Discipline requires commitment, courage, resilience, and drive. Discipline is the ability to continue to work toward a goal regardless of the circumstances.Likewise, trust leads naturally to loyalty and solidarity. Equally, trust also allows for team members to check up on each other to make sure all tasks remain aligned with the common goal. Trust is the ability to focus on one’s task while letting others focus on theirs, thus optimizing efforts.This allows team members to know each other more closely, develop trust, help each other, and carry out team improvement initiatives with further reach. Honesty is the capacity to share one’s own truth with others.This allows every team member to have a clear image of the self and address all personal growth and professional development needs in a timely fashion. Humility is the capacity to acknowledge one’s own truth.More specifically, I have found that people who share the values of humility, honesty, trust, and discipline achieve the highest synergies. When people share common values, they can forge strong, long-lasting alliances. More specifically, they find personal affinities that help them work together, seek opportunities to leverage each other’s talents, and measure the results of their collective efforts with respect to their common goal. When people share common interests, they align their individual efforts toward the same goal. Let us explore each of these factors further. I have found that, just as the numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons define the potential for chemical synergy, the combination of common interests, common values, and complementary talents defines the potential for team synergy. The question is, then, what should organizations do to achieve positive synergy? Figuratively speaking, it is a lot more difficult to turn a piece of carbon into a diamond than to continue to mine for actual diamonds. However, anyone who has ever had real team leadership responsibilities knows that hiring the wrong person is far worse than not hiring the right person. Of course, positive synergy depends also on good leadership and other ongoing people-management processes. Achieving and sustaining positive synergy is a very complex task, and it starts with hiring the right people. In this regard, introducing the “wrong” person into a team can have devastating effects on performance. This is a metaphor to show how positive synergy can be turned into negative synergy by adding the “wrong” element. In other words, we can transform a life-giving substance, water, into a destructive one, sulfuric acid. Going back to chemistry for just a moment, we know that if we add sulfur (S 8) to a controlled environment already containing water (H 2O), given the right temperature and pressure conditions we can turn said water into sulfuric acid (H 2SO 4). This is why we must talk about positive synergy versus negative synergy and how to pursue the former while avoiding the latter. This introduces a level of risk that is widely overlooked by most authors and that holds the key to understanding organizational success versus organizational failure. Therefore, a team’s collective performance can be either better or worse than the sum of its members’ individual performances. By the same token, in modern organizational theory, synergy means much more than “working together.” Synergy is actually a systemic principle that explains how a team's collective performance is unpredictable based solely on its member’s individual performances.
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