Beyond Collaboration

Overload
How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead,
and Restore Your Well-Being
Rob Cross
©2021 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
Adapted by permission of Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 978-1-64782-012-1
Estimated reading time of summary: 8 minutes

Key Takeaways
• Collaboration overload constricts your ability to innovate, execute, and achieve scale through net-
works.
• By engaging in essential collaboration, you can work more purposefully and free up valuable time to
spend on improving your overall well-being.
• Challenging your current beliefs, eliminating unnecessary triggers, imposing a new structure, and
altering your behaviors can help you to decrease collaboration overload.
• Once you’ve gained control of your time, you can better use your network to accomplish things of
greater substance and show up for others, your organization, and yourself.

Overview
Collaboration is a constant of global business, but the volume of it has left people stressed and unhappy.
Using two decades of qualitative and quantitative research with over 300 organizations, Rob Cross
explores how the wrong kinds of collaboration are negatively impacting executives, managers, and
employees. In Beyond Collaboration Overload, he highlights how you can adopt new patterns of col-
laboration that are efficient and effective. From challenging beliefs that lead you to collaborate too
quickly to imposing structure in your work, Cross’s framework can help you reduce burnout, increase
innovation, and drive performance.

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Beyond Collaboration Overload Rob Cross

Part One: Breaking Free from Collaboration Overload

An Amazing Leader Falters
Collaboration overload strips you of interactions that can help you pursue your priorities, but until it
becomes a problem, collaboration overload doesn’t necessarily feel like a negative. It feels great to focus
on a collaborative task where you feel appreciated, and a big part of the problem with today’s collabora-
tive demands lies within ourselves. Therefore, the first task in moving beyond collaboration overload is
convincing yourself that you really do need to escape it.

Why You Need Essential Collaboration

The first step to overcoming collaboration overload is actively addressing it. By challenging the beliefs
you hold about yourself, imposing structure, and altering your behaviors, you can refocus on essential
collaboration—that is, working with others in more purposeful ways. To become an essential collabora-
tor, you must overcome the factors that keep you focused on everyday distractions so you can initiate
innovate responses, mobilize people effectively, and take care of yourself.

Taking care of yourself is an important component of essential collaboration, and a great tool for
achieving dimensionality, or doing an activity that involves other people. The dimensionality created by
outside-of-work groups can impact your professional success. By taking time away from nonessential
collaboration and reclaiming your time, you can reinvest it in ways that help boost your:

• Performance. Mobilizing a broader network of connections allows you to benefit from the ideas and
perspectives of outside groups.
• Engagement. Creating and feeding off the positive energy of others in your group helps you gener-
ate engagement and encourages opportunities to flow your way.
• Well-being. Finding renewal through personal connections helps you increase your well-being and
show up as more present, less stressed, and more involved in your projects.

Challenge Beliefs
A big part of overcoming collaboration overload is eliminating unnecessary triggers. People create
about half of their collaboration overload problems in the form of common triggers. These triggers fall
into two categories: (1) those relating to identity and reputation and (2) those having to do with anxiety
and the need for control.

Identity and reputation triggers include:

• The desire to help others. What you consider helpful contributions to discussions and decisions could
make additional work for you and others.
• The sense of fulfillment from accomplishment. Small wins feel good, but the satisfaction from accom-
plishment can set up expectations that quickly spin out of control.
• The desire to be influential or recognized for expertise. When you assume your role is to constantly
jump into discussions and offer expertise, others will come to expect your involvement. You’ll end
up driving work back to yourself as requests for consultations pile up.
• Concern about being labeled a poor performer or colleague. If you feel you have no choice but to say
yes, you could eventually end up getting overloaded with collaboration.

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Beyond Collaboration Overload Rob Cross

• The need to be right. The need to be on top of all the answers can push you to spend hours preparing
for meetings, but those preparations could block others’ engagement and generate excess meet-
ings and emails instead.
Triggers that grow out of anxiety and the need for control include:

• Fear of losing control of a project. If you’re reluctant to delegate, you’ll spend all your time trying to
do everything yourself.
• Need for closure. Trying to tie up loose ends when you no longer have the energy or creativity for it
can result in poorly executed results.
• Discomfort with ambiguity. Pinning down all the details creates new cycles of collaboration.
• Fear of missing out. If you feel a frantic need to add experiences to your résumé, you might make
unproductive choices and become overburdened.

Impose New Structure

Things that happen to us are in large part things we do to ourselves, but there are structural solutions to
this problem. Put the capabilities you want to use in your work and the values you want to live by first.
Then, rethink how you structure the following:

• Decisions and informational requests. Put informational requests into different categories and iden-
tify emerging talent who can become the go-to people for those topics.
• Your role. When you’re playing an important role, shift as much as possible to less-overwhelmed
people. This will help you and allow them to improve their productivity, become resources for oth-
ers, and further balance collaborative demands.
• Meeting time. Look at the length of each recurring meeting and ask yourself if it can be cut in half.
You should also identify meetings that can be scheduled less frequently or be cancelled.
These common structural practices for overcoming overload can be grouped into two areas:

1. Orienting your network to your objectives. To feel confident about which collaborative tasks are right
for you, generate a clear idea of what really matters to you. Reflect on capabilities you want to de-
velop, focus on your values, and determine which personal aspirations and commitments you want
to prioritize.
2. Shaping role interdependencies. Improving collaborative efficiency requires practices that are mind-
ful and proactive. Periodically review your calendars and email, shape expectations about your role,
and position your involvement in collaborative work to ensure you offer unique value.

