Collaboration Overload: When the Outcome of Your Innovation Effort is Less Than the Sum of its Parts

Leaders’ intolerance to risk, combined with a practical collaboration protocol, has resulted in too much collaboration for all the wrong reasons. Traditional approaches to collaboration slow decision-making, hurt ROI, and cause excessive collaboration. Excessive collaboration harms organizational performance, overworks employees, and delays network overload points. However, studies by McIntire Professors Rob Cross and Peter Gray have shown that solutions focus on reducing collaboration overload, making information available, shifting portions of roles, hiring assistants, and avoiding being responsible for expertise that is less central. Leaders must actively seek to remove unnecessary and inefficient collaboration.