Unified Team Quotes

A unified team is a force to be reckoned with. When teams pull together to serve a higher purpose, the synergy builds momentum and helps everyone head in the right direction. When people reunite, pull together, have each other’s backs, and strive to achieve a clearly defined purpose, the culture is empowered to produce extraordinary outcomes.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

View Conflict as an Adventure not a threat.

Business leaders cultivate vision to unify teams; the teams cultivate business to fulfill the vision.

I dream of a time when politics, cultures and predispositions stop being a divisive, destructive, evil force, and instead…becomes a positive, unifying force for good; freedom, love, abundance, peace, meaning and joy.

But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is instead quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. Our awareness is divided. And much more commonly than we know, even our personalities are fragmented—disorganized team efforts trying to cope with the past—rather than the sane, unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty.

Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

A true BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

One of those classes, a constitutional law seminar of sixteen students, became a kind of family for me. We called ourselves the island of misfit toys, as there was no real unifying force to our team—a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants, a black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others—but we became excellent friends.

your team is ranked first? congratulations and big deal. maintaining a top position is far easier than starting over from the gutters. kevin is doing that right now. he’s facing entirely new schools and learning to play with his less dominant hand. when he masters it, and he will, he’ll be better than you could ever have made him. do you know why? it’s not just his natural talent. it’s because he’s with us. there are only ten foxes this year. that’s one sub for every position. think about it. last night we played blackenridge. they have twenty-seven people on their roster. they can burn through players as fast as they want because they have a pile of replacements. we don’t have that luxury. we have to hold our ground on our own.” “you didn’t hold your ground, you lost. your school is the laughingstock of the ncaa. you’re a team with no concept of teamwork.” “lucky for you. if we were a unified front, you wouldn’t have a chance against us.” “you cannot last and your unfounded arrogance is offensive to everyone who actually earned a spot in first class. everyone knows the only reason palmetto qualified for this division is because of your coach.” “funny, i’m pretty sure that’s how edgar allan qualified.” - neil & riko

One of the things that kept our marriage intact was community. Friends who spurred us on to finish strong together. And it’s friends who esteem marriage that will do this; not people who belittle it or question the value of it.

A great marriage is not when the “perfect couple” comes together. It is when an imperfect couple comes together, crazy for each other, and learns to accommodate, and even comes to enjoy their differences. —DAVE MEURER

I have since gathered data from more than five hundred individuals about their experience on more than one thousand teams. I asked them to answer a series of questions about a time when they had worked on a unified team, what the experience was like, what role their manager played, and what the end result was. Then I had them contrast this with a time when they had been on a disunified team and what that was like, what role their manager played, and how it affected the end result. The results of this research were startling: when there was a high level of clarity of purpose, the teams and the people on it overwhelmingly thrived. When there was a serious lack of clarity about what the team stood for and what their goals and roles were, people experienced confusion, stress, frustration, and ultimately failure. As one senior vice president succinctly summarized it when she looked at the results gathered from her extended team: “Clarity equals success.

Marriage as a team means working and playing together toward a winning season.

If I get married, I want to be very married. —AUDREY HEPBURN

If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.

if you’re building a global business, there are three key elements you need to put in place. A set of managers who are responsible for, and have strong executive control over, their individual markets globally An understanding of how those markets differ, which leads to a variety of plans for how to grow in each of those markets A unified executive team to coordinate global operations, including the activity of the individual managers leading operations in each country The first two elements involve a decentralized command structure that allows the individual “captains” of the ships in the fleet to operate with entrepreneurial vigor. The third involves a centralized staff that can help the “admiral” coordinate the actions of the fleet for maximum impact.

