65 Collaboration Quotes for Teamwork, Leadership, and Productivity

One of the essential elements of productivity and efficiency in any organization is its people. Much has been researched and said about collaborative teamwork. Leaders who struggle with productivity will find that a collaborative approach to building team spirit is the most efficient way to improve productivity.

The following collection of collaboration quotes will help you understand the importance of teamwork and productivity as well as how leaders can create efficient teams. These collaboration quotes garnered from experts on teamwork and collaboration are nuggets of wisdom that you can learn and apply to the management process. We hope you find them useful and effective for your professional development and building your team.

Here are the collaboration quotes curated just for you.

• “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” — Helen Keller

• “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• “Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you’re the CEO.” — Max McKeown

• “To collaborative team members, completing one another is more important than competing with one another.” — John C. Maxwell

• “Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating. — Matthew Skelton

• “…beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love.” – Ian McEwan

• “In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators.”— David Epstein

• “When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.”— Rachel Naomi Remen

• “People never remember the crowd; they remember the one person that had the courage to say and do what no one would do.” — Shannon L. Alder

• “The beauty of collaboration between older and younger generations is that we combine strength with wisdom—a surefire way to accomplish more for the glory of God.”— Brett Harris

• “We must consider the building not as an object but as a collaborative system tightly linked to it’s natural environment; an ecological niche.” — Neri Oxman

• “People are more likely to remember the great social interaction they had with a colleague than the great meeting they both attended.” — Ron Garan

• “The way forward, I’m suggesting, is not to stop collaborating face-to-face, but to refine the way we do it. For one thing, we should actively seek out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which leadership and other tasks are divided according to people’s natural strengths and temperaments.”— Susan Cain

• “The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.” — Kim Malone Scott

• It may make sense to establish incentives for business units to collaborate in new ways so that younger talent sees innovation as a path to success rather than as a career risk.”— Tim Brown

• “Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.” — Warren Bennis

• “You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.” — Hank Green

• “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 only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.”— Sam Harris

• “Collaborators don’t steal others’ ideas, take advantage of people, or sit back while others accomplish their tasks for them. Collaborators take action to ensure that everyone with whom they work can enjoy the maximum potential outcome.” — Raoul Davis Jr.

• “Collaboration has no hierarchy. The Sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth.” — Amit Ray

• “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.” — André Gide

• “But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources.”— Walter Isaacson

• “Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul.” — Lawrence Anthony

• “Synergy without strategy results to waste of energy.” — Ogwo David Emenike

• “Collaboration is vital to sustain what we call profound or really deep change, because without it, organizations are just overwhelmed by the forces of the status quo. ” — Peter M. Senge

• “Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” — Mattie J.T. Stepanek

• “A business is a collaboration of people. Businesses also become more valuable when they gain skills and capabilities that enable them to add value to people’s lives.” — Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

• “Replace cyber-bullying with cyber-believing. Let us build each other up instead of bringing others down. BELIEVE & BUILD” — Janna Cachola

• “If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty—and do much more.”— Ron Garan

• “First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.”— Walter Isaacson

• “Hidden biases prevent us from recognizing high-potential workers and retaining talented managers. They stop us from collaborating effectively with partners.” — Harvard Business School Press

• “To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation;” — Lyssa Adkins

• “Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement.”— David J. Anderson (Kanban)

• “Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation.” — Ben Horowitz
• “As a leader, it’s your job to get everyone to share what they know.” — Jane Ripley

• “Collaboration allows teachers to capture each other’s fund of collective intelligence.” — Mike Schmoker

• “The idea is that collaboration and innovation flourish when human relationships replace bullying and bureaucracy.” — Kim Malone Scott

• “The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.” — Jim Highsmith

• “Central to the performance of any team is accountability to the people and to itself, for the course to which the team is responsible.” — Dele Ola

• “Collaboration begins with focusing on the collective good rather than personal gain.” — Jane Ripley

• “High Performance Teams create cultures of caring, connection, commitment, collaboration and clear consistent communication” — Tony Dovale

• “Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative” – Steve Jobs

• “Not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, they had qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators—partners in sharing information and discussing predictions. Every team member still had to make individual predictions, but the team was scored by collective performance.” — David Epstein

• “A strategy is multi-dimensional planning, multi-team collaboration, and multitasking action.” — Pearl Zhu

• “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. African Proverb” — Ryan T. Hartwig

• “Design thinking has been associated with massive team collaboration, which in turn, fosters employee engagement and maximizes productivity. Hence, it is a tool that should be emulated and implemented for the success of any business.”— Hibatullah Jawhar

• “An individual can make a change but a team can make a revolution.” — Amit Kalantri

• “New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” – sociologist Brian Uzzi, Amaral’s collaborator.

• “Smart decisions reflect diverse opinions across disciplines, experiences, and outcomes. In today’s collaborative mindset culture, teams strive to optimize each of these inputs.” — Paul F. Magnone

• “First, collaboration is built on relationships, and product teams—especially co‐located teams—are designed to nurture these relationships.” — Marty Cagan

• “We are committed to the mission and to each other’s success: We will not let each other fail. In fact, we will ensure each other succeeds. We will elevate each other as we work together to achieve” — Keith Ferrazzi

• “The best team leaders enable and empower others to collaborate. They have made the critical pivot from performer to facilitator.” — Britt Andreatta

• “ADAPTAGILITY is the core responsibility of a leader, to ensure connection, collaboration, capacity, competence, and commitment, in High-Performance Teams” — Tony Dovale

• “The quest for innovation against newly emerging realities requires us to bring disparate teams closer together and to create more bandwidth for actually collaborating with one another.” — Kevin G. Bethune

• “People learn together by working together. Don’t waste time on fake team-building activities such as anything physical. Those activities might be fun for some people, but they don’t help people learn how to work together at work.” — Johanna Rothman

• “The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another.” — L. David Marquet

• “Thinking of small tiny improvements would be exhausting if not impossible from the leadership team. Hence it has to happen at micro level, at each team level to control their own product & their own destiny. They are the closest, they know more about it.” — Ines Garcia

Going the opposite way of collaboration (quotes)

Not all believe in collaboration. In fact, individualism works well too for some. If you think about the adage “too many cooks spoil the broth”, going the opposite way of collaboration makes sense. This is why we have also thrown in a few non-collaboration quotes as insights how and when to adopt this approach for efficiency and productivity.

• “No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.” — Scott Berkun (The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work)

• “The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions.” — Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)

• “If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, then you’ll know what to do when your best salesperson skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues.” — James M. Kouzes (The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations)

• “I’ve never trusted collaborations, because most people in this world are not closers. They don’t finish what they start; they don’t live what they dream; they sabotage their own progress because they’re afraid they won’t find what they seek.” — Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)

• “There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.”— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

• “Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world.” — Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)

• “I’d collaborate with my clones, because I’m a team player who wants all the credit.” — Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)

Whether you are a team player or a leader with a vision, these collaborative quotes from professionals and collaboration experts are just the tools you need to build a dynamite team. We hope you find these collaboration quotes useful and add dimension to your management style.

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