INTRODUCTION
Get Smarter about Collaboration
Right now, the stakes for effective collaboration could not be higher. A fly-on-the-wall visit to a Bay Area fintech company we’ll call ModFin provides a typical business example.
Oren Weiss runs a key division at ModFin, and he knows that his team and the larger company are in trouble. For the past few years, competitors have been faster to market with new products, and ModFin has lost several important clients. Meanwhile, the challenges faced by the entire fintech sector have been mounting steadily—for example, meeting ever-greater demands for complex data and analytics, enhancing the user experience through personalized services, and complying with regulations. Weiss knows that only companies that address these challenges will survive.
ModFin has hardly been coasting. Like many of its competitors, it took advantage of remote working to hire new developers and salespeople in Edinburgh, Boston, Austin, Mumbai, and Miami—all while growing in double digits.
But Weiss is pretty sure it’s not all rosy. To him, it feels like ModFin’s culture, formerly a strong suit, is declining. His team members seem to have lost the sense of pride, ownership, and excitement they felt in the fintech’s startup days.
Weiss decides that broad-based collaboration on a big, meaningful project might help revive that sense of purpose. Toward that end, he pulls together a cross-functional, company-wide team to rethink their product road map: What new functionalities should they develop, and how can they get there faster?
Using a combination of in-person meetings and remote teaming platforms, the group spends two days brainstorming ideas. While the sessions seem reasonably productive, several things give him pause:
- Most in-person attendees are members of Weiss’s long-standing core team, who have worked together for years. Left to their own devices, they are likely to regroup on their own after the sessions to decide what’s really going to happen.
- Meanwhile, the people participating through the company’s video platform are mostly new to ModFin, aren’t familiar with other participants’ roles, and struggle to contribute to the sessions.
- A product manager from another division says, “OK, but I don’t really see how my products fit in.”
- Several of his senior engineers roll their eyes whenever one of the younger digital marketing managers puts an idea on the table.
- One of the new hot-shot developers seems to be tuning out during much of the conversation. Over lunch, Weiss asks her what’s going on. “Sorry,” the developer replies. “But this is the seventh project I’ve been asked to work on this month. I’m tapped out.”
Overall, Weiss’s instincts are on target. ModFin does indeed have problems, external and internal, and fixing those problems will require new kinds of input. And this is the same conclusion that many savvy business leaders today are reaching: success going forward will absolutely demand multifaceted inputs, necessitating more and better collaboration both within their organizations and with outside partners.
And by the way, this same challenge faces all kinds of complex organizations. Yes, for-profits need to find ways to get ahead of their business challenges, to serve their customers better, or to more consistently engage in more profitable work. At the same time, though, nonprofits also want to carry out their missions more effectively.
So collaboration has become a hot topic. Across many sectors and industries, organizations are realizing that they have to get better at collaboration, and many are plunging in. But it’s easy to get implementation wrong and fall into what might be called “collaboration traps.”
For example, some leaders treat collaboration as a magic cure-all, as if all they need to do is form a team and their challenges will go away. Others consider collaboration an “initiative” that can be “implemented” and then left to fend for itself. Some organizations focus on collaboration as a goal in and of itself. In those cases, collaboration becomes an explicit “organizational value.” This sounds good, but in practice, it often means that people aren’t shown how specific collaborative behaviors will help realize the company’s strategic goals. Some managers wind up throwing teams at every problem, which commits valuable employees to too many different projects and thus stretches good people too thin. Some leaders instruct people to collaborate on X, Y, or Z without equipping them with the skills or technology to do it well. Some go the exact opposite route, showering people with teamworking technologies on the assumption that getting people “wired up right” will lead naturally to great outcomes. Some companies develop strong implementation plans but backtrack in the face of a crisis or retrench when they don’t get the quick payback they are hoping for. Many leaders fail to realize how badly managed collaboration can undermine their already complicated diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
This is a sobering list of collaborative traps, myths, and missteps, and the danger is real. But what about the upside? What about smart collaboration? Done right, collaboration works, and it amply rewards those organizations that embrace it. In the half-decade since the publication of Smart Collaboration, we have seen many organizations deeply transformed through their embrace of the concepts we laid out in that book. They have accelerated innovation, improved service, and enhanced employee engagement. In the process, they also generated higher revenues and profits, gained market share, and accelerated growth. Nonprofits have experienced similar gratifying results from effective collaboration, advancing their strategies in new and compelling ways.
