In Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos, Heidi Gardner explains how leaders in almost organization can establish or strengthen a workplace culture within which smart collaboration is most likely to thrive.

As she explains, an organization’s greatest asset is the expertise of its key people. “The most important challenge faced by any such organization is bringing that collective expertise to bear on the problems that, increasingly, are so complicated and so sophisticated that no single expert – no matter how smart or hardworking – is in a position to solve them.”

What’s needed are interdisciplinary teams of experts who “work together to integrate their separate knowledge bases and skill sets to forge coherent, unified solutions. They have to collaborate, in efficient and effective ways. I call this smart collaboration.”

I cannot recall a prior time when there was greater need for smart collaboration because I cannot recall a prior time when the global marketplace was more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than it is now.

These are among the major benefits of smart collaboration:

o Clients/customers gain access to the best experts to solve the toughest problems.
o They gain a deeper understanding of their own business.
o Smart collaboration enables global reach and impact.
o It fosters innovation.
o It leads to high-quality results and mitigates risks.
o Peer collaboration signals an organization’s collaborative commitment and capacity.
o Smart collaboration leads to consistency in service levels
o It promotes simplicity and eliminates waste.
o It fosters responsiveness.
o It increases efficiency.
o It builds strong bonds.

I also highly recommend Collaboration in which Morten Hansen explains how “disciplined collaboration” can help leaders to avoid or free themselves from various traps, create unity of commitment and effort, and “reap big results.”