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Collaborating Better Across Silos
Harvard Law School lecturer Heidi K. Gardner discusses how firms gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. But it’s often difficult,...
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Harvard Law School lecturer Heidi K. Gardner discusses how firms gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. But it’s often difficult, expensive, and messy. The former McKinsey consultant is the author of the new book, Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. I have to confess that when I was a student, I always hated group collaborative projects. Usually one person got saddled with all of the work. Usually I felt like this was me. And if we somehow did manage to spread out the work evenly, we’d end up with a final project that just often seem low quality, disorganized, full of holes. And if we wanted to avoid that, we had to invest so much more time in it that seemed like it would have taken to just do the work on our own. In short, working in groups just seemed to create more work.
And I think as grown ups, we often tend to fall into the same dynamics. We think it will just be faster and easier and maybe even better to do the work ourselves. We think we don’t have time to collaborate or that the payoff won’t be worth the effort.
With me today to convince that’s how shortsighted we are, and help us understand how to collaborate better, is Heidi Gardner. She’s on the faculty of Harvard Law School, previously was a Professor at Harvard Business School. And her new book is Smart Collaboration. Heidi, thank you so much for talking with us today.
HEIDI GARDNER: My pleasure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So first, let’s talk about why this is so important to get right and how we often get it wrong. Does collaboration most of the time actually pay off?
HEIDI GARDNER: It depends.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: OK. Fair.
HEIDI GARDNER: Collaboration pays out when it’s what I call smart collaboration. And that means that people have to be really choosy about when they team up. And so sometimes we do what you talked about, we either get assigned a team or we throw a team at a problem in order to evade responsibility, or we just think it’s somehow the right thing to do. But we actually need to be smart about the choices we make. When does a situation warrant a team?
And what we find is that situations that are complex– they often span disciplines. They require different kinds of specialists to work together– and that’s exactly when collaboration is the right answer. So the way I think about collaboration is it’s the integration of specialized expertise to solve problems that no expert, no matter how smart or hard working, could solve alone.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What are some of the common pitfalls that we have? Particularly in cases when you have a lot of experts trying to work together. Because I think, to a lot of us, that is actually the toughest time to collaborate.
HEIDI GARDNER: It’s the toughest time, but it’s when there’s the highest payout. So some of the traps that we fall into when we’re trying to collaborate is frankly just not listening. So one of the biggest problems is not truly understanding what problem it is that we’re trying to solve. And we have to be able to identify the need for collaboration and what different kinds of expertise are truly required in order to solve that problem. And they may not all be required at once.
And so making smart choices about who you bring onto the team, in what sequence, at what points in order to solve which parts of the problem. That kind of strategizing about how you’re going to pull the team together and collaborate in order to tackle these tough problems, that’s what makes a real difference.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So much of the research you’ve done that informs this book is based on professional service firms. Is collaboration in those kinds of firms different than in other types of firms and other types of knowledge firms?
HEIDI GARDNER: Collaboration in professional service firms was a convenient place to study this because, first of all, people work in teams nearly all the time. And secondly, because it is such a knowledge-based environment, people are becoming narrower and narrower experts in order to stay on top of their domain. And so it’s a great place to study collaboration. They are also routinely tackling very complex problems for clients. And that’s one of the reasons that I chose to study team work in professional firms.
To be honest, it’s also a setting that I know extremely well based on my own background. And it made sense for me to begin studying it in that setting. But I’ve done, now, work in other kinds of knowledge-based organizations– R&D, academic medical research institutes, and other kinds of knowledge-based industries. And across all of them, we’re seeing these same kinds of issues.
And, in fact, I’ve gotten some– I’m not sure if it was– fan mail or hate mail, but people writing to me after they’ve read some of my articles, or very recently picked up the first copies of my book, asking why didn’t you study it in my organization? And, again and again, I’m hearing that people are facing these same kinds of challenges. It’s certainly not limited to professional service firms.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It might be helpful at this point just to have an example in mind of that type of project you’re talking about.
HEIDI GARDNER: Well one of the examples that comes up all the time when I interview clients and ask them what their complex problems are that keep them up at night, these days one of the first things that pops to mind is cyber security. And so it’s not a problem where you simply need IT and security people to be working together. With the Internet of Things, for example, the threat landscape has become so dispersed that you can have hackers coming in through all parts of the supply chain, all sorts of angles, that you wouldn’t have necessarily thought of previously.
And so now you need the supply chain involved. You need human resources involved, be thinking about policies and training programs to get people aware of this. You need corporate communications involved. You need a raft of other internal departments and just as many external advisers who each have a very specialized take on what’s necessary in order to prevent a cyber threat or, god forbid, actually deal with it once it happens.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and that’s an interesting example because I think it kind of points to the rising level of complexity that we interpret in our business. I mean I’m sure people in the Middle Ages thought that their lives were complex too, but do we need to collaborate more now than we did before?