This past half-decade has given us the opportunity to research how these diverse organizations have rolled out their collaboration initiatives, and to assess their results. Based on solid implementations of collaboration in an ever-broader range of sectors, we’ve continued to refine our understanding of its basic tenets. Organizations ranging from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to Bridgewater Associates to PwC to the US CyberSpace Solarium Commission have worked with us, pushed our thinking, and helped us make real contributions to the field.1 Through this iterative process, our definition of smart collaboration has gotten broader and deeper.
Now it’s time to take these ideas to the next level. We need to consolidate learnings about best practices and provide a road map for execution. Looking forward, it’s the right juncture to help new people, teams, and companies get into smarter collaboration—and thereby reap the benefits of a uniquely powerful approach to organizing, deploying, and retaining some of their most important talent. That’s what this book is about.
The Whys, Whos, and Hows of Smarter Collaboration
Smart Collaboration focused primarily on the why. It stressed that the benefits of cross-functional collaboration are real and can be measured: outcomes like revenues, profits, customer loyalty, diversity, and employee attraction, retention, and engagement. In other words, smart collaboration is far from a “soft” topic or a “nice to have.” Instead, it’s at the very heart of how savvy organizations operate today.
Over the past half-decade, we’ve conducted more than four hundred in-depth interviews with senior corporate leaders. Based in part on that input, we’ve launched collaboration pilot projects with some of the world’s leading companies, applying the concepts of smarter collaboration to address real-world obstacles and drive successes.
Building on these foundations, Smarter Collaboration continues to make the why case—now expanded to reflect our work in such diverse industries as financial services, health care, biotech and pharma, consumer products, automotive, technology, telecoms and media, energy, government, and higher education. But Smarter Collaboration goes much further, with a new emphasis on the who and how.
For example, when it comes to who, we now recommend a focus on who thinks differently from me, as well as who knows something different from me. In the past half-decade, diversity, equity, and inclusion issues have come to the fore in a wide range of organizational settings. Diversity means an appropriate mix of function-related talents that must contribute to solving the problem at hand, such as marketing, product, finance, and technology. But it also means a purposeful mix of educational, geographic, and economic backgrounds, as well as genders and ethnicities, especially if the problem extends beyond the purely technical.
Reflecting another new dimension of who, we also explore third-party collaboration, which has become significantly more important since the publication of the previous book. Just as professionals must increasingly specialize in their domain to develop deep expertise, so too must organizations focus their talent and resources to differentiate themselves from the competition. This means they need to collaborate with experts outside their own boundaries.
By design, this book asks and answers practical questions. What are the barriers to smart collaboration? How are they overcome? And those answers, again, come directly from the front lines. For example, we worked with one very large company for more than three years across forty-five countries, starting from scratch and continuing through the codevelopment, testing, and rolling out of tailored solutions around the world. These real-world collaborators consistently pushed us to focus on implementation: why, who, and how.
Today, we continue to work with a growing list of complex institutions to refine these practical solutions. Collectively, these experiences help anchor our narrative in up-to-the-minute organizational realities. For example, how do corporations break down internal silos to generate innovative solutions to customers’ most complex problems and thereby drive profitable growth? How do companies use technology, data, and analytics to facilitate, analyze, and continually improve collaboration—especially given the realities of hybrid working? How do organizations work across government, corporate, and nongovernmental organization boundaries to address some of society’s biggest challenges like climate change? The rich examples in this book will show vividly how smart collaboration goes well beyond classic teaming.
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SMARTER COLLABORATION
Throughout this book, we’ll use three lenses to explore smarter collaboration:
The WHY
- Hyperintentional to tackle truly complex issues
- Aimed at achieving breakthrough insights, innovation, and transformational change
- Focused on a sense of purpose
The WHO
- The right number of team members
- Expanding beyond the boundaries of the “usual suspects”
- Diverse in expertise, perspectives, and other aspects
The HOW
- Inclusive: not just having people on the team, but truly engaging them
- Tech- and tool-based to facilitate communication, support hybrid working, analyze performance, and increase efficiency
- Measured: both collaboration and the related outcomes
- Developmental: creating real-time learning environments to increase collaborative capabilities
The Road Map
Smarter Collaboration consists of four parts. Part 1, The Case for Smarter Collaboration, lays out the competitive arguments in favor of collaboration (Chapter 1: The Business Case) and moves on to the talent case—that is, why embracing smart collaboration helps companies recruit, engage, and retain great people (Chapter 2: The Talent Case).
