See Chapter four of our new book “Smarter Collaboration” for an extended discussion of the Accelerator.

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LEVERAGE YOUR STRENGTHS – ENGAGE AUTHENTICALLY – CAPITALIZE ON DIVERSITY

Smart Collaboration

In her Washington Post best-selling book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos, Dr Heidi K. Gardner shows how organizations earn higher margins, inspire greater customer loyalty, produce more innovative work, and attract and retain the best talent when experts engage in Smart Collaboration across boundaries.

Why Collaborate?

Our toughest and highest value challenges are becoming more VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous.

These complex problems require experts to integrate their knowledge in order to generate higher-impact solutions than anyone could produce on their own.

Whether you are trying to drive greater innovation, enhance commercial performance by deepening your client relationships, improve talent engagement and retention, ensure effective post-merger integration, or optimize team performance – Collaboration is essential.

A Strengths-based Approach to Behavioral Change

Even when people buy into the concept of collaboration, they can find it hard it hard to execute. Oftentimes their behaviors are blockers to effective teamwork, and they rarely get the kind of actionable feedback that allows them to use their natural behaviors in a collaborative way.

It’s very difficult for a person to completely change their natural tendencies, and demands that they should “fit” into the prevailing culture can be stifling and lead to turnover. Instead, each person has the potential to enhance collaboration by drawing on their unique combination of strengths.

For example:

Telling a ‘wary’ person to simply trust others is unrealistic.

A ‘wary’ person can contribute to effective collaboration by using their naturally ‘wary’ tendencies to help a highly ‘trusting’ group avoid a bias toward over-optimism.

However, taken to an extreme, a ‘wary’ tendency can become anti-collaborative if that person is overly cautious in engaging with others and acts as a lone wolf.

When you are aware of your natural tendencies and make smart choices about how to deploy them in a team setting, you have the power to help the group to leverage members’ potential and make collaboration work better.


This is where the Smart Collaboration Accelerator comes in:

Understand your behavioral tendencies and effectively deploy them to drive improved collaboration and its financial, strategic and talent-related benefits.


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