HEIDI GARDNER: I do think we need to collaborate more now than ever. Will we need to do so increasingly in the future? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I would guess yes. The term that is often used is VUCA– volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. And when you put all of those factors together, it really means that we need to be thoughtful about whether we’re tackling the problem in its entirety– are we developing a coherent joined-up solution that’s really going to address this problem? Or are we just slicing off parts of it that we’re comfortable solving which won’t actually make the problem go away.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I noticed in your bio that you’ve lived and worked on four continents. And I am just wondering if norms about collaboration have differed in your experience from continent to continent. And what’s your sense of how this plays out in different cultures?
HEIDI GARDNER: Collaboration really does change culture to culture. There are norms of expression. For example, in Japan where I lived, it’s much more hierarchical and people are much more respectful of elders than they are in some other places where I lived. And that creates a dynamic where it may not be that easy to speak up and certainly not to object to the views of somebody who is older and more senior. Given that, the leader has to be really aware of bringing out the best in the people and giving them the opportunity to contribute so that they’re truly collaborating, and not suboptimizing when they’ve brought the team together. So that’s just one example of how collaboration differs.
Now, I’ve lived in South Africa, as well, for example. There I was fortunate to work in very, very multicultural teams. That has its own challenges. We make some assumptions about other people, consciously or not, in terms of what they might be good at or how we should interact with them.
And I think bringing those biases to the surface in some ways helped us to say what’s going to be the best outcome for us that we could possibly develop and deliver as a team. And by having really thoughtful kickoff meetings and trying to unearth what some of our working styles and preferences were, what the different knowledge bases we were trying to draw on, and again really evaluating the problem and saying what kinds of expertise are necessary for this, that allowed us to have much smoother interactions. But it’s never easy.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So let’s shift gears now a little bit and talk more about the solutions and how we can become better collaborators together. You talked about the different roles that can be necessary to make this happen. And I’m just wondering if you could just kind of walk us through some of those rules here.
HEIDI GARDNER: There are a number of different kinds of roles that can be important for collaboration. The first one, I think, is the one who’s going to spot the opportunity. And in a professional service firm, that’s often the rainmaker, somebody who’s interacting with a client a lot and trying to understand the full range of their problems. And connecting the dots then back into the firm to say what kinds of expertise do we have that would present a joined-up solution to this complicated problem? It’s not enough, though, just for somebody to spot those opportunities. Clearly then, they need to be able to draw the different kinds of experts together in order to collaborate and develop a solution.
And so you need contributors. And oftentimes the contributors are sort of the unsung heroes. People get a lot of credit for originating a project or generating the work or doing the business development or spotting the issues. And people may not feel like they get that much credit in order for simply contributing to quote unquote “somebody else’s project.”
What we’re able to show in the book, though, that I think is extremely valuable for people in that position is the identification of other kinds of benefits that they get. Maybe not immediately, as in all of the credit for having created this piece of work or sold this piece of work, but when you think about the learning benefits, for example, it’s actually really easy to see how they pay out over the longer run. People who contribute to somebody else’s project also develop a reputation with, say, the rainmaker or whoever that originator is. And that reputation spreads then word of mouth. And so they’re likely to get more and more of these opportunities. And between their growing reputation and the knowledge and skills that they’re learning by contributing to these other projects, eventually, then, they’re likely much more likely to become the person who is originating the project.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Given the way that some people in companies can become known as sort of very collaborative contributors, it does seem that sometimes these same people get asked to collaborate over and over again and can easily become overwhelmed or burned out. Sometimes that might happen because of the nature of their role. Are there some steps that leaders can take to make sure that the same sort of collaborative demands aren’t always falling on the same people or that they’re sort of spreading the work out in a sort of more aware way of what different workloads are and what different areas of development for people are?
HEIDI GARDNER: I think this is an absolutely essential thing that leaders need to focus on. And so, imagine that I’m the one who’s originating that piece of work. I really want to solve the problem. I went to crack it.
And when I think about who’s best placed to join my team? Who’s really the expert? One of two people, two kinds of people are most likely to pop to mind. Either somebody who is– what I call Yoda, right? The absolute guru– so who can I get who has those sterling reputation? Who really is the one who’s probably going to be this bottleneck like you talked about completely overloaded?
Or the other kind of person I might think about is mini me. So I know this problem inside and out. I feel like the person best placed to help me solve it is going to be somebody pretty much just like me, maybe with a different category of expertise, but otherwise pretty similar to me. And because of those two sets of biases, it means that the same people get tapped again and again and again, or the same types of people at least.
And it’s up to leaders to create an environment and, perhaps, even some formal structures that create accountability for spreading that work. One of the things they can do is simply call it to people’s attention and start to track who is overloaded in the organization. Getting a good handle on utilization and who’s overextended is important kind of data that leaders need to have their fingers on.
Beyond that, I think there should be some accountability in the organization asking people whether they really are looking for ways to expand the contributors on their team. And, again, tracking it with some stats. Do you bring in mostly the same kind of person all of the time? Whether that’s by gender or location or some other way, those kinds of stats can really be eye opening for people. They may be doing this without a real awareness of it.
