Quotes About Unity

The national plan is about all of us moving together. It's also not a national plan for picnics, just quietly

We've said the whole way through – this (Covid-19) is like a public health bushfire. And just like a bushfire, there's steps we can all take to keep ourselves and our homes safe.

Let peace, descending from her native heaven, bid her olives spring amidst the joyful nations and plenty, in league with commerce, scatter blessings from her copious hand!

While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it's not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It's not something you are. It's something you do.

Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family.

We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

your cellphone, she is feeding that flame. Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal.

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.

They did not rely on any outside structure or safety net. They were the structure, and if any of them failed, the group would fail.

Relatedly, it's important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we've seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built.

When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family. What's more, they tend to describe the feeling of those relationships in the same way.

I made a list: Close physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intensive, active listening Humor, laughter Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.) One more thing: I found that spending time inside these groups was almost physically addictive.

Eliminate Bad Apples:

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice:

You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards.

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group.

But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.

In the first two sections of this book we've focused on safety and vulnerability. We've seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it's time to ask: What's this all for? What are we working toward? When I visited the successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose.

On the face of it, these awkward moments at Pixar, the SEALs, and Gramercy Tavern don't make sense. These groups seem to intentionally create awkward, painful interactions that look like the opposite of smooth cooperation. The fascinating thing is, however, these awkward, painful interactions generate the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation.

Close physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intensive, active listening Humor, laughter Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)