The best teamwork quotes say in one line what a whole training day tries to teach: a good team beats a group of talented individuals almost every time. Below you’ll find 151 teamwork quotes for work, sorted by how you’ll actually use them, from short lines for Slack and slides to funny quotes for meeting invites and sports quotes for team-building days.
We also checked who really said them. A surprising number of famous teamwork quotes are misattributed, so wherever the origin is uncertain we say so. That matters if you’re about to put a name on a slide in front of your whole company.
The 10 Best Teamwork Quotes (Quick Picks)
Short on time? These ten work in almost any setting. The last column tells you where each one fits best.
| Quote | Who said it | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” | Helen Keller | Kickoffs, cards, any occasion |
| “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” | Michael Jordan | Sales and competitive teams |
| “None of us is as smart as all of us.” | Ken Blanchard | Brainstorms and workshops |
| “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” | Steve Jobs | All-hands and launches |
| “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” | Simon Sinek | Onboarding and culture docs |
| “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” | Henry Ford (attributed) | Project milestones |
| “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” | African proverb | Long projects and strategy days |
| “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” | Phil Jackson | Recognition and shout-outs |
| “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” | H.E. Luccock | Cross-functional teams |
| “If you take out the team in teamwork, it’s just work. Now who wants that?” | Matthew Woodring Stover | Light-hearted team chats |
Teamwork Quotes by Category
- Short Teamwork Quotes
- Inspirational Teamwork Quotes
- Motivational Quotes for Teamwork
- Teamwork Quotes for Work and Employees
- Team Building Quotes
- Funny Teamwork Quotes
- Sports Quotes About Teamwork
- Leadership Quotes on Teamwork
- Who said “teamwork makes the dream work”?
- Teamwork quotes that are often misattributed
- How to use teamwork quotes at work
- FAQ
Short Teamwork Quotes
Short teamwork quotes are the ones you will actually use: they fit on a slide, in a Slack message or on the whiteboard before a kickoff. These are short enough to remember and strong enough to repeat.
- “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller
- “None of us is as smart as all of us.” — Ken Blanchard
- “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” — Michael Jordan
- “Many hands make light work.” — John Heywood (English proverb, recorded in 1546)
- “In union there is strength.” — Aesop
- “United we stand, divided we fall.” — Aesop (moral popularized by John Dickinson in 1768)
- “Two heads are better than one.” — John Heywood (English proverb)
- “We rise by lifting others.” — Robert Ingersoll
- “Light is the task where many share the toil.” — Homer
- “It takes two flints to make a fire.” — Louisa May Alcott
- “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” — Ryunosuke Satoro
- “Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.” — Unknown
- “I am because we are.” — Ubuntu philosophy
- “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb (exact origin debated)
- “A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.” — Japanese proverb
- “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.” — Kenyan proverb
- “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” — Ethiopian proverb
- “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” — Aristotle (paraphrase of his Metaphysics)
- “One is too small a number to achieve greatness.” — John C. Maxwell
- “Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.” — Malcolm Forbes
- “Teamwork makes the dream work.” — John C. Maxwell (popularized by his 2002 book of the same name)
Inspirational Teamwork Quotes
These are the quotes to reach for when a team needs reminding why the work matters. Most come from people who achieved something that was impossible to do alone.
- “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” — Henry Ford (commonly attributed)
- “Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” — Mattie Stepanek
- “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” — H.E. Luccock
- “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead (commonly attributed)
- “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton
- “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” — Alexander Graham Bell
- “Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.” — Vesta M. Kelly
- “I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.” — Mother Teresa (commonly attributed)
- “There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.” — Lyndon B. Johnson
- “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” — Martin Luther King Jr. (commonly attributed)
- “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
- “The nicest thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.” — Margaret Carty
- “Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results.” — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
- “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” — Andrew Carnegie (commonly attributed)
- “If everyone helps to hold up the sky, then one person does not become tired.” — Askhari Johnson Hodari
- “There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.” — Idowu Koyenikan
- “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
- “Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.” — Stephen R. Covey
- “Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives.” — Stephen R. Covey
- “There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” — Margaret J. Wheatley
- “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” — Unknown (widely misattributed to Charles Darwin)
- “Remember, upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.” — Alexander the Great (commonly attributed)
- “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” — Benjamin Franklin (commonly attributed; said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence)
Motivational Quotes for Teamwork
Use these when energy is low: the week before a launch, the end of a long quarter or the day after a setback. They are less about feeling good and more about getting moving together.
