Collaboration among internal employees and with external partners is a powerful way to improve productivity, create value, and obtain a competitive edge. But managers must apply it strategically and provide ongoing support to obtain its maximum impact. In ten essays by leading scholars and practitioners originally published in Harvard Business Review, HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Collaboration helps leaders understand how and why this approach succeeds-and sometimes fails. The book offers proven, practical collaboration strategies based on cutting-edge research from a wide range of industries and organizations.
The authors explain that:
1. Collaborative leaders need distinctive skills and styles. To successfully promote and sustain collaboration requires the ability to forge connections outside of one’s organization; engage diverse talent; model collaborative efforts at the top; and take a strong role in directing, forming, and disbanding teams.
2. A socially intelligent leader can inspire others to feel better and perform more effectively. The set of interpersonal competencies known as “social intelligence” taps into neurobiological circuits. These cause others to mirror a leader’s positive emotions and actions.
3. To bring about true collaboration, leaders must convince people to work together when their cooperation would not otherwise be wanted or needed. In addition to persuasiveness, this task requires authenticity and an impresario personality.
4. A collaborative enterprise can be both innovative and efficient. To achieve these ends, an organization must define a shared purpose; create an ethic of contribution; develop scalable coordinating processes; and introduce boundary-spanning infrastructure.
5. To succeed at solutions selling, companies must release and leverage the knowledge and expertise that have traditionally resided in silos. Silo-busting requires coordination of work across organizational boundaries; cooperation among previously competing groups in the interests of customers; capabilities built around a generalist customer focus; and connection to external partners.
6. Communities of practice enable experts to share knowledge and ideas effectively and efficiently. These informal employee networks work best when they tackle high-priority problems; focus on long-term goals; and are supported by integrative human systems in addition to technology.
7. Organizations cannot improve collaboration without addressing the root of its failure: conflict. Leaders can take advantage of various proven strategies to manage conflict, both at its starting point and after it escalates up the management chain.
8. Enterprises can effectively use emergent social software platforms to achieve collaboration-related goals. Managers must not be misled by the common myths about this technology; for example, that its risks outweigh its rewards, or that its benefits should only be measured in monetary terms.
9. Collaboration can go awry, and is not appropriate for every project or opportunity. Business leaders must weigh the return of a potential collaborative project against its opportunity and implementation costs.
10. Before beginning a collaborative effort with an external partner, business leaders need to select the most promising collaboration mode. These modes differ along the dimensions of openness (the degree to which anyone can participate) and hierarchy (whether decision making is shared or reserved to one partner).