With markets declining, costs escalating and as a result competition getting even more fierce, business organisations are forced to achieve the best efficiencies to sustain performance.
While individually, each function needs to do its best within their scope - that alone wouldn’t be enough to keep the businesses growing. When functions individually have achieved the best efficiencies, amplifiers can come from cross functional synergies. Does this come naturally? No, not at all. Individual brilliance to team brilliance is a transition that has to be planned and executed with strong leadership.
There are unique and distinct traits that are specific to each individual based on their background, life experiences, job experiences and social influences. These traits, which are personality attributes, thinking approaches, work styles and behavioral patterns, have an impact on the performance of a person in team situations as well.
These traits work positively and negatively in an organisational environment; conflicts at times and adding new dimensions into the team. Conflicts cost money but new dimensions promote better quality judgment. Getting onto a common platform is not an easy task but there is where the savings are achieved through optimal efficiency.
It is generally assumed that a successful relationship between an individual and an organisation is based on a shared foundation of beliefs and behaviour. Similar beliefs and ways of working usually encourage communication and tend to support the working relationship, allowing synergies to emerge. In contrast, a high level of dissimilarity usually needs a high consumption of adaptive energy. If you can successfully do this, you can get the best out of differences of people- each difference has a different value.
Collective effort
Business success depends on team performance not on individual performance. The real reason for creating teams is the hope that the output from the collective effort would be significantly better than what each individual can accomplish separately.
Team members are, at a fundamental level, short-listed for their knowledge, skills and expertise. But one has to also take into consideration the personality traits and thinking approaches necessary for a task. Take for example an aggressive go getter vs passive follower working together or risk-taking approach vs Cautious and conservative approach in a team situation.
Synchronisation for synergy demands the most persuasive leadership style with a delicate balance for fairness while ensuring the managers can still perform with authenticity for their best performance. When managers are allowed to perform authentically you always get the best and combining authenticity for synergy is where the magic is. Magic is savings.
There are mental habits that we all use in different situations. For example some people follow a set procedure to achieve their goals and others prefer to have options. Evaluations can be based on people’s own opinions, or on those of others.
Deterrent
Some people initiate action, while others are reactive. Some aim to achieve positive goals and others want to avoid negative problems. Some people think in overview and others focus on finer details. People may also look for how things are similar to, or different from, each other.
Two people with different wavelengths can find it difficult to communicate effectively and this can be damaging in business which can be a major deterrent to synergy. Learn to recognise different patterns of behaviour in your team members and work with these differences to maximise performance.
Even though managers consider teamwork and cross functional collaboration as critical to success, not many companies implement strategies and practices to derive real benefits. Some leaders shy away as it sometimes upsets some key managers when there is a major shift from individual recognition to team recognition.
Some managers fear that they will lose their identity and their individual contributions will go unnoticed when this happens. Creating a culture within the management team for collective effort thus results is a long process worth exploring. You may recover all what you lost due to Covid-19 pandemic with this strategy – trust me such is the level of savings one can get through synchronisation and synergisation among the management teams.