Part 2, Assessing Your Collaborative Starting Point, presents a set of methodologies for judging the strength of your collaborative foundations. The organizational diagnostic, Chapter 3 (Enterprise-Wide Diagnostic), presents a powerful approach to assess your company’s collaborative opportunities and prioritize actions to deliver a return on your efforts. We have also developed a toolkit, available through Harvard Business Review Press, with practical templates, instructions, and approaches for applying the concepts in your organization.2 Chapter 4 (Individual and Team Diagnostic) presents a new way of looking at the behaviors underlying smarter collaboration, so that every person can understand how to use their natural way of operating as a strength to contribute to collaborative teams.
Part 3, How-To’s and Use Cases for Smarter Collaboration, provides a holistic approach to the who and how of collaboration.
Starting with building a collaborative talent pool, Chapter 5 (Collaborating to Succeed at Hiring and M&A) shows how collaboration helps solve a major problem that has stumped organizations for decades: making sure that the people you bring aboard—whether through recruitment or acquisition—actually stick around, become profitable, and thrive in the long run.
No matter how you grow your employee base, how do you motivate people to engage in collaboration rather than individualistic endeavors? Chapter 6 (Paying People to Collaborate?) presents a comprehensive three-part system that combines aspirational goals and performance metrics, discussions aimed at performance improvement and development, and a revamped annual compensation review.
Even the most motivated performers need strategically aligned structures to help them take full advantage of their collaborative efforts. In Chapter 7 (Collaborating through a Sector Lens), we explore how a company can adopt sector-oriented structures that encourage people across the organization to integrate their unique views and generate more holistic solutions that are tailored to a customer’s industry. Since all of those transformative efforts require significant ongoing vigilance and leadership, Chapter 8 (Leading and Sustaining a Collaborative Transformation) tackles the challenge of supporting collaborative efforts over time. It lays out a practical approach to embed collaboration so that it takes root and thrives long term.
This sets the stage for the final chapter in this part (Chapter 9: Collaborating with Outside Partners). Truly smarter collaboration involves recognizing the limits of your own organization and then finding external partners with complementary expertise. We show how to cultivate a collaborative ecosystem well beyond your own borders.
The other side of “how” is “how not to.” Troubleshooting Collaboration Challenges is the fourth of our four parts. Chapter 10 (Watch Out: The Illusion of Inclusion) is purposefully provocative. We argue that mismanaged collaboration, especially when it is used to provide a veneer of diversity, can actually marginalize certain workers. Without strategic oversight and measurement, collaboration can create the appearance of diversity without real inclusion.
Mismanaged collaboration creates pitfalls beyond inclusion. In times of crisis, the strain on individuals and teams can destroy trust and weaken collaboration. Chapter 11 (Watch Out: Pressure Undermines Collaboration) shows how to sustain a collaborative culture during crises, which can help separate your organization from the pack and set you up for a strong postcrisis rebound.
Chapter 12 (Watch Out: The Overcommitted Organization) explores the roots and perils of asking people to take on too much in the name of collaboration. For example, some companies throw teams nonstrategically at every problem, on the assumption that if some collaboration is good, more must be better. But spreading resources too thin and overusing teams for routine work leads to bottlenecks and burnout. We describe steps that can be taken on three levels—senior leader, teams, and individuals—both to head off overcommitment and to manage it when it arises.
Our concluding chapter, Chapter 13 (The Next Frontiers of Smarter Collaboration), foreshadows the exciting future of smarter collaboration, presenting overarching principles that we derive from the preceding chapters.
This leads us to one last introductory thought: smarter collaboration should be at the top of every senior leader’s agenda, because it is essential for addressing the highest-value challenges and opportunities in today’s complex, data-rich, war-for-talent setting.
At the end of the day, collaborative success hinges on leadership focus and strategic execution. We hope that Smarter Collaboration helps you get there.