Mike Krzyzewski Quotes

One of the greatest joys of leadership is assembling and knitting together teams of fantastic people.

You must learn how to hold a team together. You must lift some men up, calm others down, until finally they've got one heartbeat. Then you've got yourself a team.

Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.

It's much easier when your team's winning. When your team starts to lose, that's where a lot of these quarterback controversies divide a locker room. The key, as a pro, is to be a pro.

During the season, your team should be led with exuberance and excitement. You should live the journey. You should live it right. You should live it together. You should live it shared. You should try to make one another better. You should get on one another if somebody's not doing their part. You should hug one another when they are. You should be disappointed in a loss and exhilarated in a win. It's all about the journey.

We create a standard for how we want to do things and everybody's got to buy into that standard or you really can't have any team chemistry. Mediocre people don't like high-achievers and high-achievers don't like mediocre people.

I've been a solo act, a columnist and worked from home, only relying on myself. Now I'm part of a team, a leader, and I have to fit in at a big corporation and deal with all the moving parts, all the different personalities. That has been a challenge, to be quite honest, that I've embraced.

Coaching is salesmanship. Coaching is winning players over and convincing them they have to play together. It takes a team conviction to play together to make things work.

The greatest gifts you can give your team: clarity, communication, and pulling people together around a shared mission.

He doesn't need advice on how to play his position, but he needs advice on how to play team ball... If it's going to be my team, I'll voice my opinion. If he don't like it, he can opt out.

If you work for a team, you have a different view, if you own a team you have a radically different view.

Running a football team is no different than running any other kind of organization.

I am not dealing with footballers, I am dealing with people. They have fears and worry about failing and making fools of themselves in front of 80,000 people. I have to make them see that without each other they are nothing.

When I hear a company is being run by a team, my heart sinks, because you need to have that leader with a vision and heart that can move things forward.

I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day.

He says all the right things, like it's Jeter's team. I want to correct him on that - it's my team.

I think teams win. I don't think offense wins. I don't think defense wins. I don't think special teams - teams win.

This team just wasn't good enough today, but they had the unity I always wanted. To have an American team like this has always been a dream of mine.

To have harmony on a team, you need a coach who can get inside the head of every player and get them all pulling in one direction.

Talent is important. But the single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It's not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself. I really believe that that's been ultimately important for us.

I think the teams biggest struggle is remaining a team. It's kinda like a puzzle, If one piece of the puzzle is missing then the puzzle can't be completed. Every team member plays an important part.

The greatest ally you have to get things working well and the players performing as a team is the bench. Don't be afraid to use it, either for the star player or anyone else.

Every day in practice I have to lead by example. But at the same time, when people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, you're responsible as a player. You can't rely on the coaches to say everything. The players have to be responsible and take ownership of the team. Every day in practice there are situations where you need to say something and get a message across, but do it in the right way.

This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.