Alter Behaviors to Streamline Collaboration Practices

Just as your beliefs and structures can help save you from collaboration overload, so can streamlining
your collaborative practices. Huge efficiencies can be found by implementing better norms of practice
around how you use the range of collaborative tools at your disposal. Establish better practices around:

• Meetings. Focus on the desired outcomes, include only those necessary, and ensure meetings are
efficient.
• Emails. Establish guidelines on the format and organization of emails, use of email, and how you’ll
limit email-related disruptions.
• Direct messaging. Use direct messaging to increase efficiency of established relationships.
To create efficient interaction norms, consider the following:
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Beyond Collaboration Overload Rob Cross

• Draw people to collaborative work. Identify areas where your knowledge is insufficient, then think
carefully about who could support you and seek their help.
• Adapt your behavior. Identify your inefficient interaction norms, change them, and teach others how
to better consume your time.
• Set appropriate time for collaborative tasks. Thoughtfully allocate your time based on the true needs
of the interaction.
• Develop trust. Foster trust and teach your team to take risks by being authentic and demonstrating
that you adhere to principles larger than your own self-interest.

Part Two: Using Your New Freedom to Increase Performance

and Well-Being
Networks of Successful People
People with noninsular networks, or those that encompass a diversity of perspectives, are more success-
ful. Structurally diverse noninsular networks bridge expertise domains, cultures, geographical regions,
and functional areas; however, a bigger network isn’t necessarily better. Managing a big network is time
consuming and can generate collaboration overload.

To strategically start building a more effective noninsular network, look to your medium-horizon proj-
ects—those career-defining initiatives that are happening now and will unfold over the next few months.
Medium-horizon work dictates what types of connections are critical for effective and efficient delivery
of results. Craft your medium-horizon networks to:

• Break out of narrow ideas. Proactively initiate contact with people who can help you with your evolv-
ing projects.
• Envision projects as sets of activities for a network. See your network as a fluid extension of your own
expertise. Envision ways that greater results could be produced by leveraging others and engage
those groups in a mutually beneficial way.
• Use networks to fill knowledge gaps. Admit your shortcomings and find people whose knowledge
and skills fill the gap.
• Connect with influencers to gain perspective. Early outreach can make implementation easier and
more efficient, so engage with formal decision makers and informal opinion leaders to gain influ-
ence without authority.
While the medium horizon is a great place to start building a network, short- and long-term horizons are
also important. Short-horizon interactions are typically shaped by a presenting opportunity, and they’re
critical to innovation. In the short term, it’s important to reframe the problem and start conversations
with others who might be involved if things move to the medium horizon. Long-horizon interactions
are forms of exploration that are pivotal to laying the groundwork for future success. The long horizon
is when you seed networks through exploration and create scale through co-creation. These network-
exploration investments are crucial because they let you see and solve problems differently than people
who don’t make the investment.

Energizing Connections
Once you’ve started building your noninsular connections, you must energize them. Trust is critical to
building energy, because if trust is lacking, people shy away from engaging with new ideas. Building

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Beyond Collaboration Overload Rob Cross

trust comes from engaging in behaviors that quickly enable others to trust you, and those behaviors
can be small and easy. You can build trust by offering your time and guidance, providing resources, and
connecting with people off task to better understand their backgrounds and interests. The behaviors
underlying trust and energy aren’t difficult to implement, but they do require you to be intentional.

Thriving in a Connected World

Intentionality and well-being are linked, so spend quality time focusing on your own mental and physi-
cal health. Well-being affects your sense of satisfaction with your life, and to find it, focus on three things:

1. Maintain physical health. Exercise is one of the most effective ways to combat the effects of stress
and ensure you bring energy to your work and life.
2. Shield from the negative by managing micro-stressors intentionally. Stress is the top driver of poor
health, and relationships can create stress by draining your personal capacity, depleting your emo-
tional reserves, and challenging your values and identity. Routinely identify and act to minimize the
impact of systematic micro-stressors.
3. Add dimensionality to life through interactions that generate purpose and meaning. More than half
your sense of purpose and meaning comes from your interactions with others, so make subtle shifts
to activities that pull you into social spheres that yield a sense of purpose for you.
So much of your purpose and meaning comes from personal interactions, so find people who can be
anchors for you. Life anchors are people who can ensure you don’t let yourself become too unidimen-
sional, and they take three forms:

1. Life role anchors. These people can help you impose structure through role clarity, connections, and
rituals that shape your life.
2. Process orientation anchors. These people can help you develop heuristics for embracing the moment
with other people. They can help you see life as emergent and to lean into the flow of a situation.
3. Value anchors. These are people you cultivate through life experiences. They can provide non-nego-
tiable points through which you can create dimensionality.
A sense of purpose in life is deeply constructed through interactions you have inside and outside of
work, but too many people are treating work and life as a trade-off. Look to engage more purposefully
in small moments, view transitions as opportunities to discover a better version of yourself, and seize
control of what you do and with whom. As you become more proactive at shaping your work, you can
free yourself from a demanding work culture and bring more to your overall performance, health, and
well-being.

About the Author

Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College and the cofounder
and research director of the Connected Commons business consortium. He’s a renowned thinker, writer,
and speaker whose category-defying ideas, courses, and tools have influenced fields as diverse as orga-
nizational design, change, collaboration, teams, agility, innovation, and talent optimization. Cross has
authored six Harvard Business Review articles on practical approaches to enhancing collaboration. He’s
the coauthor of five books, including The Hidden Power of Social Networks.

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Beyond Collaboration Overload Rob Cross

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