From "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork," by John Maxwell:Good attitudes among players do not guarantee a team’s success, but bad attitudes guarantee its failure.
Attitudes have the power to lift up or tear down a team. If you want outstanding results, you need good people with great talent and awesome attitudes. When attitudes go up, so does the potential of the team. When attitudes go down, the potential of the team goes with it.
An attitude compounds when exposed to others. Several things on a team are not contagious. Talent. Experience. But you can be sure of one thing: Attitude is catching.
Bad attitudes compound father than good ones. There’s only one thing more contagious than a good attitude—and that’s a bad attitude.
Attitudes are subjective, so identifying a wrong one can be difficult. People always project on the outside how they feel on the inside. Attitude is really about how a person is. Petty jealousy. An attitude that really works against people is the desire for equality that feeds petty jealousy. For some reason the people with this attitude believe that every person deserves equal treatment, regardless of talent, performance, or impact. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Each of us is created uniquely and performs differently, and as a result, we should be treated as such. Most bad attitudes are the result of selfishness.
Rotten attitudes, left alone, ruin everything. Bad attitudes must be addressed. You can be sure that they will always cause dissension, resentment, combativeness, and division on a team. And they will never go away on their own if they are left unaddressed. They will simply fester and ruin a team—along with its chances of reaching its potential.
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental
attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help
the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
-President Thomas Jefferson-
