Workplace synergy – in other words, teams that work together effectively – is an important aspect of any organization. It increases team performance by helping employees learn how to minimize conflict, adjust to change, and improve communication.
Every individual, who’s already an employee or even a promising job candidate, can bring specific strengths and values to a team. Aligning these strengths and values to improve communication can, however, be time-consuming and could even be a costly affair for organizations.
By leveraging the use of a personality assessment, you gain insights into your team’s or a candidate’s potential strengths, as well as blind spots that may occur when certain traits and skills are lacking in a team.
This knowledge can, ultimately, help you improve workplace synergy.
In modern organizational theory, workplace synergy is not only about working together as a team.
Synergy can’t just be reduced to the collective performance of your team, which really depends on individual performance – it’s much more than that.
Achieving workplace synergy isn’t as easy as it may seem. There’s a level of risk involved with creating workplace synergy within your team because it’s challenging to maintain it. Just as you can turn water, a life-giving substance, into sulfuric acid just by adding sulphur, positive synergy can be turned into negative synergy with the addition of the wrong element to your team.
Someone with the wrong personality traits, strengths, and values, for instance, can be crippling to your team’s performance.
One can say that positive synergy depends on a team having a good leader and good management processes. However, even with those elements in place, the addition of the wrong element could have a more negative impact on collaboration, innovation and morale than we can imagine.
If that’s true, then what can be done to create and maintain positive workplace synergy?
If you look closely at a team that has achieved positive workplace synergy, you’d see that they all have common interests that align their individual efforts to the same objective.
Whether your team members have different roles within the organization or even compete with each other, having a common objective contributes towards singular success and incredible workplace cohesion.
Therefore, it’s important to be very clear on the goals you’ve set for your organization, to communicate them frequently to your team, and to review their progress regularly to ensure that the common interests of each individual are aligned across the team and to what you want to achieve, both at the organizational and employee level.
Strong positive relationships and alliances are an important part of organizational synergy and success. People who share common values such as humility, honesty, trust, and discipline can stand to gain the highest workplace synergy.
Trust leads to loyalty and solidarity. Discipline is needed to enjoy commitment, courage, resilience, and drive to achieve common goals team members share, regardless of any circumstances that may test you. Humility helps team members look beyond themselves and work honestly towards important objectives.
While it’s possible to have team members with different but complementary values, clashing values can lead to longstanding conflict. Through the use of a personality assessment, you can ensure that your team’s values are aligned strategically.
Don’t confuse workplace synergy with creating teams that have individuals who are cut from the same cloth. Synergy can be achieved if team members complement each other – it’s really about overcoming adversity, staying focussed, and achieving success more meaningfully.
There’s a pool of skills and talents out there and to help achieve positive workplace synergy, it’s crucial to put the right people, with complementing skills and talents, together.
Leverage the use of a personality assessment and have a deeper understanding of each employee’s personality. Ultimately, you will be able to build teams that can work together and integrate each other’s potential to achieve workplace synergy and organizational success.
