Team Rewards By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability.

truly comfortable being exposed to one another that they begin to act without concern for protecting themselves. As a result, they

What I’m referring to is, first, the need to ensure that the people on a team are, in fact, capable of being team players.

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

“No. It’s broader than that, Martin. We’re questioning how good our products need to be for us to win in the market. We’re questioning how much effort we need to be putting behind future technology, because that might come at the expense of having the market embrace our current technology.”

It requires team members to make themselves vulnerable to one another, and be confident that their respective vulnerabilities will not be used against them. The vulnerabilities I'm referring to include weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, mistakes, and requests for help.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

“If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.”

Yes, as desirable and powerful as teamwork is, it remains unnatural and requires people to willingly enter into risky discomfort. And it always has.