“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Phil
Engage others in creative and synergistic endeavors. Purposefully find ways to force team member interplay for power results. Be sensitive and firm. This is not a day at the ropes course. This is in the work place on real tasks that have real risk of failure and real potential for success and reward.
“Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives. But creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.” Steven Covey
It takes a LEADER: Good executive leaders understand this rule. Leadership is required. Manager thought tends to avoid this risky behavior. Lead.
Personal Security: The workplace should ooze with personal security and powerful self esteem and a sense of individual dignity. Of course it might not be happening where you lead. Then you need to work on it. People need to understand accountability and responsibility and the safety of making mistakes from which we learn.
Accountability means I understand my actions and results impact all those around me and I account that into my decisions. Others will hold me accountable for what I do. They will rejoice in tandem, forgive forthright mistakes, and hold me responsible for results both individual and together.
Responsibility means my action will impact me directly. I get it. I understand it. I welcome it. Good or bad results, I am responsible for my actions.
Personal security can only be reinforced in such a dual environment. Many lack personal security and are looking for everyone from mom and dad to the government to supervisors to take responsibility for their success or failures. Those people cannot thrive in synergy at optimum levels. But they can start where they are, grow, and experience more daily.
Openness: Every team has to find the place of what Jim Collins calls, “brutally confronting the facts.” It is not negative. It is a direct and non-personal approach to dealing with the blips, glitches, misstatements, wrong turns, customer complaints, and missed deadlines. Dancing around the issues because a team member is overly sensitive inhibits synergy. You have to want synergy. You have to desire synergy. You have to yearn for synergy to get past covered conversations into open, intelligent discussion.
Spirit of Adventure: A community leader speaking at a business leaders’ lunch asked for a show of hands. “Who loves to do things with uncertain results and a high risk?” Only one hand among 450 went up. “Well”, he said, “that is the definition of adventure.” Among all of these senior executives, bankers, lawyers, CEOs, and wizened warriors of the workplace, the sense of adventure had died. For synergy to happen every day, the third ingredient is a spirit of adventure. Individually and together the team needs to led into a continual spirit of adventure.
On a powerfully synergistic team, a client came with a bothersome technical improbability. Theoretically, what they were doing should work. But, it was failing at several levels of production and the supporting vendors had sent them to us for resolution. After some frustrating attempts, one of the team just would not let it go. He tested and tried and worked with the other members to come up with a solution. At first, we discovered how to force it through our production engine, but only with effort. Then synergy exploded. A simple solution was implemented that allowed the originating production shop to perform without having to upgrade their equipment or outsource the job to us. Our team invented themselves synergistically out of a job that was highly profitable. Openness means honesty. Sense of personal security means do the right thing for the client. Spirit of adventure means taking on the improbable and finding a way to do it anyway.
SOLUM SERVICES 