04/05/2022

Before Agreeing to Collaborate, Check Your Emotions

Workplace collaboration possesses many pitfalls

Practically everything we do at work is a collaboration. Pre-pandemic, many people spent 85 percent or more of their time each week in collaborative work — answering emails, instant messaging, in meetings and using other team collaboration tools and spaces. This number has only grown throughout the [COVID] pandemic, with no end in sight as we move into various forms of hybrid work.

The dilemma is that conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health and overall well-being. My Connected Commons colleagues and I have spent a decade quantitatively studying how successful people — those who are top performers and are thriving in their work — manage collaboration in today's hyper-connected work context.

What we learned was that the more successful people were not distinguished by larger networks, but rather by more efficient ones. By collaborating in a more purposeful fashion, the successful people I studied were 18-24 percent more efficient than their peers.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.