Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being

Product Description
Named the Best Management Book of 2021 by strategy+business
Named one of "this month's top titles" in the Financial Times in September 2021
Named to the longlist for the 2021 Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Award in the Management & Culture category
A plan for conquering collaborative overload to drive performance and innovation, reduce burnout, and enhance well-being.
Most organizations have created always-on work contexts that are burning people out and hurting performance rather than delivering productivity, innovation and engagement. Collaborative work consumes 85% of employees' time and is drifting earlier into the morning, later into the night, and deeper into the weekend.
The dilemma is that we all need to collaborate more to create effective organizations and vibrant careers for ourselves. But conventional wisdom on teamwork and collaboration has created too much of the wrong kind of collaboration, which hurts our performance, health and overall well-being.
In Beyond Collaboration Overload, Babson professor Rob Cross solves this paradox by showing how top performers who thrive at work collaborate in a more purposeful way that makes them 18-24% more efficient than their peers. Good collaborators are distinguished by the efficiency and intentionality of their collaboration—not the size of their network or the length of their workday.
Through landmark research with more than 300 organizations, in-depth stories, and tools, Beyond Collaboration Overload will coach you to reclaim close to a day a week when you:\nIdentify and challenge beliefs that lead you to collaborate too quickly
Impose structure in your work to prevent unproductive collaboration
Alter behaviors to create more efficient collaboration\nIt then outlines how successful people invest this reclaimed time to:\nCultivate a broad network—not a big one—for innovation and scale
Energize others—a strong predictor of high performance
Connect with others to reduce micro-stressors and enhance physical and mental well-being\nCross' framework provides relief from the definitive problem of our age—dysfunctional collaboration at the expense of our performance, health and overall well-being.
Review
"Beyond Collaboration Overload earns its spot among this year's best business books for several reasons. It disabuses us of the notion that collaboration per se is a good thing. It defines dysfunctional collaboration and identifies its many causes. It provides a host of research-derived tools and techniques for managing collaboration in ways that benefit people and the organizations they work within. And, of course, there's the welcome prospect of getting one day per week of your life back." — strategy+business
"Beyond Collaboration Overload convincingly argues that well-meaning attempts at transparency, communication, and collaboration can go awry when they consume too much of our energy. Cross offers useful tips for how to reclaim your time and a compelling vision of what healthy networking and collaboration look like." — Charter
"In his new book, professor Rob Cross shows how to rethink beliefs, structures and behaviours to help us adopt new patterns of interacting more efficiently. There is also a plan for dealing with collaboration overload to improve performance and innovation." — Financial Times
"At a time when so many of us have allowed our focus and relationships to become unidimensional, in orbit around our work, Rob Cross offers a framework that focuses us back on our fuller lives. And that may be exactly what we need to be happier and more productive at work." — Porchlight Books, Staff Pick
"Thoroughly 'reader friendly' in style, organization and presentation, Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being must be considered essential reading for any corporate executive charged with the responsibility of maintaining an effective work force at all levels of their business." — Midw