| ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD
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| Collaborative work has become all consuming. The time that most people spend on meetings, emails, messaging, and phone calls accounts for 85 percent or more of their workweeks, and since the COVID-19 pandemic began, collaboration demands have only increased. Collaboration—whether it is between individuals or among teams or business units—can take an organization from good to great, but when done without care, it can derail projects and exhaust the participants. This week, let’s explore ways to collaborate better, as well as some habits of collaboration that may undermine performance. |
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| “Why am I in this meeting?” We’ve all asked ourselves this question when we’ve felt that we had little or nothing to contribute to a meeting’s agenda. Diverse perspectives are indeed valuable, but you should resist the temptation to corral every available expert to staff your next project. Be selective when picking collaborators, looking for complementary skills and depth of knowledge that can be applied directly to the problem at hand. “This intentionality helps ensure that inefficient collaboration does not stymie innovation and productivity,” says McKinsey’s Stephanie Spangler. “Being intentional about when to collaborate and what projects you say ‘yes’ to also could help avoid the strain of collaboration overload.” To make the most of your collaborators’ expertise, provide immediate feedback on their contributions rather than waiting until the end of the project to debrief the team. |
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| That’s the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop warning us of the dangers of too much sunshine in his fable “The marriage of the sun.” In our own era, the dangers of too much collaboration are all too apparent. Virtual-interaction technology gives us the ability to connect constantly, but, ironically, the onslaught of meetings, emails, and texts often doesn’t lead to productive collaboration. To achieve high-quality, focused interactions, leaders can focus on three broad categories of collaboration: decision making, creative solutions and coordination, and information sharing. Getting these right will require corrective action, such as clarifying who makes decisions (ideally, just one person), empowering employees to come up with innovative solutions, and—you guessed it—reducing the number of meetings and their attendees. Treat meeting time as a precious commodity and take it as seriously as you would financial capital. |
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| If you suffer from collaboration overload, take heart: it is possible to collaborate effectively. So much more effectively, in fact, that you can claw back 18 to 24 percent of your time, says Rob Cross, Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, in this McKinsey Author Talks interview. But he warns that there isn’t a “single, seductive principle” to follow: “This is more of a brawl than a ballet.” That means setting norms around collaboration, whether it involves allocating time strategically, energizing and engaging people, or networking purposefully. The best collaborators are “seeding relationships and developing an understanding of how they could work together with others,” says Cross. “Then when the opportunity comes by, their response is much greater than those of people who don’t do this. So they’re able to mobilize resources that produce a bigger outcome.” |
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| SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION |
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There are many reasons collaborations fail, but a common one is that leaders neglect to set up the conditions needed to support collaboration, relying instead on conventional solutions to fix collaborations when they break down. Research by Babson College professor Rob Cross and coauthor Inga Carboni outlines six patterns of collaborative dysfunction that can harm performance. Examples include hub-and-spoke networks, where leaders micromanage or make all decisions on their own, and disenfranchised nodes, in which groups and team members are isolated from one another. And beware of overwhelmed nodes, in which excessive collaboration brings projects to a standstill.
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| — Edited by Rama Ramaswami, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Stamford office |
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