How should we build teams so that we accomplish truly great things? In a tremendous TED talk, Margaret Heffernan implores us to concentrate on the mortar far more than we focus on the bricks.

Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital….Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we’ve thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.

We know that this works.

– Margaret Hefferman: Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work