Stick Together (book summary)

This blog entry is a summary of the book Stick Together, a simple lesson to build a stronger team by the authors Jon Gordon and Kate Leavell.

Summary

Stick Together delivers a crucial message about the power of belief, ownership, connection, love, inclusion, consistency, and hope. The authors guide individuals and teams on an inspiring journey to show them how to persevere through challenges, overcome obstacles, and create success together.

Lessons

1. Believe
   • Believe in each other
     • When team members believe in each other, that helps them fill each other up with positive energy, encouragement, and belief
   • Challenges are opportunities
     • Challenges are opportunities to help us learn and grow and make us stronger and better
   • If we want to accomplish something great as a team, we have to believe it’s possible. If we believe it is possible, we will work hard to achieve it
2. Ownership
   • Take responsibility for your choices
   • No Excuses
   • Failure refines instead of defines
3. Connection
   • Connection leads to commitment
     • When a team is connected, they feel more committed to each other
     • Ways we can apply this are to have more opportunities to get to know each other and to be honest with each other
   • Build trust
4. Love
   • Stronger team
   • Drives a team to succeed
   • Leaders who show their teams they care about them have more committed team members
   • A team that cares about each other is able to challenge each other to work harder and sacrifice more
   • Care / love also helps with having more patience, understanding, and a desire to succeed together
   • Love creates trust, trust leads to commitment, and commitment leads to sacrifice
5. Inclusion
   • Value everyone’s contribution
     • Inclusion is important for each team member to feel like they are a part of the team
     • A big part of inclusion is the good feeling you get when you contribute to the team and are recognized and valued for who you are and the contributions you’ve made
     • When you feel like you are helping to build the future of the team, you feel more connected to the team and the team’s outcomes
   • Applies to society too
6. Consistency
   • Consistent effort every day
     • Consistency is what creates excellence because we are what we repeatdly do, not what we say we’ll do or want to do
     • When we are consistent, we’ll see that our outcome is determined by our commitment to the process along the way
     • It means that our actions are based on our commitments rather than being controlled
   • Consistency = excellence
7. Hope
   • Always remain hopeful
     • When you lose hope, you can’t win the future. You can’t move forward. You get stuck. You focus on where you are instead of where you want to be.
     • So keep hope alive
   • hope -> future