I spent a good portion of my childhood dragging around a bulky and cumbersome black case that held my baritone. What is a baritone you may be asking? Image the hybrid offspring of a trumpet and a tuba and you’re somewhere in the ballpark. I was a member of the school band from grade six through my high school graduation, and while I probably couldn’t define synergy during that period of my life, I think I can safely say knew what it felt like. We’re told by Moran, Abramson, and Moran (2014), that “synergy comes from the Greek word meaning working together”, and if there’s one thing that school band teaches you, it’s understanding what working together feel like. A school band (or choir or orchestra) tasks students with learning how a group of different people, each responsible for a different aspect of a collective work, join together to create a piece of music. Each student is responsible for a different “building component” of that music, from the percussion section to the brass section, each band member is tasked with performing an action in sync with a few dozen other members, each with differing backgrounds and skill levels.
Getting all of these pieces to work together is a time consuming process (especially with young students who may have a short attention span), and I don’t think we praise school band leaders and conductors enough for the burdensome work they do. However, when the pieces of this “musical pie” do come together, it’s a wonderful thing, and as a band member I can profess that it is a gratifying and enlightening experience to witness. Author and musician Erica Sipes eloquently sums up the experience in her music blog Beyond the Notes (2010), when writing about playing with a church choir, saying “it was truly a moment of synergy; a moment when the notes coming from the piano and the voices of the church community mixed together to produce an energy in the air much more powerful than either musical instrument alone could ever have created”. Like sports teams, bands have a way of clicking together after going through the process of learning about each other and becoming familiar with the other band members.
This idea of bands finding and experiencing synergy easily dovetails into the desire of global teams and leaders finding a way to work together in a conducive and harmonious manner. Moran, Abramson, and Moran (2014), explain that synergy on a global team “means the collective contribution of the team far exceeds the adding up of the individual contribution of each team member”. Like a student band, a global team is comprised of individuals from different backgrounds who need to become comfortable in working together in order to accomplish the goals their group sets out to achieve. Mike Samson of crowdspring.com (2011), writes that “In a complex piece of music (as in a complex venture) small components add up to a greater whole. In music it is the individual notes and the individual players”. He goes on to make the connection that, “In entrepreneurism it is the individual components of a business as well as the individual people involved. Great entrepreneurs recognize that their venture, like a great symphony, should be greater than the sum of its parts”. To be successful in either a band or on a global team, finding synergy should be a top priority, as many times, the cost of groups not being able to work together means failure.
References
Moran, R., Abramson, N., and Moran, S. (2014). Managing cultural differences. (9th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Sipes, E. (2010). Musical synergy that will take your breath away. Beyond the Notes. Retrieved on February 18, 2017 from http://ericaannsipes.blogspot.com/2010/06/musical-synergy-that-will-take-your.html
Samson, M. (2011). 10 things entrepreneurs can learn from musicians. crowdspring.com. Retrieved on February 18, 2017 from https://blog.crowdspring.com/2011/03/10-things-that-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-musicians/
You made such a good point here. I too was in the band; I played the trumpet. There were so many days when we would be out of sync because someone forgot to practice or didn’t stay on beat too.
I like this way of looking at a team in a workplace too and it’s given me a new way of looking at the individuals that compose them. Sometimes we are all just a group of kids with braces trying not to make our clarinet squeak! 😎 It really speaks to the element of practice too because the more we work together the more in sync we can become.
Lastly, your post made me think about a jazz concert that I went to a while back in Dallas, Texas. The musicians were exceptional and they worked off one another with perfect synergy. It just felt like each one trusted the other to play his instrument to the best of his ability and they established the communication we read about a few weeks ago. The relationship they had with each other highlighted their individuality, as well as, their collective whole.
Great post!