Yes, "teamwork makes the dream work." Go beyond that tired saying with these collaboration quotes that will help you build a strong team, inspire collaboration, and solve common problems that affect teams.
53 Teamwork Quotes That Will Inspire Collaboration
Updated on Oct. 22, 2024
Unless your company only has one employee (you), the success of your business relies on the team of people you have working there. So hiring the right employees, organizing them into effective teams, and promoting teamwork should be a top priority of all business leaders, says Alison Green, business management consultant and author of “Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work.”
The first step to building a strong, trusting team is to lead by example, modeling teamwork by working with your employees, not ruling over them, Green says. The next step to building a great team is to inspire them to work together and collaborate by sharing your vision for the team and the project and set expectations from the start. “It’s really hard, if not impossible, for your team to reach a goal if you’ve never told them exactly what that is,” she says. “Remember, you are the one with the overall vision and the best person to see how it’s coming together.”
One way to share your vision is to use inspiring teamwork quotes. This helps all of you think about things from a new perspective, solve problems, and feel more motivated to work together. To help you, we’ve rounded up some of the best teamwork quotes.
Need more inspo? You’ll find everything you need with these motivational quotes for work, leadership quotes, strength quotes, and quotes about change.
Teambuilding quotes
1. “I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I sure can pick smart colleagues.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. “To build a strong team, you must see someone else’s strength as a complement to your weakness and not a threat to your position or authority.” – Christine Caine
3. “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” – Booker T. Washington
4. “Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.” – Amy Poehler
5. “Teams are successful when they are focused, have a short cycle time, and are supported by the executives.” — Tom J. Bouchard
6. “Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs
7. “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
8. “When you hand good people possibility, they do great things.” ― Biz Stone
9. “Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.” — John Rockefeller
10. “It’s better to be alone than in bad company.” ― George Washington
11. A team is not a group of people who work together but a team is a group of people who trust each other.” — Simon Sinek
12. “Lead by example, insist on teamwork and instill motivation. Self-discipline is what gets you to work every day, and hard work builds character.” — Dave Mueller
13. “Collaboration has no hierarchy. The Sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth.” — Amit Ray
Team motivational quotes
14. “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. Talk about a motivational sports quote!
15. “The nicest thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.” — Margaret Carty
16. “Many hands make light work.” –John Heywood
17. “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
18. “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” — Henry Ford
19. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb
20. “Teamwork is a make or break situation. Either you help make it or the lack of it will break you.” – Kris A. Hiatt
21. “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson
22. “If you take out the team in teamwork, it’s just work. Now who wants that?” – Matthew Woodring Stover
23. “Synergy – the bonus that is achieved when things work together harmoniously.” – Mark Twain
24. “A team is more than a collection of people. It is a process of give and take.” – Barbara Glacel
25. “A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.” – Proverb
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Collaboration quotes
26. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton
27. “Not finance, not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and rare.” — Patrick Lencioni
28. “I’ve never scored a goal in my life without getting a pass from someone else.” — Abby Wambach
29. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” — Michael Jordan
30. “Teams are incredible things. No task is too great, no accomplishment too grand, no dream too far-fetched for a team. It takes teamwork to make the dream work.” — John Maxwell
31. “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
32. “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin
33. “There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.” – George Shinn
34. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” — Reid Hoffman
35. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
36. “Many of us are more capable than some of us, but none of us is as capable as all of us.” — Tom Wilson
37. “It is great to do what you love but greater with the great team.” — Lailah Gifty Akita
38. “When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.” — Marissa Mayer
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Working together quotes
39. “A group is a bunch of people in an elevator. A team is a bunch of people in an elevator, but the elevator is broken.” — Bonnie Edelstein
40. “None of us is as smart as all of us.” — Ken Blanchard
41. “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” – Harry Truman
42. “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” — Warren Buffett
43. “If you can laugh together, you can work together.” — Robert Orben
44. “What separates the good players from a great player is that a great player is willing to give up their own personal achievement for the achievement of the group.” — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
45. “You are either supporting the vision or supporting division.” — Saji Ijiyemi
46. “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden. It’s deadly.” — Mark Sanborn
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47. “A single leaf working alone provides no shade.” – Chuck Page
48. “Teamwork does not come naturally. Let’s face it. We are born with certain inclinations, but sharing isn’t one of them.” – Pat Summitt
49. “Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.” – Emily Kimbrough
50. “Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.” ― Virginia Burden
51. “Tough times don’t last. Tough teams do.” — Robert Schuller
52. “The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” — Thomas Stallkamp
53. “Don’t aspire to be the best on the team. Aspire to be the best for the team.” — Brian Tracy
Next, check out these clever team names for the ultimate team building at work.