- “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” — Henry Ford (commonly attributed)
- “Individual commitment to a group effort: that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” — Vince Lombardi
- “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” — Vince Lombardi
- “It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” — Napoleon Hill
- “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” — Booker T. Washington
- “The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” — Thomas Stallkamp
- “A boat doesn’t go forward if each one is rowing their own way.” — Swahili proverb
- “No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The ratio of We’s to I’s is the best indicator of the development of a team.” — Lewis B. Ergen
- “Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.” — U.S. Navy SEAL saying
- “Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” — Patrick Lencioni
- “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.” — Patrick Lencioni
- “When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.” — Howard Schultz
- “People have been known to achieve more as a result of working with others than against them.” — Dr. Allan Fromme
- “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman (commonly attributed)
- “The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison.” — James Cash Penney
- “Teams share the burden and divide the grief.” — Doug Smith
- “If you can laugh together, you can work together.” — Robert Orben
- “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
- “Teamwork: simply stated, it is less me and more we.” — Unknown
Teamwork Quotes for Work and Employees
These quotes are about teamwork in a workplace: hiring, trust, communication and what makes people want to do their best work together. Good for all-hands decks, onboarding docs and manager notes.
- “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” — Steve Jobs
- “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts.” — Steve Jobs
- “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.” — Simon Sinek
- “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” — Simon Sinek
- “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” — Richard Branson
- “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney (commonly attributed)
- “People will support that which they help to create.” — Mary Kay Ash (commonly attributed)
- “Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person, not just an employee, are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled.” — Anne M. Mulcahy
- “Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” — Sam Walton
- “Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.” — Bill Gates
- “When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.” — Marissa Mayer
- “Politeness is the poison of collaboration.” — Edwin Land
- “You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note.” — Doug Floyd
- “Teamwork requires some sacrifice up front; people who work as a team have to put the collective needs of the group ahead of their individual interests.” — Patrick Lencioni
- “Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry.” — Patrick Lencioni
- “Collaborate with people you can learn from.” — Pharrell Williams
- “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” — Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
- “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.” — Mark Sanborn
- “A successful team is a group of many hands and one mind.” — Bill Bethel
- “I invite everyone to choose forgiveness rather than division, teamwork over personal ambition.” — Jean-François Copé
- “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” — C.S. Lewis
- “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” — Ken Blanchard
- “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.” — Ed Catmull (from Creativity, Inc.)
- “Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.” — Ed Catmull (from Creativity, Inc.)
- “Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.” — Google re:Work (finding from Google’s Project Aristotle research)
- “Teaming is teamwork on the fly.” — Amy Edmondson
- “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker
- “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — William H. Whyte (usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw)
- “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Unknown (often attributed to Peter Drucker, but it doesn’t appear in his writings)
Team Building Quotes
Team building is not trust falls; it is the slow work of getting the right people, building trust and giving everyone a reason to pull in the same direction. These quotes are about that work, and they make good openers for offsites and retreats.
- “For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” — Rudyard Kipling (from The Law of the Jungle)
- “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” — Phil Jackson
- “Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” — Jim Collins (paraphrase of Good to Great)
- “A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of others.” — Norman Shidle
- “Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We.” — Phil Jackson
- “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” — Amy Edmondson
- “Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about the team.” — Patrick Lencioni
- “When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.” — Joe Paterno
- “Getting good players is easy. Getting ’em to play together is the hard part.” — Casey Stengel
- “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
- “If a team is to reach its potential, each player must be willing to subordinate his personal goals to the good of the team.” — Bud Wilkinson
- “A player who makes a team great is more valuable than a great player.” — John Wooden
Funny Teamwork Quotes
A little humor goes a long way in a meeting invite or a team chat. These poke fun at committees, meetings and group projects, and anyone who has worked on a team will recognize themselves in at least one.
- “Team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.” — Michael Winner
- “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
- “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” — Alec Issigonis (commonly attributed)
- “A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.” — Milton Berle
- “Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.” — A.H. Weiler
- “None of us is as dumb as all of us.” — Despair, Inc. (from its ‘Meetings’ demotivational poster)
- “Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.” — David Ogilvy (commonly attributed)
- “Teamwork is essential: it allows you to blame someone else.” — Unknown
- “If you take out the team in teamwork, it’s just work. Now who wants that?” — Matthew Woodring Stover
- “To err is human; to blame it on somebody else shows management potential.” — Unknown
- “Committee: a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.” — Fred Allen
- “If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.” — Jeff Bezos (commonly attributed; Amazon’s ‘two-pizza team’ rule)
- “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is a ‘me’ if you look hard enough.” — Unknown
Sports Quotes About Teamwork
Nobody talks about teamwork more honestly than coaches and athletes, because the scoreboard makes it obvious when a team is not one. These translate directly from the court and the field to the office.
