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Habit 6: Synergize

This is the last in a series of columns on Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and what they mean for information professionals. You may read all of this series at www.dmreview.com/authors/author_sub.cfm?authorID=30029.

Synergy, the sixth Habit, is very much like the musical term "ensemble," which means to play together as a single entity. Stephen Covey calls synergy the "essence of principle-centered leadership."¹ I call synergy the essence of the effective information age organization. Peter Drucker describes the new leadership paradigm as the symphony orchestra model.² Management can no longer lead organizations by managing up and down the business functions or the silo organization structures that end up competing with each other. Rather, management must lead the enterprise as a symphony orchestra conductor leads the symphony - as a whole, not as many different "silos" of musical specialists. In music, synergy is called "ensemble," meaning everyone plays "together" as a single whole, not as a group of prima donna soloists. This is synergy.

Synergize

Synergy comes from two Greek words - the word for "work," and the word for "with" or "together." Thus, synergy means working with one another, together as a single whole. Synergy is the simple fact that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The habit of synergy is about how people work together to solve problems and to cooperate to accomplish the mission of the enterprise. Effective organizations have many different business areas with different specialized job functions and skill sets, but they work together in ways that complement each other and optimize the result. How do effective organizations perform their information work?

• They recognize that information is not a proprietary, departmental resource, but an enterprise resource.
• Information producers know who their information "customers" are and care about them so they capture all the information with the quality needed to effectively perform their jobs.
• Information producers are able to provide high quality customer service to their information customers because the information customers themselves, and their own information producers, create quality information that they need to do their jobs effectively.
• Managers work for goals that benefit the enterprise, not just their own department; for at the end of the day, there is only one profit or loss figure.
• The executives at the top of the enterprise are leading their enterprise in the same way the symphony conductor leads the orchestra - as a single whole. They manage across the value chains to optimize them. Enlightened executives know there are no such things as "profit centers" and "cost centers." They know the perceived profit centers cannot make a "profit" without the services provided by the perceived cost centers. Therefore, they do not manage the functions as independent entities. Rather, they manage them as interdependent components of the various business value chains.
• The performance measures reward synergistic teamwork that maximizes knowledge and information sharing for the good of all.

What good is it if Department A sells $1 million more than their quota for the month, but to do so they cut corners and do not capture vital information needed by Department B, thus costing Department B a $5 million loss in missed sales and information scrap and rework? What good is it if management increases claims processor productivity by 20 percent through turning off the edits so they can process claims faster if this causes overpayments to claimants and liabilities that result in losses ten times the amount of the "productivity" savings?

Synergistic Communication

Synergy relates to how we work together, whether performing our work in a larger value chain or solving problems as a team. Synergy requires empathetic listening (Habit 5) and beginning any activity with a win/win outcome goal (Habit 4).

There are three basic levels of communication based on levels of trust and cooperation:³

• Defensive = Win/Lose or Lose/Lose outcome (low trust and cooperation)
• Respectful = Compromise outcome (medium trust and cooperation)
• Synergistic = Win/Win outcome (high trust and cooperation)

People who seek their own agenda exhibit defensive behavior and tend to be uncooperative and skeptical that an amicable "solution" can be reached. They typically operate out of a win/lose style, though some highly dependent people operate from a lose/win mind-set.

Often when cooperation results in a perceived "consensus" solution, the parties have not really achieved consensus. They have merely been respectful, and their "compromise" is a polite or politically correct decision. They have communicated politely - not empathetically. Compromise really means that 1 + 1 = 1¹/2.⁴ This result is only a low form of win/win.

Synergy comes when you recognize that there are not just two choices (mine and yours). By operating out of a trust relationship and with a cooperative spirit, we can think together outside the box, discovering new options that would have remained invisible otherwise.

Examples of Synergy

When I was the information management leader at a publishing firm, a conflict arose between the information management team and an application development team (surprise, surprise!) over the database design of a student course database file. This file maintained the student course records of customers who took self-study courses. We had designed the database following information integrity principles. However, the monthly transcript report application took nearly all of the nine hours of available overnight runtime as the number of student course transcript records grew. The application developers wanted to compromise the file design to allow the transcript file to duplicate the course title (that was kept one time in the course file) in the student course file. At the time, there were 110 course records and more than 4 million student course records. The 25 character-long course title was an inherent data element of the course record. The application team wanted to put the course title in the student course record so the application would not have to read the course record to reduce the runtime to produce transcripts. This "compromise," however, would have created integrity problems for the data - when a course title changed, the title had to be changed in every one of the student course records where that specific course was taken. This would also have added 100 megabytes to one of the faster growing files in a shared database. We brainstormed alternative options with the application team. We achieved synergy when we had open dialog about the pros and cons of various alternatives. The solution was fairly simple. We had the application read the 110 course records into an in-memory table so all the application had to do was read the student course records and match the course ID with the in-memory table and put the course title into the transcript report. Eureka. We accomplished both goals. The database integrity remained, and the application runtime decreased from 8 hours to 30 minutes.