With a StoryBrand-inspired narrative, ordinary jobs become extraordinary adventures. With a unifying BrandScript, the above story would have gone more like this: Before even applying for a job, the prospective employee has already heard the buzz on the street about this cool company. It’s somehow more alive. The people who work there love it and so do their customers. They exude a sense of competence within their industry as well as across the community in general. Their leaders are respected. Even their former employees talk about it with a hint of sentimental longing. On the list of ideal places to work, there are few that compare. During the first interview, the candidate starts to understand where the buzz has been coming from. The hiring manager describes the company the way you might describe Lewis and Clarke preparing to tame the western frontier. There are interesting characters whose lives have led them to this place. Business goals sound like plot twists. There are mountains to climb and rivers to cross. There are storms to weather, bears to hunt, and treasure to find. The hiring manager is visibly excited as she walks effortlessly through the seven categories of the company’s narrative. But not just anyone gets selected for this expedition. The employees of this company aren’t trying to be snobs; they’re just staying true to the story they’re following and they don’t want to compromise the plot. If you happen to be selected, it’s because destiny basically demands it. Instantly the candidate’s concept of work shifts up a level. It’s no longer just about what he can get out of it. It’s also about who he will become if he’s allowed to enter the story. He senses that working for this company will transform him. By the second and third interviews, the candidate has met most of the team and even been interviewed by them. Everyone he meets tells the exact same story he heard on the street and in the first interview. The story is growing on him. He realizes he needs to be part of a story like this to be fully satisfied in life. We all do. Finally, his first day on the job arrives, and the onboarding experience is more like being adopted than getting hired. He spends quality time with a facilitator who takes a small, new team through a curriculum explaining the story of their customer and how the company positions themselves as the guide in their customers’ story. Amazingly, the onboarding is more about the company’s customers than it is about the company itself. This organization loves their customers and is obsessed with seeing them win the day. Finally, the new employee discovers the secret. These people are here to serve a customer they love.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.

The two teams created a text-messaging distribution list that allowed for constant communication about potential problems during the four-day convention. When a Bernie supporter raised an anti-Clinton sign, a whip team member in the convention hall could relay the message quickly to the boiler room. The team there would send a note to Bernie and Hillary aides on the floor, who would ask the person to take it down. The flash-speed communications network would turn out to be a major factor in transforming what was a tumultuous convention inside the hall into a unified one on television. That is, it looked a lot different to folks watching at home than it did to participants inside an arena with plenty of anti-Clinton Bernie delegates.

Kindness is a powerful bridge builder which unifies teams, bonds friends, supports loved ones, and spreads goodwill. Tending to your bridges will fortify your relationships in such way that you will keep your invitations coming and your options open for future opportunities.

But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party—after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually—responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team.

Understanding Personality Styles Helps You: • Communicate more easily with others by understanding their perspectives. • Adapt your behavior to resonate with others. • Develop deeper levels of compassion, patience, and communication. • Deliver personalized customer service. • Build trust and rapport faster. • Nurture existing relationships. • Make more sales. • Feel more confident networking. • Realize that people behave the way they do for their reasons, not yours. • Appreciate the diversity of teammates, family members, friends, and work groups. • Unify your teams and get the best out of your people by focusing on their strengths, aligning their styles with their assigned positions, and knowing how to motivate and reward them.

When a vision is inspirational, such as putting a man on the moon, it can unify a team toward a common goal.

Management becomes more complex, too, because the staff has to reach across the organization at a level and consistency you never had to before: different departments, groups, and business units. For example, analytics and business intelligence teams never had to have the sheer levels of interaction with IT or engineering. The IT organization never had to explain the data format to the operations team. From both the technical and the management perspectives, teams didn’t have to work together before with as high of a bandwidth connection. There may have been some level of coordination before, but not this high. Other organizations face the complexity of data as a product instead of software or APIs as the product. They’ve never had to promote or evangelize the data available in the organization. With data pipelines, the data teams may not even know or control who has access to the data products. Some teams are very siloed. With small data, they’ve been able to get by. There wasn’t ever the need to reach out, coordinate, or cooperate. Trying to work with these maverick teams can be a challenge unto itself. This is really where management is more complicated.

