"The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." This quote comes from Phil Jackson, the former NBA player and coach widely regarded as one of the most successful in basketball history, having led his teams to multiple championships. The idea that each person matters to the team, and that the team matters to each person, is a principle that extends well beyond sports. It's a tenet we believe every company should embrace to ensure the success of not just the organization, but the people within it.
As a steadily growing company, we recognized the need to strengthen relations to safeguard that growth going forward. With the goal of building trust and fostering better teamwork, our management decided to organize an activity designed to bring that vision to life.
Since Legend Metal was established in 2014, our team has grown substantially. Nearly a decade later, we held our first-ever team-building seminar, a two-day event in February 2023, facilitated by Vytautas Gaidamavičius, a Lithuanian team relations coach with 20 years of experience helping organizations around the world strengthen their internal dynamics. His guidance shaped every part of the seminar, from the exercises to the conversations that followed.
Among the highlights was a series of exercises built around trust, including one where a group of selected team members supported a teammate standing on materials typically considered unsafe. Despite the apparent risk, everyone approached the activity with enthusiasm, relying on one another throughout — and no one was hurt, a small but telling testament to the strength of the bond within the team.
That same spirit of trust carried into the seminar's next phase, where each participant was tasked with identifying the concepts that best captured who we are as team members. By the end of the two days, the group had narrowed these down to the ones that most accurately represented us as an organization — cementing what would become our company's core values.
On a separate occasion, management held a session with Vytautas to reflect on themselves as leaders and on their dreams — both personal and for the company. We touched on the topic of what values we live by and why they matter. If an organization, much like a person, understands and lives by its values, it will prosper, and its people will find satisfaction as well.
Management compiled a list of the company's best practices since its founding — the factors behind its growth and its strong employee retention. Key leaders looked back on certain events in 2016 that unintentionally gave rise to the company's first core values:
During a morning assembly that year, our CEO, Jin Yingzhe, told the then-small team that having a sense of responsibility is important in life, not just at work. It was the first value the company came up with, and lived by. That same year, some challenges arose due to cultural differences within the team. By communicating effectively, the team averted a crisis. This made us realize how powerful communication is as a tool. We also decided to turn adversity into our strength; by embracing our diverse backgrounds, we can think of solutions from different perspectives.
Owing to these past experiences, three concepts were the first to come up when the leaders analyzed what has made the company grow since its inception — Responsibility, Communication, and Diversity.
These three were added to the list from the seminar, and the combined set was presented to the entire company for feedback. What emerged became our official core values: a product of collaboration across every level of the organization. We defined what the Legend Feeling meant to us, and how we operate as Team Legend.
Management recognized the impact this event had on team dynamics, and it has since become a recurring part of our culture — now held multiple times a year by the same facilitator, but now with the participation of all team members.
What began as a single event helped shape who we are as an organization, built on the belief that every member matters. We've come to understand that a strong team is built from strong individuals who choose to stand together. Like the champions we aspire to be, we know that success starts with the strength of the team behind it.