How to Build Synergy & Harmony in Your Team?

The mantra that I have been toying with as of late is ‘Manage to make an impact.’

Inspired by Cindy Ventrice’s seminal book, Make Their Day, I’ve come to realize that many companies still need to step away from traditional hierarchies and models of work distribution in order to promote happiness, passion, and community inside their institutions.

Recognition is vital to upending the power dynamics that encumber contemporary institutions. When recognition prevails, it naturally leads to value-based team building, the vestment of administrative authority for expert in a team rather than solely in a managerial figure, and, overall happiness inside the workplace.

In this article I cover those topics and propose some ways that you can cultivate trust, reciprocity, and collective will inside institutions. 

The short of it is this: Every employee’s experience, feedback, and expectations matters. When an institution acknowledges this and candidly rehashes its time-old processes and hierarchies accordingly, great things can happen.

Recognition Is the Key to Happiness

In the workplace, recognition can come from many sources but it means more when it comes from a manager or a higher up. Power structures are being challenged and dismantled everyday, but that doesn’t mean that the perception of authority has vanished. Whether you are opposed to pre-established power dynamics the fact remains that power can is multiform. Power can flow from knowledge, experience, or material wealth. If someone that you perceive as more powerful recognizes your efforts or achievements, it will hold weight. 

The research supports this.

In fact the research has gone as far as to quantify the preferred distribution of recognition that employees prefer, based on self-report. On average, employees want recognition from three sources: managers, the organization as a whole, and their fellow employees. The preferred mix is 50-30-20, respectively. 

Whether you adhere to the mix or not, today’s work culture demands recognition are a prerequisite for market success. When an employees gives their loyalty to a company, they will champion it. It’s happening more and more thanks to social media. Employees can grow to feel a kinship with their employer, but only when they judge that the company has their best interests in mind and authentically aims to maintain it. Institutions can foster this loyalty by upholding employee recognition as a value. It will help employees feel like members in a tribe or a community.

5 Ways to Offer Recognition that Works

When deciding to give recognition the goal shouldn’t be to laud a person with pretty words and a plaque. The recognition must spring from a work relationship based in empathy, understanding, and clear expectations. 

I have composed this list of 5 ways to help set the groundwork for meaningful recognition.

• Provide clear expectations, validation, respect, loyalty, and trust based in a strong working relationship kept alive by open lines of communication.
• Determine what each person has to offer and wants to offer so you can leverage both their strengths and their predispositions. In that manner you can select challenges and opportunities that suit them. 
• Personalize recognition in terms that the person would use. This can only come from succeeding in the first point. It will show honest care and concern, and preclude the perception of ingratiation or pandering.
• You can start a cultural movement wherein everyone more easily and sincerely recognizes each other. Encourage recognition and constructive criticism throughout the institution amongst employees at all levels of the hierarchy. 
• Go out and celebrate as a team. Move as a single unit, as a family. Recognition within a cultural unit can become a group activity.

Because these changes are meant to permeate every level of an organization and may run contrary to practices already in place, I suspect your head may be swimming in “yabbuts.” 

That’s the term that innovation-strategy pioneer Larry Keeley invented to denote thoughts like this: “Yeah, sure this all sounds good—but here’s why this would never work in my organization.”

The 3 Yabbuts of Innovation

Chris Artel and Lisa Kay Solomon explain in Moments of Impact the 3 big yabbuts that can upend attempts to innovate or modernize an institution. They are politics, near-termism, and the karaoke curse. 

Politics.

All organizations are political in nature. Every person brings self-interest to the table. Since politics is a pejorative term we can unfairly assume that all politics are bad politics. Well, no. Politics exist on a continuum. Bad politics is solely about self-interest, resource control, and empire building; good politics is about honest debate, values, and moving forward together.

Takeaway.

The four political pitfalls are refusal to declare whose propositions are better, feigned participation, diffidence, and agenda hijacks. Make sure you don’t fall prey to them nor that your team members succumb to these pitfalls when trying to change the status quo. 

Near-Termism.

