Media

Time Magazine

When it comes to battling tight deadlines and quarterly and annual goals, it can feel like we’re getting closer and closer to burning out. Especially when holiday stress combines with pandemic stress, it’s smart to be proactive in adopting strategies to avoid that burnout. Keeping teams energized has taken on a new look thanks to the pandemic. Be open to new ways to start meetings that are more informal or encourage team members to be authentic and vulnerable to build trust.

The Globe and Mail

Collaboration has a noble purpose: keeping others involved in decisions or at least informed about them and melding together everyone’s abilities. But when you have too much of a good thing it can go awry. Today, we see a breakdown in collaboration strategy. Often we blame the organization, but there are two important things that individuals need to do to start reclaiming their time. First, leaders can challenge beliefs about themselves and their role by figuring out what triggers apply most commonly to them and then initating connections and practices that help them to refrain. Next, leaders can alter their behaviors to streamline collaboration practices, including all meetings, e-mail and direct messages.

Forbes

In the hypercompetitive world of professional sports, a new archetype of champion has been quietly emerging over the past few years. Athletes are acknowledging their limits, prioritizing their wellbeing over winning, and walking away from competition in pursuit of solace, and returning better than when they left and reenergized by the perspective they achieved. This lesson on the importance of releasing external expectations to embrace one’s true inner compass applies to business as well. Rob Cross identified the unique traits of true outliers; the rare few who are both the highest performers, and those experiencing high levels of psychological well-being, resilience, career satisfaction and general thriving. These performers shed light on how we can better manage attention, energy and our networks in a hybrid world to become world-class collaborators.

Harvard Business Review

Collaborative overload is not just a problem of volume. It has an invisible but equally sinister counterpart in cognitive switching costs created by the diversity of demands. Connected Commons research over the past decade on collaborative overload shows that more efficient collaborators — those who have the greatest impact in networks and take the least amount of time from people — are distinguished in part by how they put structure into their work to reduce the insidious cost of being “always on.” Employees at all levels are feeling the strain of collaborative overload, and there is no end in sight as we transition into a post-pandemic world of work. When they’re appropriately applied, analytics can help identify significant efficiencies in this hyper-connected world of work.

INC.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, chances are you’re collaborating too much. Excessive collaboration – created when the pace, volume and diversity of meetings, phone calls, email, IM and other collaborative platforms erodes performance and well-being — was already high before the pandemic, and it’s continued to expand over the last year. Connected Commons research shows that collaboration consumes 85 percent or more of most peoples’ work week–and our work interactions are drifting earlier into the morning and later into the evening. Dysfunctional collaboration invisibly undermines performance and effectiveness of entrepreneurial teams and has become a primary source of burnout, attrition, and poor decision-making as well.

TED Ideas

We are collaborating too much. That’s what Rob Cross has realized after studying high (and low) performers at effective organizations for more than 20 years. “We’re too eager to jump into, or be dragged into, active collaborations that might run better without us and that burn up our valuable time and energy,” he writes in his new book Beyond Collaboration Overload. And collaboration overload isn’t just about the meetings that fill up our calendars — it’s also the endless emails, Slacks, reports and work that every new project generates. To reduce the overload, one essential step to take is to recognize the desires, needs, feelings and expectations that lead us to taking on too much. Here, Cross looks at the most common and how we can counter them.

MIT Sloan Management Review

Collaboration is essential in today’s work world, but it can also consume more time and energy than well-intended leaders expect or recognize. What precisely do we need in collaborative interactions, what are we trying to get out of them, and how can we optimize our time together? Robert Cross’ research shows that by applying network analysis across all organizations, regardless of company size, you could consistently see that both the number of collaborative demands and the diversity of them were overwhelming people. A task may look easy on the project plan, but if it requires you to coordinate across three time zones with two leaders who dislike one another to secure resources from somebody with misaligned incentives — that’s huge in terms of time. And that’s what’s been invisible. People are overwhelmed — and it’s not going to get better, given this perpetual move toward greater collaboration and enterprise connectivity. We can track expense receipts down to two decimal places because of the sophistication of our systems, but organizations have to become more sophisticated at seeing the actual collaborative footprint of work. And people must be better equipped to manage collaboration in this hyper-connected world.