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THE 9/9 STYLE: SYNERGY

I've said that the major difference between the 5/5 Compromise style and a true Synergy style is one of attitude. True.  But there are also very specific, practical techniques you can, and should, employ as a team manager to raise the likelihood that your people will come out of a given encounter feeling that they've contributed to a satisfactory outcome rather than that they've been cheated.

First, you can identify the personal interests behind individual people's positions. That means both interests that relate to the job and those that extend beyond it. If Harry is adamantly opposed to the adoption of a new expense account protocol, you'll want to find out why. Maybe he's been fudging his vouchers for the past two years, and he doesn't want to have to justify his expenditures: that would be a personal interest that would clearly affect his judgment on the issue in question. Or maybe his department has been hassled by Finance for the past three quarters about expenses that are clearly justified, and he's tired of defending his turf when he knows he's right. That would be a job-related interest that you should know about before you - or the group - make any final disposition on the expense account matter.

Obviously, investigating people's personal interests in a given proposition means that you're going to have to involve yourself - just as you ask your people to involve themselves - in all the decisions being considered. This doesn't mean you've got to pry into people's personal lives. It does mean you should be aware - both as a manager and as a member of a team - of what extraneous, and internal, considerations are affecting your people's decisions.

You don't know what those factors are? Of course not. Who does before he asks? The point I'm getting at here is that managing conflict, just like managing anything else associated with human beings, means being sensitive to all the emotional issues that may be impacting the way people are reacting. Not just the business issues like "how long the line has been down" and "the increase in competition in Sector 4." You've got to pay attention as well to why Rachel Warren always seems a little down on Tuesdays - does she have a custody hearing Monday nights? You've got to be aware of why Will Roberts never has anything good to say about sales training programs - is it because he had a disastrous experience with a training program that nearly cost him his job?

You get my point. People are people. They're not simply their job descriptions. If you want to motivate them to better work, you've got to find out what makes them tick.
One of the ways to do this that I've already talked about is to ask them Empathy questions. In Chapter 6, on Reflective Listening, I talked about these kinds of questions, where you at the same time elicit further information from a person and reinforce what he or she has already said. This is particularly important when you're face to face with a person - it doesn't matter whether the person is your peer, your subordinate, or your boss - who clearly disagrees with what you're saying. In this kind of situation, asking an Empathy question is one of the best methods I know to move a potential 1/9, 9/1, or 5/5 scenario to the healthier atmosphere of 9/9.

Another way is to ask Open-Ended questions designed to find out the speaker's reasons for feeling the way he or she does. I don't mean just emotional reasons here; people are going to be reluctant to give you them anyway. I mean objective, business-related reasons - the kind of reasons any manager, and for that matter any fellow employee - always has a perfect right to ask, but that are seldom asked because it's easier to simply say, "Nonsense. That idea will never work."

I've been saying throughout this book that Involvement is an essential, that asking for everyone's opinions is not a luxury but a necessity, that every manager needs variant and even conflicting opinions because it helps him or her make more creative decisions. If any of that makes any sense, it's obvious that you have to keep asking why people support a given position even after you've decided it's "nonsense." If you don't do that, the best you can come up with is Compromise. Much more likely, you'll end up in mutual recrimination, hostility, misunderstanding, and the most noncreative of solutions.

A third way of transforming Compromise into Synergy is to focus on generating as many alternative solutions as you can in every team meeting where conflict arises. You'll recognize this as the Brainstorming technique that I described in the previous chapter. That technique has a value that transcends its importance as an aid to Creative Problem Solving. Since Compromise is at best a trade-off between two or more desirable alternatives, it stands to reason that your chances of reaching more than mere trade-off solutions is going to increase if we multiply the possible options. If I'm pushing for the three-month production schedule extension and you're committed to the one-month schedule, the best we may be able to come up with is a mutually unsatisfying two-month Compromise. But if we open out the discussion to everybody else involved in production, who knows what we might come up with? We might find somebody to show us a way that we can get the same productive capacity that I want with a one-month extension. Or somebody who introduces a marketing projection that makes the three-month design irrelevant. You don't know until you try. And the only way to try is to commit yourself, as a team, to "whatever the best choice might be" before you find out what it is.

Commitment to that kind of optimum solution, my company has found, tracks really well with the Involvement and teamwork models that I've been talking about in this book. And it opens out the possibility that what you all come up with together is going to be more satisfying than a 5/5 solution.

A final note on moving from a Compromise solution to a fuller Synergy result. I know that working toward the "best" solution when a workable Compromise is in sight can be a trying and frustrating process. It takes a hell of a lot more time than "settling." And it's psychologically risky. Working toward Synergy drains you of energy as well as time. It means you have to believe even when you don't believe. It means you have to have faith in the eventual motivational energies of your team even when you don't feel up for the game yourself. Finally, it means you've got to know that, in the long run, you and your people can accomplish more than you can, or they can, all alone.

This is the land of the free and the home of the brave and the residence of the rugged individual. So it's not going to be easy. But it can be done. And when it is done, it creates solutions that are not only better formed, better imagined, better created, than other solutions; it creates solutions that everybody can own. And ownership is essential. If you want the decisions you reach to be ongoing, continually productive decisions, you've got to involve everybody in their making. You can do that only half way (only 5/5) in a Compromise style. If you want everybody to continue producing, continue introducing input, continue creating team solutions, you've got to give them more than a 5. You've got to give them the same 9 that you would want for yourself. You do that by generating Synergy.

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