Hello again, it’s me, the task driven woman, here to update you on some thoughts that I’ve had about being a facilitator and about working with other people of the same and/or different leadership styles. Upon reflection of my own facilitation and that of others as well as a little reading I have devised a handy two step guide to working cohesively.

STEP 1 – PUT ENERGY INTO SYNERGY

Synergy comes from the Greek word, Synergia, which means ‘working together’ (Diamond, 1987). Seems pretty simple right? So simple that we tend to completely overlook it when we come to working with other people.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” – George Orwell

Synergy can be seen as the basic building block of being able to work cohesively. The thing about synergy though is that it is easily destroyed by separation (Diamond, 1987). Synergy involves taking things for more than the mere sum of their parts. In my opinion, I don’t think Western Societies are very good at doing this, rather we see things for their separate parts. Let’s look at Year 12 for example. For most students Year 12 is the last year of secondary school. The way this year works is that you sit some written tests that are assessed internally by your school, and then at the end of the year you sit an exam for each subject. Your results are added up and compared to everyone else in the state and if you did well you are rewarded by being able to choose the study or career path of your choice, and if you didn’t do well you have to explore other options. For this whole year you are competing with every other Year 12 student in the state and you are either rewarded for your individual efforts or not.

And then you might make it to university, or TAFE, or a workplace. And all of a sudden you have to work with other people. But you’ve grown up in a society that tells you that individual efforts are what get you rewards, so working in a group is hard. Synergy is destroyed by separation, and western societies teach us to be separate. Most group assignments that I have done have gone something like this: Person A will complete section A, Person B will complete section B and Person C can complete section C, lets meet back on Monday to put it all together. We spoke about this a little in some of our debriefs, with Geoff saying that it’s obvious when groups have done this as compared to groups who have worked cohesively, or with synergy, on a task. I agree, and I think our facilitation group needed a little more synergy.

The graph below (taken from Diamond, 1987) looks at where different leadership styles fit into the idea of being task focused or people focused, and on how this relates to synergy. The 9/1 represents an autocratic taskmaster (probably what I represented in my group), the 1/9 is the ‘nice guy’, the 5/5 is the compromiser, the 1/1 is the ‘minimal effort guy’ and the 9/9 is the facilitator that I would like to be. This person is able to problem solve, inspire trust AND help people to do an excellent job. They are the master at combining task driven and people driven aims in order to operate with high synergy. But enough about me, I believe that we can take this model to look at groups of facilitators, such as the one I was involved with in Singapore. By combining the task driven and people driven aims of the different leaders, we could have operated much more cohesively. We could have been a 9/9 group, rather than a 5/5 group that wasn’t all that effective at achieving people or task driven agendas.

STEP 2 – PLAN FOR FLEXIBILITY, RATHER THAN BE FLEXIBLE IN YOUR PLAN

Turner (2001) maintains that sufficient planning is critical for any type of group. It is also mentioned that a crucial part of planning for any group is the development of a clear, concise and specific purpose, which needs to be re-visited constantly. In addition to this Reynolds, Chapman, Lingard, Manders and Trenchard-Smith (2000) state that plans must be flexible in order to accommodate changing conditions or needs of the group. It is further explained that a flexible plan does not mean inadequate planning but rather a flexible plan will be a detailed plan that has options for contingencies. We also spoke about this in a number of our debriefs as many groups mentioned that they found the need to be flexible, but that having a detailed plain allowed them to do this.

I believe that our group had a strong plan with a clear purpose that we re-visited during the day, and that we were able to be flexible. Our weakness though was in not putting this plan together sooner and in the putting together of this plan being the summation of separate parts, rather than a plan developed with cohesion and synergy.

References

Turner, H. (2001). Concepts for Effective Facilitation of Open Groups. Social Work with Groups, 34(3-4), 246-256.

Diamond. P. (1987). Synergy: Working Together To Make One Plus One Equal Four. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, 25(1), 73-79.

Reynolds, V., Chapman, M., Lingard, R., Manders, S. & Trenchard-Smith, J. (Eds.). (2000). Bushwalking and Ski Touring Leadership (3rd ed.). Australia: Bushwalking and Mountaincraft Training Advisory Board Inc.