Experiencing synergy through trust

I used to write frequently about about synergy after reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Stephen Covey. This was back in seventh grade, when I thought I grasped the power of working together with other people. My work with my club, Andover Business Club, this week has changed my understanding of the breadth and scope of this concept which I used to throw around so carelessly.  

I’m the President of Business Club on campus, and something we’ve been trying to start this year, is an on-campus delivery service of simple school supplies, toiletries, and snacks for boarders in hopes of saving people time and money. We call this service BluBoxes. I have been working closely with our club advisor and the deans on campus throughout this past month of school, but as we got the club rolling I realized I was doing everything by myself. I found myself communicating with the deans, the CFO, our club advisor, running club rally, in addition to organizing and planning out our weekly club meetings. It felt I was doing everything, and at club meetings, none of my other board members seemed to know how to help me. I remember telling them that the act of us sharing our ideas was good synergy. That was exactly the opposite of synergy, a concept I so strongly believed I understood as a middle schooler.  

I talked to one of the other board members of the club about feeling like I was doing everything for the club, from operations to planning to communications to execution. He responded very honestly, “Ava, that’s because you are.” That response took me by surprise. “You need to delegate jobs. It’ll be much faster and you won’t feel like you’re doing everything.” I hadn’t realized how accurate his statement was, until I reflected on why I felt the need to do everything. 

I think a major factor that drove me to try to do everything was the fact that I only trusted my own work. For me that hit me hard when the speed of the approval  process began to quicken, and when I realized how much closer we are to our first orders than I had previously believed. That was last week. It was when I realized I could no longer handle everything, and I decided to try “delegating”. 

Delegating seemed weird to me. I was no longer doing everything, I was overseeing everything that was done. That was a little bit scary at first, since I could no longer guarantee whether it would actually be done or not. I sent two people to prepare next weeks club meeting, one person to make a slideshow for it, two people to get an account with the school started for BluBoxes, two people to create an excel sheet with price comparisons for the various products we planned on selling, and for a few people to collectively manage the social media account.  I assigned this work on Tuesday evening, and when I checked in on the group chat, everything had already been completely. I walked into Saturday with money in a bank account, with a rolling Instagram account, a plan for the club meeting next week, and a slideshow to go with it, none of which I had explicitly done myself.  I still can’t quite fathom why in the past I only trusted myself to do tasks. I realize how selfish it was of me, and how inefficient it was for the club. I realize that this past week, we collectively made more progress than I’ve made in the past month by myself. This team work was very incredible.

More importantly, I’ve learned that the people who applied for board positions last year are on the board because they want to be there, and because they want to do this work for BluBoxes and Business Club. I’ve learned to trust them, and finally after four years of thinking I knew what it truly entailed, I’ve demonstrated synergy and experienced the power of this word that I used to throw around unknowingly.