Individuals and companies alike need to learn how to balance short- and long-term goals. The difficulty is that human beings are notoriously bad at just that. There are a number of temporal biases that truncate our best attempts at planning. One extensively documented and studied temporal biases is temporal discounting.

Temporal discounting is best explained by a seminal study conducted in Stanford University back in the late 1960s by Walter Michel. Namely, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Researchers found that the ability of children to delay gratification by choosing to take two marshmallow in 20 minutes rather than one marshmallow immediately had long-term predictive value. In follow-up studies, preschoolers who exercised self-restraint had greater self-control and success as adults. 

Takeaway.

You would do well to take heed of this experiment. The desire for immediate or short-term gratification is strong in us all. When you are in the midst of sparking institution-wide change, make sure to keep a look out for this bias. A way of short fusing it is to setup incentives that would make the alterations worthwhile. For example, a Friday night outing as a group to highlight the week’s good/bad moments can be sponsored by the company. Free drinks anyone? 

The Karaoke Curse.

Imagine that you are in a Karaoke bar. You and your group step into the room, have a couple of drinks, make selections, and take turns signing. There is usually at least one person who can sing much better than everyone else. After enough drinks the worst of singers will think she is Frank Sinatra when she sings alongside the better of the singers. A person’s confidence can sometimes exceed their competence, particularly when they are in the company of more competent people.

You’d be surprised how damaging it can be when someone doesn’t notice that they are not qualified to opine on a matter. That compounded by the the belief that their ideas are golden—when they aren’t—can tragically derail an otherwise fruitful conversation.

When you want to initiate institution-wide change that forces you to rail against entrenched power structures, this kind of person can inhibit progress. That is when strategic thinking becomes crucial.

Takeaway.

The advice of the Karaoke Curse cuts both way. Make sure that you can take a step back from a conversation to evaluate what your contributions are accomplishing, what it implicates for next steps, and how it would play out in a real-world scenario. When someone else is getting trigger happy, ground them the same way you’d ground yourself. 

Beyond the Karaoke Curse, strategic thinking entails holistic analysis and process-oriented R&D. Any change within an institution will affect any number of moving parts. Apprehending what will change and how before you act will save you a lot of time and energy. 

A Few Tips from Successful Strategic Thinkers

Good strategic thinkers may not realize how good they are. When you see one in action though, you can almost immediately recognize their talents—especially if you don’t let your ego get in the way.

There are a few tips that have been handed down to me by strategic thinkers that I admire. I would like to share them with you now.

• Systems Thinking. Model and tinker with modes of thinking and organizations.
• Scan and Identify Patterns. Continually scan for new data and extrapolate insights from sources all around you. 
• Challenge Assumptions. Encourage challenges to presuppositions, even your own. When you reveal underlying thinking processes, you reveal deeper meanings.
• Balance Long- and Short-term Goals. Keep an eye toward future and present goals simultaneously. They usually do not oppose each other, but rather beg to be balanced.
• Synthesize and Storytelling. Constantly observe people and operations in other industries to create a coherent story and find opportunities to merge their innovations with your own.
• Hypothesis Testing. Trial and error. Do not be afraid to try something new. You can learn from failed attempts. 

Once you’ve done a lot of your initial information gathering and started thinking about strategy, remember that changes likes this take team effort. Be sensitive to group dynamics. Find ways to pair people where they naturally intersect rather than where they differ. Identify who wants to support you in your venture and leverage them to meet your needs. 

Team and Process Build for High Performance

Putting together a team involves a number of complex maneuvers. You must coordinate individuals with a broader context, think about relationships, think about bottomlines, think about productivity. I’ll say it again. Work distribution is complex. 

At the heart of it all, you must ensure that the individual people do not feel like cogs in a machine. Yes, they should feel part of the institution and yes they must feel integral to its success, but that cannot supersede their individuality. 

Consider that every person in a team must feel a shared responsibility to their department, to each other, and to the company as a whole. When you move people around without inquiring about their expectations and goals, then they can feeling unimportant. They can feel more like objects than people. That is not a good feeling. 

