Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.

No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting

As a leader, you're probably not doing a good job unless your employees can do a good impression of you when you're not around.

Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.

Teamwork remains a sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped because it is hard to measure (teamwork impacts the outcome of an organization in such comprehensive and invasive ways that it's virtually impossible to isolate it as a single variable) and because it is extremely hard to achieve (it requires levels of courage and discipline that few executives possess) - ironically, building a strong team is very simple (it doesn't require masterful insights or tactics).

When you know your reason for existence, it should effect the decisions you make.

Achieving vulnerability-based trust (where team members have overcome their need for invulnerability) is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of the team, but that is exactly what is required.