The ability of a group of people to do remarkable things hinges on how well those people pull together as a team.

TEAMWORK: the fuel that allows common people attain uncommon results.

The Google team at Project Aristotle concluded that there were five main traits of a successful team. Psychological safety was the most important, and their research suggested that it underpinned the other four[xxvi]. The five traits were as follows: (1) Psychological safety: team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. (2) Dependability: team members get things done on time, and meet Google’s high bar for excellence. (3) Structure and clarity: team members have clear roles, plans, and goals. (4) Meaning: work is personally important to team members. (5) Impact: team members think their work matters and creates change.

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.

ability to build teams.

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

Team Spirit — an eagerness to sacrifice personal interests or glory for the welfare of all — is a tangible driving force that transforms individuals who are “doing their jobs correctly” into an organization whose members are totally committed to working at their highest levels for the good of the group. Members of such an organization are unselfish, considerate, and put the goals of the organization above their own, even at the expense of their own personal desires. When this happens — and the leader is the one who makes it happen — the result is almost magical.

When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction — it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.

when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent reason, or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.

Organizations Succeed When They Become More Than the Sum of Their Players. That’s one of the real tests of any leader, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. No team will consistently succeed unless the leader is able to achieve this critical goal.

Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

The problem of an efficient group structure alone is enough to absorb anyone's interest. An organization of a committee of scientists or a panel of script writers is far from what it could be. But we lack control in the world at large to investigate more efficient structures. Here, on the contrary, here we begin to understand and build the Superorganism. We can construct groups of artists and scientists who will act as smoothly and efficiently as champion football teams.

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.