Heidi K. Gardner

A Washington Post Bestseller Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right. Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers. In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms. But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line. With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos

Smart Collaboration

Introduction: Why collaborate? -- Collaboration helps the firm do business better -- Collaboration helps the firm recruit, retain, and grow the right people -- Collaboration and the solo specialist -- The seasoned collaborator -- Collaboration and the contributor -- Collaboration for ringmasters -- Collaboration: a look sideways -- Collaboration: yes, your clients care.

Harvard Business Review

Amy C. Edmondson

Mark Mortensen

Amanda Sinclair

Read the room—and the Zoom. Just because a global pandemic forced us all to log more hours in virtual meetings and engage in more Slack conversations doesn't mean we're good at them. We've all endured the uncertainty of knowing who should talk first when several of us start at once. Or logging in to a call with a full mosaic of faces but no one speaking. How do you allow folks to dissent or share a hard perspective? If someone appears confused, do you call them on it or message them privately? And if we found those scenarios challenging when we were all remote, how can we manage our teams and facilitate effective meetings when some of us are on-site and some are on-screen? How do we navigate a hybrid workforce? How do we build relationships and trust when some colleagues share a long history and others have never laid eyes on one another in real life? This book explores how to develop, practice, and demonstrate your emotional intelligence and social skills in a virtual or hybrid setting. With the latest psychological research and practical advice from leading experts, you'll learn how to make everyone feel heard, draw everyone's voice into the conversation, and make real connections—whether your people are in a conference room or a breakout room. How to be human at work. The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.

Heidi K. Gardner

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