Synergy: How do companies create teams that produce greater results together than the total results of the team members working separately?
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” ~ Aristotle
Collaboration and Synergy
Synergy is the process of combining the efforts of individuals or organizations to produce greater results together than the total the combined results from working alone.
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 dollars working together.
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Firsthand Experience
There are multiple reasons why synergy 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.
Synergy in Project Teams
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.
Synergy in Working with Specialists
Collaborating with specialists helps people focus on what they do best. For example, 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.
