We’ve known this since grade school. When we started playing team sports it became clear that, as important as individual play was, you win more often when the team plays well together.

Or, as “The Great One,” Wayne Gretzky, once said: “I think that from the time you start playing sports as a child you see that your responsibility to your team is to play the best that you can play as an individual… and yet, not take anything away from being part of a team.”

He has the record for most regular season goals (894) and assists (1,963), so he knows something about individual achievement and teamwork.

How does responsibility to one another relate to Mississippi Lime? One place to look is our core values under Our Responsibility to Each Other. The first line is: Teamwork among employees is a key driver of our success.

This means we make an active effort to do our best, but also take an active role in helping each other succeed.

We’re already good at teamwork. Employees all over our company routinely pitch in to give each other a hand or work as a unit to make us smarter, more efficient, more competitive and safer.

Training teams keep us sharp and current on the latest processes and techniques, and help us resolve differences.

The Keyes Contributor Award rewards those who make a notable effort to improve processes and systems. Last year the award went to the Reliability Team for improving processes for incident reporting, root cause failure and database management.

Our sales team is continually working together to improve our services to our customers and give us an edge on our competition.

And, our safety teams continually review safety procedures and conduct rescue drills to make our workplace as safe as possible.

We are a great team. And we’re getting better every day, thanks to the hard work and insights of the individuals who contribute to the MLC team. Our future success in this competitive industry depends on it. So let’s hang in there and look after one another and the teams we serve on.