And then there’s a program that we started in one firm that’s been really successful. We called it the Hidden Gems program. And it wasn’t tremendously formal, but we created an effort to have team leaders find somebody who wasn’t the obvious suspect. And sometimes this took some real work, some real digging. They had to use all of their network connections in order to find somebody who had the skills necessary and maybe underutilized.
And in these cases when people went to the work to do that, they found somebody who was hungry for that kind of work. And so what was fabulous is not only did that person get an opportunity that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but the team leader, by making that extra effort, pulled somebody onto the team who was deeply committed and was able to go above and beyond what the Yoda would have been able to contribute because they’re already so overloaded. So that kind of work balancing, I think, is exactly what leaders need to be paying attention to. It’s going to make collaboration a lot smoother and, frankly, the workplace a lot more rewarding for everyone.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the other challenges I think that can come up aside from the people challenges is just the budgetary challenges. I know in a big organization you might have a project that spans business units or spans teams. And there might be disparities in how the profits from that are then allocated. And I think one of the things you can run into is a manager saying I don’t want my people to spend time on this. The money’s not coming back to me. How can a company get around that wrinkle?
HEIDI GARDNER: I think there are two ways to take a look at this. One is either structural, which is very difficult. So if you begin either double counting or you create these revenue sharing or profit sharing systems and you have to have quite sophisticated ways to track it, and then be sure that people aren’t actually gaming the system. And you have to worry about whether there are strict rules in place or whether you allow some negotiation to go on. And if you do that, people spend a lot of time haggling over it.
And I think that can be a lot less favorable of a way to go than trying to create the environment where people understand that it’s really give and take. If you can begin to quantify what some of the outcomes of collaboration look like in terms of the cliched growing the pie. But if you can help people understand how they, as individuals, are better off– perhaps through those learning benefits and the referrals and the networking and the reputation– even if they’re potentially compromising somewhat on the short-term profits, helping them to understand what other kinds of benefits they’re getting. And then creating an environment where reciprocity is the norm. So they have a belief that if they pay it forward it will somehow return to them. I think that kind of a culture building effort may take more time, but it’s a lot more sustainable. And it’s probably a lot more fun place to work, too.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If you have identified the right type of project, something that needs multiple experts from multiple areas, you’re not just collaborating because it’s fun to collaborate, and you have set it up in the right way. It sounds like you will see a good pay out. What if you realize that you’re in the midst of a project that hasn’t been properly set up. Is there a way to fix a project that needs a little bit of tweaking midstream?
HEIDI GARDNER: Absolutely. So one of the tactics that we think is incredibly important– and I’m drawing on Dr. Richard Hackman’s work here– he, the late Dr. Richard Hackman, was a guru of groups and teams research. And he advocated, very strongly, the need for a proper team kickoff, or a team launch. And if you have the foresight and the ability to have a team kickoff right in the beginning, that’s ideal.
If you get somewhere partway down a project, there’s always the opportunity for a relaunch. And those relaunches can be very effective. What you’d want to aim for at that point is replicating some of the processes that you would do in an ideal kickoff that you otherwise would have done in the beginning.
So, first of all, what is the outcome that we’re aiming for? What kinds of expertise are necessary? How does that match up with the expertise that different team members are bringing here? What’s their knowledge base and their unique perspectives? And how might people be contributing? It may lead to an outcome where you say, actually, we’ve got some of the wrong people in the team or we need additional people in the team with a different kind of skill set. But at least you’re figuring that out partway through and not waiting until the end to figure it out.
The benefit of doing a team launch, or a relaunch if you’re partway through, is not only identifying the kinds of expertise that are needed, but figuring out the best ways for people in the team to work together. Some of the work style preferences, for example, that I think, especially, if we have some level of familiarity with each other, we assume we know how people like to work. But an explicit conversation goes a really long way in helping to overcome some potential hurdles that would arise otherwise.
For example, me personally I write from 5:00-7:00 in the morning. And then I take a break for an hour to get my kids off to school. There are three hours in the day when I’m not going to be checking email. I protect it for writing and I protect it for family. After that, I may be checking email. And all my co-authors know not to expect to hear from you before a certain time in the day. Unless there’s an emergency, and then they know they can get through to me in other ways and so forth.
Having those kinds of explicit conversations about preferences, whether it’s ours, whether it’s communication styles– do you prefer to be called or emailed? Those kinds of details, what it feels like, you’re either going to have to learn by having the explicit conversation and a quick conversation up front, or you’re going have to muddle your way through. And in a team launch, if you do it well, you’ll learn those kinds of issues as well right from the beginning, or whenever that kick off happens. And that’s going to make working together a lot smoother.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Heidi, this has been really, really helpful. Thank you so much for sharing some of these tips with us.
HEIDI GARDNER: My pleasure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Heidi Gardner. The book is Smart Collaboration. For more, go to hbr.org. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast.