The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Why do so many teams fail to perform - achieving compromise at best and gridlock at worst? And what does it take to end this gridlock? Wall Street Journal bestselling author and speaker Les McKeown shows how to take any team from gridlock to world class success.
In this book, McKeown argues that every successful team includes a critical player, the Synergist, who can take the three existing types - The bold dreamers (Visionaries), the pragmatic realists (Operators), and the systems designers (Processors) - and knit them together into a dynamic, well-rounded team. Most importantly, according to McKeown, the Synergist is a role that anyone can learn.
While most attempts at teamwork improvement deal only with the symptoms of group dysfunction such as distrust, poor communication, and fear of change, McKeown address the root cause: the innately unstable Visionary-Operator-Processor triangle. Because each of the three styles' motivations, views, and goals are incompatible, without a Synergist every team will eventually implode, stall, or underperform. Only the Synergist can put aside their own agenda and interpret the language of difficult personalities, capture the best from each person, and put the good of the enterprise ahead of their own ego.
McKeown- who has used techniques presented here in his consulting with Harvard University, American Express Financial Services, the US Army, Pella Corporation, Microsoft, United Technologies Corporation, and more- shows how any individual can fill this critical role, whether or not they're the formal leader of the group.
With thought-provoking self-assessments and an extensive Synergist Toolkit, he teaches how anyone can learn to be an effective Synergist by recognizing the vital signs of ineffective teamwork and making the right interventions at these pivotal moments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
We've all worked on teams with smart, hard-working people who, oddly enough, were never able to coalesce and work together seamlessly. Consultant McKeown thinks he has the answer: the addition of the "Synergist," the key role that exists in every successful group to tie the three other natural roles to which all of us default when we are in a group or team situation (visionary, processor, and operator). The Visionary-Operator-Processor triangle is unstable and requires a Synergist to help the group by transcending personal agendas and releasing the group's cohesion and flow. Using case studies, McKeown discusses each role's strengths and weaknesses, and provides tools for working with or for each personality type, explaining how a Synergist may help. His analysis of the choreography of group dynamics is insightful and easy to grasp, and though geared toward business teams, is equally applicable to any group of people working together to achieve any common goal. A thoughtful and incisive strategy for effective teamwork.