We’re All In This Together: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging
Mike Robbins
Hay House Business (April 2020)

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”  African proverb

As I  began to read this book, I was again reminded of the fact that companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually annually ranked among those that are most profitable, with the greatest cap value in their industry segment.

They have effective teamwork at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.

In competitive sports, only a few teams are always winning or contending for championships: Tennessee and Connecticut in women’s basketball; UCLA, Kentucky, and Duke in men’s basketball; The New England Patriots in the NFL; football teams in the SEC; and the New York Yankees in MLB.

However different they may be in most respects, all of them have a culture that is results-driven, with a foundation of mutual respect and trust, whose members think and behave in terms of first-person PLURAL pronouns.

That is also true of the animators who produced Disney’s classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,  Bambi, and Pinocchio as well as the Manhattan Project’s scientists, aeronautical engineers involved with Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” the key and contributors to NASA’s space exploration initiatives.

Members of these and countless other great teams were/are “all in it together.”

Mike Robbins wrote this book in order to share his thoughts about how to maximize communication, cooperation, and especially, collaboration, between and among members of a workforce. The key is to establish a culture within which teamwork is most likely to thrive.

I agree with him that affirming the importance of teamwork is easier said than done. He cites five reasons:

1. We aren’t trained to work in teams.
2. We get caught in the trap of “Us versus Them.”
3. We focus too much on mechanics (How) and not enough on psychology (Why).
4. We’re often separated by time and space [especially now].
4. We’re focused on ourselves.

“The intention of this book is to help you break down the barriers of whatever may get in your way — personally, organizationally, and culturally — so that you and your team can connect more deeply with one another, trust each other, and perform at the highest level.”

Mike Robbins provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that can help leaders in almost any organization to establish and then strengthen a teamwork-driven culture. He carefully explains the WHAT and WHY but I think the greatest value is created by his explanation of HOW. Long ago, Thomas Edison suggested that “vision without execution is hallucination.”

The cultures of a family, a workplace, a company, a sports team, a house of worship…whatever brings people together…define more than their identity. They also define what they value, for better or worse. Unhealthy cultures fail for one or more reasons.

Members of healthy cultures succeed because, yes, they’re “all in it together.”