You should deploy ‘smart collaboration’ into your organisation

When putting together a problem-solving team, leaders should be intentional – here’s how to deploy ‘smart collaboration’ into your organisation

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Management Today

Why are some teams more successful than others? This was a question that Heidi Gardner kept asking herself when she was working at consultants McKinsey. 

The Harvard Law School fellow and author of Smart Collaboration was managing two teams simultaneously, one of which was ‘knocking it out of the park’, having ’incredible’ levels of success, while the other ‘equally diverse and interesting’ group was doing decent work but were not ‘powerhouses’.

This is where leaders can deploy ‘smart collaboration’; a system whereby people who have different points of view formed by their differing roles within the company, life experiences, socio-economic backgrounds or education, can work together to solve a particular problem within an organisation.

Leadership actions

Smart collaboration leads to higher revenues and profits. It can help attract, engage and retain higher quality talent and it allows groups to innovate not only faster, but better because the innovations they generate are more likely to be adopted and used within an organisation.

“This is not collaboration for its own sake,” Gardner says. “It’s not a ‘soft topic’ or something you get around to when your real work is done. It’s the way that organisations bring together resources that can help them accomplish these sorts of outcomes.”

The leadership actions required to foster smart collaboration will differ, she adds. For example, a CEO of a consumer products company that is looking to navigate the cost-of-living crisis will want to bring together the heads of various different departments from across the organisation to collaborate. This may include the R&D, manufacturing, supply chains and marketing division heads, working together with the finance and HR departments. 

Smart collaboration works by looking beyond the ‘usual suspects’ and bringing in anyone else within an organisation who might have a differing view on how to tackle a problem.

Think strategically about team compositions

Another misconception of smart collaboration is the idea that more is better; leaders need to be smart about where this strategy will have the biggest impact. 

“A lot of organisations engage in ‘teaming’ – pulling teams together without being strategic – which means you’ve got rare resources that are significantly overtapped.” These “rare resources” Gardner describes are people with a certain kind of expertise, such as PhDs or somebody from a particular background a.k.a “someone that doesn’t look like us”.

Because these people are ‘rare’ they might become stretched so thin that they become overworked and burnt out – ‘overtapped’. To combat this, Gardener says leaders need to think strategically, placing people with “rare” skills where they can make the most impact without stretching them so thin that they become worn out and unable to do their job properly.

“You need to start with the end in mind; what is it exactly that you’re trying to achieve and be hyper intentional about creating the right team of people who can accomplish that strategic objective.”