If you manage to inculcate each person in a team with a sense of greater purpose that meets both the institutions needs and their own needs, then you can reap the rewards of a greater sense of purpose, passion, and commitment.

Delineate Process from the Get-Go

That work experience is born when workflows are defined. Each person must know what their role is and what is expected of them. That can only happen when you plot out what teams you need and who you need on your teams. 

Be strategic about it. Think about culture, work experience, and attitude. It will be hard for you to change the way the institution runs if you have people in it who don’t value what you value. Not everyone will be a fit. That’s okay. If someone is not a cultural fit, then they are a risk to the community your are trying to build. Do not feel compunction about letting someone like that go. The integrity of the institution is more important.

Another strategic maneuver for team building is the 80/20 principle, also known as Pareto’s Principle. It has been observed in prestige companies around the world. 

Pareto’s Principle

In some of the most successful companies, there exists a work distribution called 80/20, based on Pareto’s Principle. Simply stated the principle holds that 20 percent of a set is generally responsible for 80 percent of the related result.

For example, if you have a team of experts then each expert can use 20 percent of their time to carry out 80 percent of the business needed. This is feasible when you undo traditional managerial schemas. Presumably experts can administrate their own job function. You’d be surprised how much this increases job satisfaction, job commitment and productivity. 

In practice, the idea is that the best leaders openly take control of their careers, of their lives, and of their time. From an employee’s perspective that means “I know what I am doing. I know how to get it done.” From the employer’s perspective that means “When I see talent I don’t try to control it. I nurture it.” 

The takeaway is that power structures can be poisonous. To that extent, there are institutions founded on power dynamics that exploit power gaps. That may work in the military, for instance, but in the real-world, submission to authority in that manner is counter-productive and undesirable. 

Do Not Pay Deference to Power Structures

If you are on the fringes of a dominant culture, conventional wisdom may compel you to acclimate to the styles, values, and modes of communication prevalent in your social context. In the workplace it would be no different. It’s a way of relating and of closing whatever power gap is perceived.

Hierarchical cultures of this sort are usually unsustainable. The acclimations come at the expense of individual preferences, hopes, desires, and maybe dreams. In these situations the sense of disproportion can be detrimental to all people, leading to frustrations on both sides. 

As we delve into power-gap dynamics in an institutional context, we notice how hierarchies tend to dictate the way people live. In those cases, time and again, we have seen that people prefer an egalitarian management style, wherein the institutional structures are flat, open dialogue is encouraged, and managers are team members rather than overseers.

Bridge the Gap

Bridging the gap and instituting overall egalitarian changes can have beneficial impacts on relationships, communication, and productivity. Remember the 80/20 principle. There are vast resources that are probably being wasted on managers and administrators because the employees they oversee are reasonably more than capable of keeping an eye on themselves.

The goal here is to cultivate trust, empathy, and, increase productivity and innovation in the process. There are many ways to go about this. People are different and groups of people more so. When you embark on the journey of leveling power structures, promoting recognition, and building efficient and community-minded teams, you must identify the ways in which your employees want to be communicated with. The efficient way to do this is ask. Just ask.

Once you do that, you can start strategizing about how to implement the changes mentioned above. It will be an incremental process but worthwhile in the long-term.

Watch Out for Stumbling Blocks

There are 5 pervasive stumbling blocks that hinder attempts to create teams like I have described above.

• Lack of Trust.
• Fear of Conflict.
• Lack of Commitment.
• Lack of Accountability.
• Inattention to Results.

Conclusion

This is a slightly dense article but the topic warrants it. It is so important in today’s economy that institutions listen to their employees.

Institutional leaders need to consider employees’ feedback, self-management potential, and desire for community-building. An institution that makes those central values can guarantee that employees stay and defend the institution.

Remember that employees have an insiders perspective and more often than not are willing to vocalize it. Do your best do that what they say align with your true values.

Other articles on the topic of teamwork and collaboration

• The Smart Way to Collaborate
• Building High Performance Teams
• Understanding the Dynamics of Groups at Work 
• The One Thing Every Team Should Become