A team with talent can be good, but they must work together to be great. If you have a group of talented individuals working as lone operators, their ceiling is capped. But if you take that same group of individuals and have them working together towards a shared goal with people they respect, their ceiling is raised considerably. This is the idea of synergy and it goes back thousands of years. Synergy occurs when two or more individuals work together/interact to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate efforts.
This is why you can’t have silos (at home or at the workplace), where team members either aren’t able or willing to work together. If they are separated, working independently of everyone else, then the ceiling of the individuals’ contributions will be limited and the team’s growth will be hindered. This not only will affect how far the team can go for the short term (the next quarter or even year), but it can affect it in the long run as well. Company culture will slowly erode as relationships become nothing more than a brief hello or goodbye when passing each other in the office. The people who you once knew and cared for become just a co-worker with whom you have minimal interaction. You don’t care about them and they don’t care about you, not because you don’t have the capacity to care, but you don’t have the opportunity.
I love being part of a team. That’s why I enjoy team sports. And sports is the perfect way to show that individual talent with no team chemistry does not beat out a great team of lesser talent. The best teams work together to be the best that they can be. How can you start to apply the principle of synergy in your life?