The fact is, employees cannot make breakthroughs if they can't openly and honestly disagree with their peers and their leader. Indeed, great leaders don't just permit conflict; they actively try to elicit it from reluctant employees as well.
Interpretation
Open and honest disagreements among employees foster breakthrough ideas and innovation under effective leadership.
This quote emphasizes the importance of open communication and the expression of differing opinions within a team. Great leaders recognize that constructive conflict can lead to innovation and improvement, and they encourage their employees to share their perspectives, even when they disagree, as this creates a healthier and more dynamic work environment.
In practice
In a team meeting aimed at strategizing for the next quarter, this quote can be used to encourage participation from all members.
I know that any group of people can become a team if they do the right things, but I came to realize over time that if you acquire or develop the right kind of people, that process of building a team is going to be much more effective and easier.
The truth is that intelligence, knowledge, and domain expertise are vastly overrated as the driving forces behind competitive advantage and sustainable success.
The kind of people that all teams need are people who are humble, hungry, and smart: humble being little ego, focusing more on their teammates than on themselves. Hungry, meaning they have a strong work ethic, are determined to get things done, and contribute any way they can. Smart, meaning not intellectually smart but inner personally smart.
Team members have to be focused on the collective good of the team. Too often, they focus their attention on their department, their budget, their career aspirations, their egos.
Teamwork remains a sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped because it is hard to measure (teamwork impacts the outcome of an organization in such comprehensive and invasive ways that it's virtually impossible to isolate it as a single variable) and because it is extremely hard to achieve (it requires levels of courage and discipline that few executives possess) - ironically, building a strong team is very simple (it doesn't require masterful insights or tactics).
Clients don't expect perfection from the service providers they hire, but they do expect honesty and transparency. There is no better way to demonstrate this than by acknowledging when a mistake has been made and humbly apologizing for it.
When we say there's a dearth of women directors, it's not that there's a lack of women who direct: it's a lack of opportunities and access for women to direct and be supported in that.
You don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.
If all of you had voted the other way - there's about 5500 of you here tonight - I would not be the President of the United States.
You have to work with people you don't like. You have to work with people who are working against your interests to try to bring them around. If you don't talk to them, you end up in the same place. And you never achieve anything.
No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.
A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player. Losing yourself in the group, for the good of the group - that's teamwork.
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