No One Does It Alone!

WHY IS TEAMWORK SO IMPORTANT?

“One” is too small a number to achieve greatness.

The Value of Teamwork

  • Teams involve more people, thus affording more resources, ideas, and energy than would an individual.
  • Teams maximize a leader’s potential and minimize her weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are more exposed in individuals.
  • Teamwork reveals the leader’s potential more and makes his weaknesses less important. However, the person’s strenghts and weaknesses are more obvious.
  • Teamwork requires having more than one point of view to reach a goal or meet a requirement. So for each situation, there will be many choices. However, an individual’s point of view for a problem can rarely be so profound or so deep as the team’s.
  • Teams provide multiple perspectives on how to meet a need or reach a goal, thus devising several alternatives for each situation. Individual insight is seldom as broad and deep as a group’s when it takes on a problem.
  • Teams share the credit for victories and the blame for losses. This fosters genuine humility and authentic community. Individuals take credit and blame alone. This fosters pride and sometimes a sense of failure.
  • Teams keep leaders accountable for the goal. Individuals connected to no one can change the goal without accountability.
  • Teams can simply do more than an individual.

harat-teamwork-ekip-takim

WHY DO WE STAND ALONE?

1. EGO: “Spinning more plates doesn’t increase your talent, it increases your likelihood of dropping a plate.”  So the question is not whether you can do everything by yourself; it’s how soon you are going to realize that you can’t.

“It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you could do alone.” ― Andrew Carnegie. To achieve something really big, let go of your ego, and get ready to be part of a team.

2.INSECURITY: Secure leaders give power to others. Insecure leaders fail to build teams because:

  • They want to maintain total control
  • They fear being replaced by someone more capable

“We should not only use all the brains we have, but all that we can borrow.” -Woodrow Wilson

3. NAIVETY: Some people simply underestimate the difficulty of achieving big things. As a result, they try to go it alone. In some cases, like on a mountain trek, this decision can be fatal.

John Ghegan, president of U.S. Business Advisors, kept a sign on his desk that said, “If I had it to do all over again, I’d get help.” That is a good idea for all of us. We need to be reminded to ask others to come alongside us so we get help, they get to learn, and we create a “margin” in our lives so we aren’t needed for everything to turn out all right.

4. TEMPERAMENT: Some people aren’t very outgoing and don’t think in terms of team building. It never occurs to them to enlist others to achieve something.

“No one can do the work that a team does. We need eachother. As you need others, other may need you too. We are not living in different islands which are far away. To settle teamwork in our lives, we need to learn how to do it and support eachother. We need to create long-term relationships, share always, confess our mistakes, forgive, open arms, hug  and trust eachother. Any of us is not something much, in other words can not cover ourselves alone and by not having superpowers instead of other people, we need to stop acting like it is. Even if we don’t play a foolish game like this, life is alone enough for every of us. So the game is over!”

Game is really over for the one who wants to achieve everything alone. If you would like to achieve great success, you need to be connected with other people. Because “One” is too small a number to achieve greatness.

 

Source: John C. Maxwell, Teamwork 101, “Part 1” (Thomas Nelson Inc, 2009)

This post is also available in: Türkçe (Turkish)

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