A business is a team endeavor, even if there are only two people on the team. The synergy of the team — or lack of it — will affect the company’s bottom line because a team needs to be in sync to operate with passion at its maximum or the quality/quantity of production is inevitably reduced.
Elements of an Effective Team
To perform at its best, teams must bond. Lack of bonding also hampers production. We need to see all of the following elements in effective teams
- Respect (built on understanding) for each member of the team by each member of the team.
- Harmony of purpose and effort.
- Receptivity to new ideas.
- Team spirit, which is hard to define, but easy to recognize.
- Common knowledge and acceptance of the company’s/team’s goals and objectives, together with clear, shared expectations regarding the outcomes and time frames of these goals. This is the important alignment of the individual with the overall goals.
- Passion about the goals and objectives of the company.
- Effective communications.
- A mix of different temperaments on the team, be it a board or a working divisional team. Teams are less effective when they are made up of just one or two temperaments. Homogenous teams have blind spots and make one-dimensional decisions. Such one-dimensional decisions are hard to implement for a company that addresses a world in which all temperaments use its product or service.
Business is a team endeavor, the success of which depends upon a knowledge and understanding of each other
InnerKinetics addresses the above elements. Identify the elements you think are present or absent in your team’s dynamics.
InnerKinetics® requires that all individuals have a basic knowledge of temperament.
- We need the knowledge known for centuries and confirmed by voluminous research: that there are basic drives and urges, which form a person’s inner design and shape the life, molding our mental and emotional approach to all we do.
- We need also to understand each person on the team. That means knowing and understanding the InnerKinetics of each team member. Here’s gift for you: Who Do You Have On Your Team?
Business is a team endeavor that requires team synergy
We will use the word synergy often. So what is it? 
“The combined actions and cooperation of a group,” says Webster’s Dictionary. The word goes all the way back to the ancient Greek. It meant working together and giving assistance or help. Ergon is “work” and syn is “together with.” So the Greeks saw synergy as working together, with each giving assistance and help. Surely this is the minimum.
There are different degrees of synergy in relationships
We can’t expect the synergy of a beautiful loving relationship, but…
We must expect the synergy that is found in a successful sports team. However, if all a sports team had was what the Greeks defined as synergy, they would be a losing team. What synergy will achieve in both the sports team and in a company’s teams is the sum of the whole being greater than the individual parts — 1+1=3, so to speak.
Just as sports team synergy impacts peak performance, it does so in business, too.
Must every member like the other team members? No, but they have to learn to respect what each member brings to the team and cooperate at the highest level. There is something to respect about everyone. And as we will find, respect begins with understanding. We seldom respect what we don’t understand. In fact, we tend to demonize it.
Business is a team endeavor that cannot bypass the task of understanding if the company’s goals are to be reached
Some work teams want to bypass the harder work of understanding each other. They do so to a reduction in potential effectiveness. We must pay due attention to how humans operate. They do not usually operate according to what supervisors ask or expect of them, let alone what is required for peak performance executed with the passion a company would like to see.
To produce the synergy of a successful work team, we must first answer the following questions :
- What are the company’s goals?
- How do the company’s goals relate to the team?
- What reasons can the company give for its workers to be passionate about what the company does?
- Do the leaders have a plan for building and managing team synergy?
- Have the members of the team completed a Temperament Key, identified their temperament and discovered their strengths?
- Do they understand each other?
When we have answered these questions, we can then turn our minds to how synergy can be created.