Leadership quotes are abundant and typically easy to find. Quotes about team building are a bit more challenging to uncover. I have spent the past few months collecting these quotes and hope that you will find them useful for you and your team. Use them for teaching tools, for team motivation, and to keep your team on track.
Many of the following quotes are tweet-able (not sure if that’s a word, but it sounds good to me!); however, some are too long to tweet but could still be posted on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
Use the comments below to let me know which of these team building quotes are your favorite and what other ones you have discovered. Other than quotes, what else do you use to build your team spirit?
1. “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
2. “None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.” – Mother Teresa
3. “The greatest danger a team faces isn’t that it won’t become successful, but that it will, and then cease to improve.” – Mark Sanborn
4. “Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.” – Virginia Burden
5. “The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.” – Rensis Likert
6. “To collaborative team members, completing one another is more important than competing with one another.” – John C. Maxwell
7. “Asking for help doesn’t mean that you are weak. It indicates an advanced level of honesty and intelligence.” – Anne Wilson Schaef
8. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, you need a team.” – John Wooden
9. “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
10. “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie
11. “Collaboration, it turns out, is not a gift from the gods but a skill that requires effort and practice.” – Douglas B. Reeves
12. “One finger cannot lift a pebble.” – Hopi proverb
13. “Experiential team exercises can be valuable tools for enhancing teamwork as long as they are layered upon more fundamental and relevant processes.” – Patrick M. Lencioni
14. “A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of the others.” – Norman Shidle
15. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
16. “Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it.” – Bill Bradley
17. “Regardless of differences, we strive shoulder to shoulder… [T]eamwork can be summed up in five short words: ‘We believe in each other.’” – Author Unknown
18. “One piece of log creates a small fire, adequate to warm you up, add just a few more pieces to blast an immense bonfire, large enough to warm up your entire circle of friends; needless to say that individuality counts but team work dynamites.” – Jin Kwon
19. “I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.” – Mia Hamm
20. “The ratio of We’s to I’s is the best indicator of the development of a team.” – Lewis B. Ergen
21. “It is a fact that in the right formation, the lifting power of many wings can achieve twice the distance of any bird flying alone.” – Author Unknown
22. “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth
23. “It is amazing how much people get done if they do not worry about who gets the credit.” – Swahili proverb
24. “Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” – Stephen Covey
25. “We are most effective as a team when we complement each other without embarrassment and disagree without fear”. – Unknown
26. “No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
27. “Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” – Patrick Lencioni
28. “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity.” – Vince Lombardi
29. “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.” – Mark Sanborn
30. “Light is the task where many share the toil.” – Homer
31. “Individual commitment to a group effort, that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi
32. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” – Michael Jordan
33. “A major reason capable people fail to advance is that they don’t work well with their colleagues.” – Lee Iacocca
34. “One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.” – Kareem Abdul Jabbar
35. “Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” – Mattie Stepanek
36. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford
37. “Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about the team.” – Patrick Lencioni
38. “It is through cooperation, rather than conflict, that your greatest successes will be derived.” – Ralph Charell
39. “In order to have a winner, the team must have a feeling of unity; every player must put the team first ahead of personal glory.” – Paul Bear Bryant
40. “One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears – by listening to them.” – Dean Rusk
What are some of your favorite team building quotes? Let me know in the comments below!