Collaborating Better Across Silos

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:34.5	I have to confess that when I was a student,
0:36.6	I always hated group collaborative projects.
0:39.7	Usually, one person got saddled with all the work.
0:42.2	Usually, I felt like this was me, and if we somehow
0:45.0	did manage to spread out the work evenly, we'd end up with a final project that just often seemed
0:49.7	low quality, disorganized, full of holes, and if we wanted to avoid that we had to invest so
0:54.3	much more time and it then seemed like it would have taken to just do the work on our
0:58.4	own. In short working in groups just seem to create more work.
1:02.7	And I think as grown-ups, we often tend to fall into the same dynamics.
1:06.9	We think it will just be faster and easier and maybe even better to do the work ourselves.
1:11.0	We think we don't have time to collaborate or that the payoff won't be worth the effort.
1:15.0	With me today to convince us how short-sighted we are and help us understand how to collaborate better is Heidi
1:20.5	Gardner.
1:21.5	She's on the faculty of Harvard Law School, previously was a professor at Harvard Business
1:25.2	School, and her new book is Smart Collaboration. Heidi, thank you so much for talking with us today.
1:29.9	My pleasure. So first, let's talk about why this is so important to get right and how we so often get it wrong.
	...

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