I am fortunate in this position as Ombuds for many reasons, not the least of which is that I am able to witness, first-hand, people coming together to try to address something that they consider to be worthy of fixing. I see it with faculty, staff and students alike. Often when they come to me as a group, they explain that they have discussed the issue among themselves and realized that they – collectively – could do more in addressing and hopefully remedying it than they could individually. This is not to say that people cannot tackle things individually – in fact most things are done that way – it’s just that sometimes there is both strength and extra momentum with a like-minded group. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the saying goes.
In Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the habits is Synergize, Together is Better. The author states that improving our ability to be an effective ‘part of the whole’ can lead to up to 50 times improvement in productivity. Synergy allows us to discover together things that we are less likely to discover alone. This works best if we respectfully and mutually listen to each other’s ideas and incorporate everyone’s input. This is the opposite of having one person telling everyone else what to do. The phrase “if you want to go far go together” is yet another saying that is appropriate here. A group that is aligned with the same values and goals can achieve great things together.
A number of newspaper articles have recently reported that college students are afraid to speak up for fear that their peers will disagree with them. Let’s take this topic and apply it here theoretically: a group of seniors (emboldened because they are soon graduating) talk with each other about the issue of feeling silenced by others because of the frequency with which some people report things to the world on social media by calling people “out.” They wish this practice would end and want to do something about it. The more they talk about it, the more they agree that it’s a huge problem, it interferes with the ‘free exchange of ideas’ that they expected at college, and they want to encourage an atmosphere where people feel safe expressing doubts, concerns, thoughts, etc. about a wide variety of issues. They tell more and more friends about these ideas and soon they have a group that wants to effect meaningful change. They decide that they want a day on campus devoted to it and they want to call it “Call In, Not Out.” They have a campus newspaper article written about it, talk to their professors and residence hall leaders, and plan a day for this big event. They end up having the event with wonderful, diverse speakers, and they are thrilled that they – collectively – were able to achieve this goal that they had previously only dreamed about. If it had only been one person trying to make it happen, it would have been far less likely to have happened.
By having the group of individuals come together about this common purpose, they were able to have a broad range of ideas and a huge band of knowledge and specific skills merge in order to tackle this problem. They may have felt that it was too risky to undertake as individuals. They ended up with an amazing mix of ideas which resulted in better solutions and reaching a wider audience. Indeed, there is strength in numbers.
