Teamwork makes the dream work? Go beyond tired cliches with these inspiring teamwork quotes.
53 Teamwork Quotes That Will Inspire Collaboration
Updated on Apr. 21, 2025
Unless your company has only 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, a business management consultant and the author of Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work. One way to inspire that collaborative vision is by learning from teamwork quotes crafted by leaders who have been in your shoes.
Of course, 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 setting 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.”
Reader’s Digest rounded up the best teamwork quotes to help you and your team think about things from a new perspective, solve problems and feel more motivated to work together. Keep reading to get inspired to build great teams in your business, and share them with your colleagues.
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Team-building quotes
1. “Employers and employees alike have learned that in union, there is strength.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. “Teamwork requires that everyone’s efforts flow in a single direction. Feelings of significance happen when a team’s energy takes on a life of its own.” —Pat Riley
3. “The best way to lift one’s self up is to help 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. “Leaders have to search for the heart on a team, because the person who has it can bring out the best in everybody else.” —Mike Krzyzewski
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 D. Rockefeller
10. “Good teams incorporate teamwork into their culture, creating the building blocks for success.” ―Ted Sundquist
11. “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” —Simon Sinek
12. “Without organization and leadership toward a realistic goal, there is no chance of realizing more than a small percentage of your potential.” —John Wooden
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
15. “Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation.” —Scott Belsky
16. “Many hands make light work.” —John Heywood
17. “There is a tremendous strength that is growing in the world through sharing together, praying together, suffering together and working together.” —Mother Teresa
18. “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” —Edward Everett Hale
19. “We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.” —Woodrow Wilson
20. “With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others—or, in a word, partnership.” —Paul Farmer
21. “Teamwork is a bit like using all of your fingers. Each one is unique and contributes something different, but they unite in pursuit of a common goal.” —Terry Orlick
22. “Joining a band of brothers together, a group with one common interest or mission, whether as a company, a team or a motorcycle club, requires not only a commitment to loyalty but an understanding of self-preservation as well.” —Sonny Barger
23. “Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” —Helen Keller
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.” —Japanese proverb
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 am a member of a team, and I rely on the team. I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.” —Mia Hamm
29. “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” —Michael Jordan
30. “When your great players are team players, everyone else follows their lead. The best team doesn’t always win—it’s usually the team that gets along best.” —John C. Maxwell
31. “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
32. “Collaboration is important not just because it’s a better way to learn. … Learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy.” —Don Tapscott
33. “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” —Mary Kay Ash
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. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.” —Robert Collier
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
Working-together quotes
39. “You don’t inspire your teammates by showing them how amazing you are. You inspire them by showing them how amazing they are.” —Robyn Benincasa
40. “Vision comes alive when everyone sees where his or her contribution makes a difference.” —Ken Blanchard
41. “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” —Harry S. Truman
42. “No matter how great the talent or effort, 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 get someone to laugh with you, they’ll be more willing to identify with you, listen to you. It parts the waters.” —Robert Orben
44. “Five guys on the court that are working together can achieve more than five talented individuals who come and go as individuals.” —Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
45. “If you look for the best in your employees, they’ll flourish. If you criticize or look for the worst, they’ll shrivel up. We all need lots of watering.” —Richard Branson
46. “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden. It’s deadly.” —Mark Sanborn
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 an intelligent functioning of the concept of laissez-faire—a thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.” —Virginia Burden Tower
51. “Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” —Vince Lombardi
52. “The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” —Thomas Stallkamp
53. “Every employee must be essential to the functions of the organization.” —Brian Tracy
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At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece on teamwork quotes, Charlotte Hilton Andersen tapped her experience as a longtime journalist to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Marcy Lovitch, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Glamour, Seventeen, Real Simple, Forbes and InStyle magazines, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Source:
- Allison 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; interviewed
