Collaboration where the goal is to create results where, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” ~ Aristotle
How do companies create teams where team members produce greater results together than working separately? How do great leaders create powerful teams? Here are some ideas to help answer those questions.
Collaboration by Combining Different Skills and Different Experience
For the greatest power of synergy, surround yourself with people who know things that you don’t know.
Synergy is the process of combining the efforts of individuals or organizations to produce greater results together than the total combined results of working separately.
For example, let’s say that companies X, Y, and Z earn a total of $5 million working separately. However, by merging their efforts, these three companies earn $10 million.
The efforts of the synergistic teams do more than add more hands working on the assembly line. These teams add people who empower each other through the combination of their different skills and experience.
First-Hand Experience
There are multiple reasons why collaboration is so effective. One of the reasons is that synergy fills in the gaps of knowledge among individuals or among individual organizations.
A simple example is my experience in teaming up with other recruiters to share work. Together, we each made more money by combining our resources than each of us would have made working alone. I had recruiting contracts and job applicants. The other firms had different recruiting contracts and different job applicants.
By working with each other, we could accelerate filling jobs by helping each other find job applicants for our recruiting contracts.
In most companies, departments work separately to do their jobs. Sales planning does sales planning. Marketing does marketing. Manufacturing does manufacturing.
But some projects require knowledge from each of these departments. Collaboration empowers teams from separate departments to produce greater results by filling in the knowledge gaps among the teams.
Collaborating with Specialists
A simple Case study: Collaborating with specialists helps people focus on what they do best. Writers know how to write. Some writers can do a reasonable job of editing their own work. Also, most writers can figure out how to copyright their material. However, writers can produce far more material by just writing and having experts handle the other tasks in publishing a book.
