Synergy involves creation of a new organizational reality – a bubble within which those involved share a purpose. As organization’s proprietor or top-level manager, your main function is to ensure everyone shares a strategic vision, focus or direction. It’s for this reason why you must demonstrate high levels of commitment and involvement in the process of synergy assimilation and creation of a new organizational reality.

But synergy isn’t a chance occurrence – it requires deliberate planning and execution, and takes time. Furthermore, you require to commit lots of time, effort and resources to ensure everything goes according to plan. As a topmost figure in your organization, it’s you who has the full grasp of its limitations and resource constraints.

You need to evaluate resource scarcity, type and availability after which you can conduct an in-depth analysis of what’s ailing your organization. This isn’t to say that you can’t interpret early tell-tale signs of problems in your organization. For example, employees’ feelings and their responsiveness to customer’s needs. That’s exactly what this article’s going to talk about, providing you with insights from an angle of interactions. Let’s dive deep!

The Questionnaire

This is a very important and powerful diagnostic tool, and is available at the Synergy Center. It can help you map out interactions in your organization, but to do that you must undergo training on how to use it. Luckily, the organization hosts a number of seminars and workshops where you can receive training. The book Organizational Synergy: A Practical Guide – Recalibrate Interactions to Achieve Peak Engagement, Productivity & Profit supplements your knowledge and increases your managerial skills.

It’s important to note, however, that, despite the questionnaire’s detailed structure and clear instructions, issues about how to complete it can arise. This is something that you should expect as you pass it around during a meeting or workshop. One good thing about it, though, is that it can help you to illustrate the different interactive forms. This illustration can help you to relate questionnaire responses to the team development process.

Alternatively, you can hand it out when conducting a one-on-one interview. And because this opportunity gives an interviewee maximum attention, you can address all issues concerning the questionnaire’s purpose and nature. This ensures that the individual internalizes without group’s assistance. Nevertheless, this approach misses the context of a dynamic group discussion, and so you may not be able to obtain some important information. It’s a common practice, especially among closed organizations, to administer the questionnaire privately, because the participants may not engage in free speech in a dynamic group scenario, such as a workshop.

When analyzing, processing or diagnosing the questionnaire responses, take note of who completed it, and what’s the individual’s reference. It’s also important to consider the impression that the responses portray. This is because people have different impressions (or perceptions) of interactive forms, but it’s important to take note of ones, which emerge most frequently. Every interactive form has an average point, and it’s possible to calculate it. Here’s how:

Equally important, take note of cases cited by the employees. These examples provide you with a real-time update on what’s ailing your organization at individual, unit or organization level. The Synergy Center prepares a specific questionnaire that’s tailored to your organization’s specific needs — not a one-size-fits-all. Usually, the focus of the questionnaire is a topic chosen by organization’s leadership. Topics may range from line and employee interactions to improved customer service. It’s less appropriate to ask for employee’s preference for topics.

The main aim of the questionnaire is to reduce destructive forms – such as sensations of invasion or obscurity – and to enhance quality forms, such as synergy. A perception index of less than 5 per cent is desirable. Most commonly, interdependence is the most predominant form in many organizations, but the questionnaire would ensure synergy becomes one of the most dominant interactive forms. The quality forms – synergy, interdependence and interfaced – should account for more than 70 per cent of all forms if you were to consider your organization as “healthy”.

Other Diagnostic Tools

These include:

• Appreciative inquiry – it stresses on the strengths of the organization.

All in all, a questionnaire enables you to know the condition or state of your organization on an “as is” basis. And this condition is as far as interactions go within your organization. Once you construct an overall picture of what’s going on in your organization, you can define what condition you target, or one that’s ideal for your organization. You can use this definition as a benchmark against the current condition in your organization. To construct this benchmark, characterize areas where your organization is “sick”, and topics you need to focus on.

Once you complete the diagnosis, examine the findings and prepare a work plan, but seek managerial approval before create it. Then, you can tailor the work plan to the organizational needs with the greatest precision. In your work plan, include significant gains for the work process, milestones, delegation of responsibility, and an evaluation of available resources.

So Finally…

A questionnaire that’s specifically tailored to your organization’s needs in terms of interactions is one of the most powerful tools you can have as a top-level manager or proprietor. It’s an important diagnostic tool that enables you to construct a big picture of what’s currently happening in your organization.