Collaboration - too much of a good thing

The article that stood most out for me in the Jan/Feb edition of HBR was the featured contribution of Rob Cross on 'Collaborative Overload'.

Collaboration is the right thing to do (it is the new black)

In my work (note: which is creating leadership development solution for big companies) I've seen a rise in the number of corporations that add collaboration as a value, a principle, a must win battle, a leadership competence, a strategic driver, etc. It makes sense. The era of the lone expert who added value to the business all on his or her own is over. Think about it. What can still be achieved without your colleagues or teams around you? As work has become more complex, more rapidly changing and more interconnected with other people's work, companies have embraced collaboration as the new black. Teamwork and cross-team collaboration is going to save the business day. From individuals that requires a collaborative mindset in the first place - the realization that you cannot work hard or smart enough on your own anyway. From teams that requires collaboration across all kinds of boundaries - and the departmental silo boundary is the one keeping most managers awake. And from organizations that requires they have a hard look at collaboration versus performance, because there is something peculiar going on.

But we are not doing it right

I know what you are thinking: meetings, bloody meetings. It's one of my pet peeves too: collaboration doesn't equal meetings. But that's an old pain, as this clip of John Cleese shows: "Why can't you do your work at work?" asks the wife. "Oh, there isn't time, I'm in meetings." says the husband. It actually gets worse...


Let me quotes from the HBR featured article:

• "Too much teamwork exhausts employees and saps productivity...  "
• "The time spent by managers and employees in colaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more."
• "The distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees."
• "We typically see an overlap of only about 50% between the top collaborative contributors in an organization and those employees deemed to be the top performers."

So the first problem is that we aren't collaborating efficiently enough. A 2005 IDC White Paper, ‘The Hidden Costs of Information Work’, reports that knowledge workers waste a third of their time looking for information and finding the right people to talk with. We spend over 50% of our time (the HBR article quotes as high as 80% in some cases) in collaborative work. Just imagine that time gets just a bit more productive...

The second problem (and maybe less known) is that collaboration is badly distributed. The burden typically is on the 'extra milers', the colleagues who love to help out others and are actually good at it. That's an upward circle, until that circle becomes vicious and everyone wants or needs a piece of these 'extra milers' who while in high demand have lower than average engagement levels, up to a point where they might leave the company or become toxic. I also learned from the article that women bear more of this burden than men. 

So what now? 

I think it starts with the realization that more collaboration isn't better. Better collaboration is both more efficient and better distributed. Part of the solution can be technology: technology to better collaborate (social media type of collaboration tools, the increasingly popular slack.com or  the app do.com that makes meetings more efficient), and technology to better realize where the actual collaborators are (social network analysis). The non-technical part of the solution is collaborating less on time (which is limited, eg the time we spend in meetings) and more on sharing connections and knowledge.