Leading Synergistically

If you're involved with any group of people who are trying to achieve common goals, you soon become acutely aware that those goals will be achieved only through the work of the people in the group.

Yes, all work is done through relationships and wisely managing these relationship is critical to your team, group, division, company and community. Put simply, organizations don't succeed in and of themselves. They succeed only through individuals working in groups or teams.

The synergistically-oriented leader observes the team interactions from an elevated level, watching their interactions on the dance floor below, choosing to engage only when an intervention is necessary to move the team process forward. While natural "Synergists" exist, they are rare. If they were common, most teams of any size would be statistically likely to include a Synergist from the outset, thus avoiding gridlock.

So how does this happen? In practical terms, what is it that the Synergist does that breaks the gridlock of the team and releases it to perform effectively?

Most of the conflict that appears in the team occurs when one or more members operate at the extreme of their natural tendencies. The Synergist's first, and arguably most important, job is to regulate the range of those characteristics within which the team members operate, allowing them to flourish in the roles without straying into the red zone of unhelpful extremes of behavior.

Resolution is made possible by unshackling the members from their personality style-driven agendas. Many of the difficulties in the team member interactions are due to misunderstandings in communication. The vocabulary that the personality styles use, the different meanings they give to certain words and phrases, and the differences in the use of metaphor, descriptors and hyperbole all combine to produce a communications landscape dotted with land mines. Within this environment, Synergists act as minesweepers, scanning for potential communication hazards on the horizon and defusing them where possible.

From the elevated position on the balcony, the Synergist is perfectly placed to help the team members choreograph their interactions for achieving the best results. This act of connecting: to sit together and extract critical information from one another allows the team to reach the best solution to a specific issue.

The Synergist is the vital missing piece that enables this phase in the interaction. Because they are focused primarily on what's best for the enterprise as a whole, the Synergist can act more as an interested observer and less as an invested participant. The leader can draw out what is needed from each participant in an agenda-neutral manner.

Sources: Les McKeown: The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success

John G Agno: Women, Know Thyself: The most important knowledge is self-knowledge.