Members of trusting teams admit weaknesses and mistakes, take risks in offering feedback and assistance, and focus time and energy on important issues, not politics.
Interpretation
Trusting teams foster open communication and prioritize constructive engagement over office politics.
In effective teams, members are encouraged to be open about their vulnerabilities and errors. This environment allows for honest feedback and collaboration focused on addressing significant challenges rather than getting caught up in political maneuvering, ultimately leading to greater success and unity within the team.
In practice
In a team meeting to emphasize the importance of honesty, one might quote this to reinforce a culture of openness.
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.
Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.
Leaders lead but in the end it's the people who deliver.
Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.
It's easier to run for office than to run the office.
The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.
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