Elizabeth Doty, MBA
There
are certain words that are used so often and so vaguely that they can mean
almost anything. “Teamwork” is clearly one of those words… and “synergy” is
another. Some of you may remember the
film In Good Company, where cut-throat tycoon Teddy K. (played by Malcolm
McDowell), speaking after a series of arbitrary layoffs, folds his hands together
almost like a priest and incants the mystical virtues of synergy. No wonder
they banned the word in my business school classes! It’s just too easy to lump
all the goodness of coordination under that one umbrella term without being
clear about it.
So
what exactly is team synergy?
Simply put, we can define team synergy as the experience where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Where the members of a team operate in ways that complement and leverage each others’ strengths such that they accomplish results beyond what they could achieve individually, added together. It usually comes with the ‘high” of a high performing team. We might say it look something like this:
Sounds
good, right? But when we face the amount of up front work it takes to get
there, we are not always sure. Will it be worth the effort? Are these the right
people? Why haven’t they “gotten it” already? Sometimes it feels as though we
could get the same great results if we just had all “A” players on our team.
In
my experience consulting with a variety of teams over the past 17 years, I have
noticed that leaders and team members spend an awful lot of time negotiating
whether to invest in becoming a true team.
I
think this is because we view results as fundamentally individual and that
teamwork is largely about “being helpful” with each other’s individual
problems.
What this misses is the way our work is inherently interdependent. This is easier to point to if we are part of a work team with shared responsibility – but it is also true of staffs and functional groups. If not managed, we can end up taking a “bite” out of each others’ effectiveness, so the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
For
example, in one firm, a project manager and an account manager were assigned to
work together for a new client. Both of them had been with the company for some
time (though they had not worked together before) so they believed they knew
each of their responsibilities. Yet the Project Manager had come from a small
office – where a small staff meant that technical staff development defaulted
to account managers. The Account Manager had come from a larger office where
other leaders took that responsibility. Both were quite embarrassed when they
realized their assumptions meant they were caught short without the level of
staff skills they needed a year later.
The
point is, if we go along mostly believing that we can do our jobs on our own
and only need to come together occasionally for planning, then we are likely to
feel that investing in teamwork is optional, a nice-to-have if the stars line
up right – while blissfully ignoring some very wasteful practices.
In
the next post, we will explore more of the specific ways interdependencies
affect team performance.
In
the meanwhile, have you seen examples where one person’s or group’s actions
affected another’s – without necessarily even knowing about it?
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