Your focus should be on creating an environment where growth can occur and then letting nature take its course.
Interpretation
Foster a supportive environment for growth and allow natural progress to follow.
This quote emphasizes the importance of cultivating an environment conducive to development, suggesting that when the right conditions are provided, success and growth will emerge organically. It highlights the role of leaders in facilitating this environment and then stepping back to allow individuals or teams to flourish naturally, rather than micromanaging the process.
In practice
During a team meeting, when discussing project expectations, you can quote this to encourage a supportive culture.
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.
The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.
A real leader is not the top dog who merely shouts down orders. a leader is one who holds the space for the brilliance of others.
Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos.
Human affairs require some combination of moral commitment with disciplined political action. And that is what keeps me intrigued and challenged and wanting to influence events.
For me, I've learned that the best thing is to focus on the team you play for and yourself and what you need to do.
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