Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being
Rob Cross
Harvard Business Review Press (September 2021)

How to avoid “the death of a thousand cuts” from inefficient communication and collaboration

According to Rob Cross,”We endure a volume, diversity, and velocity of collaborations that place an unprecedented tax on our time and brains. And we experience many stressful micro-interactions — caustic remarks from the new boss, cutting remarks from a key account — that we rapidly forget, but these moments leave behind the negative feelings that last for hours and days. We go home exhausted but with little ability to pinpoint what is causing our burnout.” (Page 4)

What does Cross suggest? “Specifically, there are three strategies that can magnify your impact at work and make you much happier in your career and life.” He calls them “essential collaborations,” a term that encompasses the importance of working together as well as the need to reduce collaboration to its essentials.” He explains HOW to launch each strategy and then coordinate all three.

Keep in mind that companies consume 85 percent of or more of their employees’ time in collaborative activities “and have no idea what impact this time has on corporate performance, individual productivity, or — perhaps most disturbing — employee well-being.”  Companies can be, are, and remain healthy only if those involved are healthy.

These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also provided to suggest the scope of Cross’s coverage:

o Essential collaboration (Pages 7-10 and 27-40)
o Collaboration overload and impact on leadership (13-26)
o Challenging beliefs Structural approaches to relieving collaboration overload (41-63)
o Triggers for collaboration overload (43-52 and 57-63)
o Why You Need Essential Collaboration (27-40)

o Life’s dimensions (34-37 and 202-213)
o Coaching Break: Don’t Do It, Teach It (45)
o The Surge and the Slow Burn (53-57
o Impose New Structure (65-92
o Noninsular networks (75-76 and 128-129)

o Coaching Break: Strategic Calendaring (77-78)
o Shaping Role Interdependencies (81-87
o Behaviors to avoid overload (93-119)
o Efficient meetings (95-100 and 116-117)
o Medium-horizon networks (136-150

o Long-horizon networks (155-159
o Energizers and their “pull” (161-178)
o Coaching Break: Six-Energy-Building Behaviors (166-168)
o De-energizers (176-178, 195-196, and 202-203)
o Coaching Break: Crafting a Healthy Social Ecosystem (182-183)

All healthy organizations have effective communication, cooperation, and  — especially — collaboration between and among their people at all levels in all areas of the given enterprise. These initiatives are guided and informed by lean principles that include defining value, mapping the value stream, creating flow, using a pull system, and pursuing perfection.

Years ago, Albert  Einstein nailed it: “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.”

As indicated, Rob Cross provides in this volume an abundance of information insights, and counsel that can help almost anyone who reads his book to prevent overload through a two-step process: create channel efficiency, but then, crucially, attack the underlying norms that create inefficient communication.”

This book is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!