Stephen Covey

Strenght lies in differences, not in similarities.

Ayn Rand

Competition is a by-product of productive work, to its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Theodore Roosevelt

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

Andrew Carnegie

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

Lou Holtz

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing, and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team.

Tony Dungy

Hard work and togetherness. They go hand in hand. You need the hard work because it's such a tough atmosphere ... to win week in and week out. You need togetherness because you don't always win, and you gotta hang though together.

Jack Kemp

Every team requires unity. A team has to move as one unit, one force, with each person understanding and assisting the roles of his teammates. If your team doesn't do this, whatever the reason, it goes down indefeat. You win or lose as a team, as a family.

Robert Half

Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too.

Harry Firestone

You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.

Russell H. Ewing

A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a leader is interested in the group.

H. Ross Perot

When building a team, I always search first for people who love to win. If I can't find any of those, I look for people who hate to lose.

Sam Walton

Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Chinese Proverb

Behind every able man, there are always other able men.

Harvey S. Firestone

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.

Vincent Lombardi

Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Bob Anderson

You can't always wait for the guys at the top. Every manager at every level in the organization has an opportunity, big or small, to do something. Every manager's got some sphere of autonomy. Don't pass the buck up the line.

Alfred A. Montapert

The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies.

Stephen R. Covey

Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

Stephen R. Covey

If you put good people in bad systems you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.

Brian G. Jett

It's easy to figure out who isn't a team player. They'll constantly remind the coach just how good they are.

Alice Vernon

Teams work better - when they work together.

Rick Pitino

The only way to get people to like working hard is to motivate them. Today, people must understand why they're working hard. Every individual in an organization is motivated by something different.

Submitted by Emily Kohlbus

Definiton of a great teammate: a person who makes their teammates look GREAT!

team building variables

When planning and running team building activities, exercises, games, etc., certain variables have a significant influence on the way the activity works. When planning team building - or any group activity - think about and use these factors to suit the situation, logistics, team/group numbers, and the aims of the exercises.

• team mix (age, job type, department, gender, seniority, etc)


• team numbers (one to a hundred or more, pairs and threes, leadership issues)


• exercise briefing and instructions - how difficult you make the task, how full the instructions and clues are


• games or exercise duration


• competitions and prizes


• venue and logistics - room size and availability (for break-out sessions etc)


• materials provided or available


• stipulation of team member roles - eg., team leader, time-keeper, scribe (note-taker), reviewer/presenter


• scoring, and whether the exercise is part of an ongoing competition or team league
  

With a full day or more it's very useful to include something on personality types and how this affects teams, style of management required, learning styles (eg Kolb, VAK, etc). If you use psychometrics in your organization, if possible expose delegates to the testing and theory - it's interesting and a great basis for absorbing the issues. It also adds a bit of hard theory to the inevitable other soft content.

Ongoing competitions are excellent for team building, but If you are training the trainers don't run a competition through the whole day - mix up the teams from time to time to show how team dynamics can be changed and the effect of doing so. Also demonstrate how games take on a different meaning if numbers are changed (eg larger teams require leadership or there'll be passengers (see the POB team-building acronym); and, you can play the same game with 3 and 6 people and it completely alters the conduct and outcomes).

Change and demonstrate gender and age mixes also - team mix is a crucial area of understanding.

Use a mixture of games to cover different logistical and environmental constraints - small room, large room, syndicate rooms, outdoors.

Include a mixture of games to develop different skills and aspects within team building - leadership, cooperation, communication, breaking down barriers, planning, time-management, etc.

Ask the delegates (in syndicates) to design their own games to meet specific scenarios. As well as the ideas, look at all the variables: clarity of instructions, timings, team numbers and mix, logistics, venue requirements, etc.

Outdoors, use traditional games like rounders, cricket, touch rugby, relay races, to demonstrate the big team dynamics, and the physical exercise effect - stress reduction, endorphins and neuro-transmitters, etc.

Also cover 'workshops' and how to plan and run them - practical sessions dealing with real business issues, with real content and real action-based outcomes, including the team-building effect - use a real business issue as an example. This would also require some pre-session preparation and coached and measurable follow-up, which are also extremely useful and under-used mechanisms.

team building and happiness

Here's a simple easy tip for team-building, motivation, and creating happy atmosphere:

Buy a big basket. Buy lots of sweets or candy, lollipops too, wrapped preferably (for hygiene and maintenance reasons) and put them into the big basket. Put the big basket of sweets and lollipops on the table before people arrive for work, or the meeting, or the training session.

And then watch people smile. Sweets and lollipops break down barriers. They are a universal language for feeling good and being happy.

After a week or two of different sweets throw in some bubblegum. Also some bubblegum with collectible cards.

This gesture is not restricted to the training room; you can put baskets of sweets all over the place. Even in the reception and the board room; and even in the finance director's office.

You can ask the receptionist if she (or he) would be so kind as to make sure that the sweet basket is always filled to the brim (at the company's cost of course), and to make sure she (or he) always invites every single visitor to dip their hand in and take a big handful for their kids. And you'll see how wonderfully well people react to being treated in this way.

Go spread the word - put a big basket of sweets on your table.

When you've firmly established the practice of having baskets of sweets everywhere, you can move on to fresh cut flowers.........

A little bunch of fresh cut flowers in a vase, on a table. It's worth a million words.
(Next of course you'll need to appoint a flower monitor, which every right-minded person will want to be, so you can have one per floor, or one per day of the week, or one per department, whatever...)