

The Star of the Team Is the Team.

Insist that Members of Your Team Share the "Ball"—Information, Ideas, and More.

Go Out of Your Way to Praise Those "Quiet" Performers Who Make Things Happen.

Seek Players Who Will Make the Best Team Rather Than the Best Players.

I never dreamed about winning a national championship. What I was dreaming about was trying to produce the best basketball team we could be. My thoughts were directed toward preparation, our journey, not the results of the effort. That would simply have shifted my attention to the wrong area, hoping for something out of my control.

Condition Your Team to Love the Struggle.

Organizations Succeed When They Become More Than the Sum of Their Players. That's one of the real tests of any leader, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. No team will consistently succeed unless the leader is able to achieve this critical goal.

Personal greatness is not determined by the size of the job, but by the size of the effort one puts into the job. This applies to everyone on the team.

A person who values winning above anything will do anything to win. And such people are threats to their organizations.

Sports don't build character; they reveal it.

And that, in my opinion, is the first goal of leadership—namely, getting the very best out of the people in your organization, whether they have talent to spare or are spare on talent.

Drawing up plans such as these diagrams is the easy part. I did it thousands of times. Creating a successful organization with people who execute the plans at a level of Competitive Greatness—now, that's the challenge of leadership.

I believe effective leaders are, first and foremost, good teachers. We are in the education business. Whether in class or on the court, my job was the same: to effectively teach those under my supervision how they could perform to the best of their ability in ways that best served the goals of our team. I believe the same is true for productive leaders in any organization.

there is one similarity between a prison guard and a leader: Both have the final word. When a decision is made, it must be accepted by those on your team, or they must be encouraged to find another team.

I told players at UCLA that we, as a team, are like a powerful car. Maybe a Bill Walton or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan is the big engine, but if one wheel is flat, we're going no place. And if we have brand new tires but the lug nuts are missing, the wheels come off. What good is the powerful engine now? It's no good at all.

what I say about leadership: "You must be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.

I'm very proud of the fact that while all the records were being set at UCLA by our basketball teams, I felt exactly the same way. Family is first. Always. Always.

I prize intensity and fear emotionalism. Consistency in high performance and production is a trademark of effective and successful organizations and those who lead them. Emotionalism destroys consistency. A leader who is ruled by emotions, whose temperament is mercurial, produces a team whose trademark is the roller coaster—ups and downs in performance; unpredictability and un-dependability in effort and concentration; one day good, the next day bad.

Our teams at UCLA had four perfect seasons, but we never played a perfect game, never played as well as we could. That's perfection. We didn't reach perfection, but we constantly strove toward it.