- “To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.” — Mike Krzyzewski
- “A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist.” — Mike Krzyzewski
- “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
- “One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.” — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- “The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.” — John Wooden
- “The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.” — Bill Russell
- “The name on the front of the jersey is a hell of a lot more important than the one on the back.” — Herb Brooks
- “The best teams have chemistry. They communicate with each other and they sacrifice personal glory for the common goal.” — Dave DeBusschere
- “Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers.” — Pat Riley
- “Lead from the bench.” — Abby Wambach (from Wolfpack (2019))
- “There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players and never win titles. Most of the time, those players aren’t willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the team.” — Michael Jordan (from I Can’t Accept Not Trying (1994))
- “Ask not what your teammates can do for you. Ask what you can do for your teammates.” — Magic Johnson
- “Leadership is diving for a loose ball, getting the crowd involved, getting other players involved. It’s being able to take it as well as dish it out.” — Larry Bird
Leadership Quotes on Teamwork
Teams rarely outperform their leaders’ idea of what a team is. These quotes come from leaders who understood that their job was to make the team stronger, not to be the star of it. For more, see our collection of inspiring leadership quotes from top leaders.
- “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu
- “Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” — Simon Sinek
- “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’” — Peter Drucker
- “No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.” — Andrew Carnegie
- “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” — Theodore Roosevelt
- “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” — George S. Patton
- “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” — Jack Welch
- “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates
- “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” — Ralph Nader
- “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.” — John C. Maxwell
- “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.” — Colin Powell
- “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.” — Ronald Reagan (a line he kept on a plaque in the Oval Office)
- “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger.” — Nelson Mandela
- “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” — Sheryl Sandberg (commonly attributed)
- “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” — Ken Blanchard
- “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” — Max De Pree
- “A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” — Brené Brown (from Dare to Lead)
- “There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.” — Jocko Willink (from Extreme Ownership)
Who Said “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work”?
“Teamwork makes the dream work” is most closely associated with leadership author John C. Maxwell, who used it as the title of his 2002 book Teamwork Makes the Dream Work. Maxwell made the phrase famous, but the rhyme was already circulating in coaching and motivational circles, and nobody has documented a clear original author.
If you use it on a slide, crediting Maxwell is the accepted convention. His longer version is worth knowing too: “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.”
Teamwork Quotes That Are Often Misattributed
Before you put a famous name under a quote, check it. These five appear on almost every teamwork quotes list, usually with the wrong name attached.
| Quote | Usually credited to | What we actually know |
|---|---|---|
| “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 | It doesn’t appear in Darwin’s writings. The Darwin Correspondence Project lists it among quotes he never said. |
| “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” | George Bernard Shaw | The earliest known version appeared in a 1950 Fortune article by William H. Whyte. |
| “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” | Peter Drucker | There’s no record of it in Drucker’s published work. The phrase spread through business circles in the 2000s. |
| “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” | Henry Ford | There’s no evidence Ford said it. Similar wording predates the attribution and is often traced to Edward Everett Hale. |
| “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” | Margaret Mead | No one has found it in her published work, though the institute she founded believes it is genuinely hers. |
How to Use Teamwork Quotes at Work
A quote on its own is decoration. A quote tied to something your team is going through right now can actually change how people show up. A few ways to use them well:
- Open a meeting with one. Pick a quote that fits the agenda and ask one person what it means for the project. It takes two minutes and gets people talking before the status updates start. (More ideas in our guide to running team meetings people actually want to attend.)
- Pair it with recognition. When you thank someone in Slack or Teams, add a quote that matches what they did. “The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team” lands well when someone quietly unblocked three colleagues.
- Anchor a kickoff or all-hands slide. One quote per deck. More than that and none of them stick.
- Use them at team-building events and retreats. Print a few, have each group pick one, and ask them to describe a moment when the team lived it (or didn’t).
- Back the words with behavior. Quotes about trust only work on teams where people feel safe speaking up. If that’s a gap, start with creating psychological safety in your team.
- Credit carefully. If an attribution above says “commonly attributed,” say the same on your slide, or use “Unknown.” Someone in the audience will Google it.
FAQ: Teamwork Quotes
What is the best quote about teamwork?
The most widely used teamwork quote is Helen Keller’s “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” It’s short, it works for any team, and the attribution is well established. For a workplace setting, Steve Jobs’ “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people” is a close second.
Who said “teamwork makes the dream work”?
The phrase is credited to John C. Maxwell, who popularized it with his 2002 book Teamwork Makes the Dream Work. It circulated earlier as a coaching slogan, and no original author has been documented.
What is a good short teamwork quote?
Good short teamwork quotes include “None of us is as smart as all of us” (Ken Blanchard), “Many hands make light work” (John Heywood) and “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships” (Michael Jordan).
What is a good teamwork quote for work?
For work, try Simon Sinek’s “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other,” or Patrick Lencioni’s line that teamwork “remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
Is “there is no I in team” a real quote?
It’s a popular saying rather than a quote, and it has no known author. It became widespread as a coaching slogan in team sports.
How do you use teamwork quotes in a meeting?
Open with one quote that fits the agenda, ask a team member what it means for the current project, and move on. Keep it to one quote per meeting so it doesn’t feel forced.
Keep Building a Stronger Team
Teamwork quotes are a starting point, not a strategy. If you’re leading a team, these guides go deeper: