You have to build trust among team members so that people feel free to admit what they don't know, make mistakes, ask for help if they need it, apologize when necessary, and not hold back their opinions.
Interpretation
Building trust in a team encourages openness and collaboration.
This quote emphasizes the importance of trust within a team, highlighting that when team members feel secure, they are more likely to be honest about their limitations, seek assistance, acknowledge errors, and share their thoughts openly. Such an environment fosters growth, accountability, and effective communication, leading to a stronger, more united team dynamic.
In practice
In a team-building workshop, you might use this quote to illustrate the importance of trust.
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.
I don't want people to think you have to look a certain way or be a certain mold to be able to be a quarterback.
The king shall singly deliberate over secret matters; for ministers have their own ministers, and these latter some of their own; this kind of successive line of ministers tends to the disclosure of counsels.
Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.
We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.
At least there's a political input, but when you put on the robe, at that point the politics is over.
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
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