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?