* “Coming together is a beginning. Staying together is progress. Working together is success.” Henry Ford * “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Benjamin Franklin

* “If I could solve all problems myself, I would.” Thomas Edison, when asked why he had a team of twenty-one assistants * “The strength of team is each individual member...the strength of each member is team.” Coach Phil Jackson - Chicago Bulls

* “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Ken Blanchard

How To Help Build A Winning Team

So how do you help build an effective team that contributes to a positive, successful work environment? Here are four tips to help you:

Contribute. Everyone is responsible for success of their team. At group meetings, for example, be an active participant who contributes valuable content. If you’re not familiar with discussion topic, silently observe team's process and find ways to facilitate its progress.

Communicate. Good communication is essential to success in workplace. We’ve all had experiences of hearing wrong message, assuming incorrectly, misinterpreting others' behaviors and feeling offended. That’s why it’s important to use clear communication, as well as active listening skills with fellow team members. Don’t just seek to be understood, but also seek to understand.

Be Committed. Commitment equals buy-in. A good work team needs to agree on and believe in its basic purpose — its mission or reason for existing. Work teams that have clarity of purpose can easily visualize their connection to organizational success. With strong commitment to move toward same goal, team creates a synergy — a force that is greater than combined energy of its individual members.

Be Supportive. Good work teams are like close-knit families. They require acceptance, nurturing, patience and support. They won't always agree and often need to compromise their personal preferences to achieve best results. Effective work teams need continued support and feedback to stay focused and to feel good about what they are doing. For a team to reach its full potential, members must be able to share their thoughts and ideas, and to see that these are valued and heard.

As information gets aggregated this way, it loses most of its context and richness. By richness, I'm talking about anecdotal and personal knowledge that front-line workers gather and build from continuous interactions with customers or users. Obviously, most CEOs don't have time to read reports comprised of hundreds of anecdotes; they want summaries of information.

Second, as information or data moves upward, it tends to be slotted into pre-existing categories. Employees on front-lines know and understand nuances of each customer story; it reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, personal relationship between worker and customer. But, there's no place for nuance in weekly reports.

Third, upward communication normally deals with compliance, rather than competitive or operational intelligence. Managers use information moving up hierarchy to determine how well instructions have been followed. When they want competitive or operational information they often use different means, such as bringing in consultants or commissioning studies.

It's always tempting to attribute communication failures to moral failures by managers, but if you really want to understand communication failures, you should start by looking for structural hurdles.

In summary, CEOs who spend time on front lines will undoubtedly be in for many surprises. But, if they want to get news from front lines, they'll need to address structural nature of upward communication.