During their brief history the newly formed Special Operations Forces had already achieved a notable record, but they had yet to tackle a major rescue of the magnitude of the Lady Flamborough hijacking. The orphan child of the Pentagon, the Special Operations Forces were not molded into a single command until the fall of 1989. At that time the Army's Delta Force, whose fighters were drawn from the elite Ranger and Green Beret units and a secret aviation unit known as Task Force 160, merged with the top-of-the-line Navy SEAL Team Six and the Air Force's Special Operations Wing. The unified forces cut across service rivalries and boundaries and became a separate command, numbering twelve thousand men, headquartered at a tightly restricted base in southeast Virginia. The crack fighters were heavily trained in guerrilla tactics, parachuting, wilderness survival and scuba diving, with special emphasis on storming buildings, ships and aircraft for rescue missions.

A leader's true strength lies not in their title, but in their ability to bring out the best in others and create a unified and motivated team

Whether your staff is seventy thousand or only seven, a leader needs two things to create a strong unified team: an elevated mission and everyday human contact. Angela managed to squeeze a little of both into that three-minute video.

Tiny Titans: A Haiku Ants toil with intent, Embrace chores they loathe and love, Unified spirits.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care.

Management by objective (MBO) which means purposeful leadership to achieve a strategic objective is one of the keys to successful airline management. MBO is also referred to as Management by Results – MBR. This is a system where subordinates coordinate with their superiors to achieve the desired objective. Under this principle, the goals of the organization are linked to employee goals. Management objectives are made to meet operational objectives. And both management and operational objectives are made to achieve organizational long-term objectives. Organisational objectives are linked to the vision and mission of the organisation. The team is made aware of the achievable goals of the organization and unified effort is exerted in that direction; on the other hand, the employee whose performance is noteworthy will be rewarded by the organization. This builds a transparent and clean work culture on one hand and the other unclogs communication blocks.

That's the beauty of football: You don't have to be a great player or great athlete to be a part of it. It's a sport that destroys divided teams and rewards those who rely on one another. At its best, football is a unifier and a confidence builder for young boys.

See others’ slights or outright insults as opportunities to show equanimity, spurring observers to do the same, unified with you around a best side of us. Opportunity Makers demonstrate that being a strong team player is as important as being the leader. Think well of yourself. The subconscious can't take a joke.

Success: creates unified strong team spirit!

Schools have tried just about anything to try to calm racial tensions: professional mediation, multi-cultural training, diversity celebrations, anger-management classes, and a host of other interventions. In 2004, the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, in Riverside County, California, even considered a rule that would have forbidden any student to “form or openly participate in groups that tend to exclude, or create the impression of the exclusion of, other students.” The school board narrowly rejected the proposal when it was pointed out that the ban would have prohibited membership in the Hispanic group, La Raza, and could have been read to forbid playing rap music around white students. Absurd measures like this show how desperate schools are to solve the race problem. A 2003 survey found that 5.4 percent of high-school students had stayed home at least once during the previous month because they were physically afraid. This was an increase over 4.4 percent ten years earlier. Racial violence was undoubtedly an important factor. The circumstances under which some of our least advantaged citizens must try to get an education are nothing short of scandalous. Is it a wonder their test scores are low, that many drop out, that they fail to see the value of an education? How many times must school race riots be put down by SWAT teams before school authorities realize that this may be a problem that will not be cured with sensitivity training? The purpose of schools is to educate, not to force on children integration of a kind their parents do not even practice.

Realize that if the company was set up with feature teams, then it is very unlikely that there was any unifying vision at play—as feature teams are all about serving the needs of their particular stakeholders.

The beauty of scorecards is that they are not just documents used in hiring. They become the blueprint that links the theory of strategy to the reality of execution. Scorecards translate your business plans into role-by-role outcomes and create alignment among your team, and they unify your culture and ensure people understand your expectations.