Seven habits of highly effective people - Stephen R. Covey [121]
It's like administrators who set up new rules and regulations based on the abuses of a few people inside an organization, thus limiting the freedom and creative possibilities for many --or business partners who imagine the worst scenarios possible and write them up in legal language, killing the whole spirit of creativity, enterprise, and synergistic possibility. As I think back on many consulting and executive education experiences, I can say that the highlights were almost always synergistic. There was usually an early moment that required considerable courage, perhaps in becoming extremely authentic, in confronting some inside truth about the individual or the organization or the family which really needed to be said, but took a combination of considerable courage and genuine love to say it. Then others became more authentic, open, and honest, and the synergistic communication process began. It usually became more and more creative, and ended up in insights and plans that no one had anticipated initially. As Carl Rogers taught, "That which is most personal is most general." The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves. That expression in turn feeds back on the other person's spirit, and genuine creative empathy takes place, producing new insights and learnings and a sense of excitement and adventure that keeps the process going.
People then begin to interact with each other almost in half sentences, sometimes incoherently, but they get each other's meanings very rapidly. Then whole new worlds of insights, new perspectives, new paradigms that insure options, new alternatives are opened up and thought about. Though occasionally these new ideas are left up in the air, they usually come to some kind of closure that is
practical and useful.
Synergy in Business
I enjoyed one particularly meaningful synergistic experience as I worked with my associates to create the corporate mission statement for our business. Almost all members of the company went high up into the mountains where, surrounded by the magnificence of nature, we began with a first draft of what some of us considered to be an excellent mission statement. At first the communication was respectful, careful and predictable. But as we began to talk about the various alternatives, possibilities, and opportunities ahead, people became very open and authentic and simply started to think out loud. The mission statement agenda gave way to a collective free association, a spontaneous piggybacking of ideas. People were genuinely empathic as well as courageous, and we moved from mutual respect and understanding to creative synergistic communication.
Everyone could sense it. It was exciting. As it matured, we returned to the task of putting the evolved collective vision into words, each of which contains specific and committed-to meaning for each participant.
The resulting corporate mission statement reads:
Our Mission is to empower people and organizations to significantly increase their performance capability in order to achieve worthwhile purposes through understanding and living Principle-Centered Leadership.
The synergistic process that led to the creation of our mission statement engraved it in all the hearts and minds of everyone there, and it has served us well as a frame of reference of what we are about, as well as what we are not about.
Another high-level synergy experience took place when I accepted an invitation to serve as the