The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Habit 6: Synergize

Continuing our series on the Seven Habits.

• Habit One: Be Proactive
• Habit Two: Begin With the End in Mind
• Habit Three: Put First Things First
• Habit Four: Think Win-Win
• Habit Five: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Synergy has become one of those corporate wankspeak buzzwords that makes many people’s skin crawl. The sort of thing that you’d expect to come from annoying management consultants that charge big corporations staggering amounts of money to put together presentations full of blathering nonsense that just waste everyone’s time, and then are immediately forgotten because they contain zero meaningful content.

But remember that in 1989 when Seven Habits was released, Synergy wasn’t such a cliche. It only became a cliche because so many people recognized the value of Covey’s ideas. (And then decided to throw the terminology around without any pragmatic actionable advice behind it.)

Habit 6 is about recognizing the strengths of other people, and understanding that they may line up with your weaknesses. Other people know things you don’t. Other people understand things you don’t. Other people have abilities you don’t. 

It is important to recognize that. An effective person doesn’t try to do everything on their own or pretend they know everything by themselves. They work with others who know more things and have greater abilities in certain areas, so that they can combine strengths.

“The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.”

This isn’t just about knowledge and abilities though. It’s also about outlook.

 “Valuing the differences is the essence of synergy – the mental, the emotional, the psychological differences between people. And the key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.”

And this extends to opinion. You need to be open minded, talk to people with different beliefs, and genuinely consider what they’re saying.

Covey references the optical illusion of the picture that can either look like an old woman or a young lady depending on how you view it. 

“If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. It’s not going to do me any good at all to communicate with someone else who sees only the old woman also. I don’t want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.”

How do you best take advantage of Synergy? You have to be open and genuine with people. By doing so, it will encourage them to open up to you in return. And by sharing your true beliefs, you’ll be able to come up with new ideas and build something together that’s greater than either of you could have done on your own.

“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.”

I’m in full agreement with this. And I think this is one of the habits that trips people up the most. Combining knowledge and abilities is the easy part, and fairly common. It’s the synergy when it comes to outlook and opinion that’s hard.

Let’s start with opinion. When two people with different opinions communicate, they should be focused on learning from each other. But instead, they usually each try to prove their own opinion is the correct one. This only results in frustration and resentment.

Alice tells Bob all the reasons she thinks argle-bargles are the best thing ever. Since Alice is already convinced that she’s right, she thinks the reasons she’s giving are clear, compelling, and logical, and obviously any decent and intelligent person should agree with her. Meanwhile Bob, who thinks argle-bargles are terrible, finds Alice’s arguments ill-informed and downright insulting. He lays out his reasoning as to why only a moral monster with the brains of a three-year-old could think argle-bargles are a good thing. He thinks his arguments are convincing, but Alice sees them as a direct attack on her. 

So they just walk away hating each other, and with less of an understanding of the issue than when they started. They each believe that the only reason someone is on the other side is because they’re an awful person.

Whereas if they had gone into the discussion with more of a synergistic mindset, they could have treated each other with respect and tried to learn from one another. Then they could have both come out of the conversation with a better understanding of the pros and cons of argle-bargles.

If this is a political argument, there aren’t huge consequences for a single individual having a lack of understanding of the issue. But there most definitely are consequences if this lack of understanding extends to them hating, or even disrespecting, the people who hold the opposing viewpoint. And there are significant consequences if this an opinion outside the context of politics, where it impacts the decisions they make in their life, among their family, friends, and work.

Outlook is even harder to synergize with. There’s a lot of truth to Covey’s point that people see the world not as it is, but as they are. The optimist, the pessimist, the peacemaker, the aggressive taskmaster, the high-strung and the chill, they all see the world very differently. The truth of the world is probably somewhere in between their different perceptions. They all bring something to the table, and effective synergy means mixing their viewpoints to capitalize on their different strengths while learning from each other. But they can’t do that if each is intent on holding on to their outlook as the “correct” one.

So I think that it’s very worthwhile to keep this synergistic viewpoint in mind, and look for ways to learn from and harness the strengths of others – especially from people who have very different opinions and outlooks than you.