Welcome back to the Summer Quote Series, which is a pared down and shortened up version of the podcast. We're taking 6 weeks or so to listen to some wisdom snippets from Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.
Since I've been in the workforce, teamwork has taken on a bigger and bigger role. It's become a buzzword and companies are restructuring all over the place into team frameworks. I admit. teams have been a hard sell for me. I'm naturally more of a loner. I'm generally self-directed. Give me a goal or project and I can go off and make it happen on my own.
But, over the years, I've managed to get wiser as I've grown older. Teams produce better work. No matter how smart and capable I am, projects benefit from multiple viewpoints, multiple personality types and multiple inputs. With a good leader and/or good team dynamics, more and better work can be done in a team than one person can possibly accomplish alone.
Lombardi said, “People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.”
Modern society has an awful lot of problems. And I'm not sure we're doing a very good job of working on them together. We have a nasty habit of villianizing those who hold a different viewpoint. I read an article this week, posted by one of my very, very liberal friends. It was a reader who had sent in a question in to a liberal writer explaining that his father was ultra conservative and they could no longer have a relationship because the dad was destroying the planet, destroying the country and destroying their relationship. What should he do? The article answered the questioner by saying that the letter, which had been really ugly and vicious, had reduced the father to a set of ideologies and that until we begin to see each other as people first, we'll make little headway on bridging the gap between differences of opinion. Bravo. Exactly.
People who work together will win. Work gets done faster. Problems get solved better. Solutions are more creative. When people work together.
Where in your life do you need collaboration? Do you need to start seeing people instead of ideologies? People who work together will win. Where do you need to win this week?
What if we work together? What could we accomplish?