Companies today need cross-silo collaboration to survive a volatile competitive environment and grow revenue. But often their performance management systems discourage it. Indeed, in research involving more than 8,000 senior managers in biotech, banking, consumer products, energy, law, and other sectors, the authors found that a siloed approach to performance targets is a huge barrier to collaboration. Too many companies incentivize employees to take an overly narrow, short-term view, which makes them scramble to hit their numbers and lose sight of their organizations' bigger objectives. This article offers a better approach and outlines specific ways companies can retool their performance management systems to boost collaboration. It starts with implementing a four-part performance scorecard for every employee that establishes shared goals for tackling big challenges while still holding people accountable for delivering individual results. Each component--cross-silo goals, team goals, individual goals, and long-range programs--is weighted according to its importance in helping the company achieve its strategic aims.

Agile methodology, created to fast-track software development, is now being used throughout organizations by teams that want to execute projects quickly. But those efforts often don't pan out, say Babson's Rob Cross and Alia Crocker and Harvard Law School's Heidi K. Gardner. Their research reveals that many large agile initiatives not only miss their goals but also cause organizational disruption--including staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams. What's going wrong? With the help of organizational network analysis--a methodology for mapping how people collaborate--the authors have identified where unforeseen barriers undermine agile initiatives. The main problem they found: Traditional practices for executing agile projects are ineffective. Companies err by staffing agile teams only with stars, isolating them from the main business, and dedicating members 100% to teams. In this article, they offer alternative approaches: tapping "hidden stars," who will be less overloaded, for agile initiatives, and then identifying and reaching out to highly connected potential resources who can bring in expertise as needed.

The agendas of company boards are so packed that it's hard to get to every question and concern during regular meetings. So between meetings, directors do what members of a team always do in this situation: They start having conversations on the side. Conducted properly, side discussions allow directors to work together efficiently--to trade opinions, share information, and exert influence. But conducted improperly, they encourage political maneuvering, marginalize members with key expertise, foster inappropriate alliances, and lead to poor decisions. They shut out diverse input, and they make boards dysfunctional. The authors started examining side conversations three years ago as part of a larger study of board dynamics. In this article they share what they've learned about how directors should approach them. High-functioning boards, for instance, set clear rules of engagement and regularly review whether they're following them. They create onboarding processes, help directors form personal relationships, and take measures to maintain trust--such as ensuring that every member is briefed on all relevant information before formal discussions restart.

By assigning people to multiple teams at once, organizations can make more-efficient use of time and brainpower and do a better job of solving complex problems and sharing knowledge across groups. But competing priorities and other conflicts can make it hard for teams with overlapping membership to stay on track. Group cohesion often suffers, and people serving on several teams concurrently may experience burnout. Through extensive research and consulting, the authors have identified several ways that both team and organizational leaders can reduce the costs of multiteaming and better capitalize on its advantages. Team leaders should launch the team well to establish trust and familiarity, map every member's skills, carefully manage time across teams, and boost motivation by emphasizing opportunities to learn. Organizational leaders should focus on mapping and analyzing patterns of team overlap, promoting knowledge flows among teams, and buffering teams against shocks. All this represents a significant investment of time and effort. But organizations pay a much higher price when they neglect the costs of multiteaming in hot pursuit of its benefits.

By pooling their know-how and resources across internal boundaries, organizations can solve problems more creatively, increase their productivity, and reap higher profits. But collaboration is not easy, given how time-pressed managers are, how reluctant they are to cede control over projects and relationships, and how tough it is for them to stop working in silos when they've been doing it for ages. About 10 years ago, leaders at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute realized that the growing complexity of the problems its experts were charged with solving meant their fiefdoms couldn't last forever. In developing a case study about Dana-Farber, Gardner saw firsthand how difficult it was for the organization to move away from a star-based system to one that got researchers working together across specialties and facilities. She demonstrates that its story has clear parallels with business and outlines how executives can pull the levers of change in a wide range of companies.

For professional services firms, the only way to address clients' most complex issues is for specialists to work together across the boundaries of their expertise. When they do, their firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, and gain a competitive edge. The author's research shows that the more practice groups involved in a client engagement, the greater the average annual revenue the client generates. And the more cross-specialty work professionals engage in, the more work they will subsequently get and the more they'll be able to charge for it. But although the financial benefits to the firm of multidisciplinary collaboration are clear, the benefits to individuals accrue slowly--and the downsides are immediate. The organizational structure, compensation systems, and cultures in many firms favor "rock stars, not the whole band." Moreover, learning to collaborate effectively is difficult. Both individuals and firms can encourage the kind of collaboration that lands high-value client work. Professionals, for instance, can reap the benefits sooner by establishing themselves with an influential colleague who can help them build connections to specialists across the firm. And leaders can take steps to lower the cultural and structural barriers to cross-disciplinary work.

Riverview Law, run like a business rather than a traditional law firm, wants to expand its unconventional concept from the UK to the US. The firm's approach includes performing all legal work for annual fixed-price contracts, using data and analytics to advise clients on ways to reduce their legal problems (and spending), and evaluating lawyers' performance based on client satisfaction surveys rather than typical metrics like billed revenues. With detailed information on the firm's financial performance, service teams, pricing, culture, and business model, students can debate whether Riverview poses a truly disruptive threat to traditional law firms.

Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) uses an innovative new approach to procuring outside legal counsel: it replaces relationship-based selection and law firms' traditional time-based billing with data-driven decision making and an online reverse auction. In the case, GSK is hit with a potentially devastating suit and must hire a firm in time to respond. The recently hired managing attorney, Sophia Keating, grapples with GSK's approach. The GSK veterans assure her that the approach drives down costs and improves the quality of work by systematically increasing the rigor in the procurement process. Still skeptical, Sophia runs the process of systematically analyzing and comparing the competing firms' bids. This case also describes the process by which these tools were created and adopted. Beyond the implications for law firms and other service providers, lessons from this case are applicable for teaching about institutional change, procurement processes relevant to many fields, and how to increase rigor in typically informal business processes.

By the late 2000s, the law firm Duane Morris had transformed itself from a growing U.S. law firm to a significant global player. The firm's uniquely collaborative organizational culture, which featured a transparent, data-driven compensation system, practice-group integration across multiple offices, and rewards for attorneys who shared responsibility, had contributed to the firm's success as it had expanded into new U.S. and international offices. Yet, amid a shaky world economy and an increasingly cutthroat legal profession, Duane Morris attorneys began to wonder-could collaboration survive as a firm value? Would the firm's culture help it continue to grow in the years ahead and bring in more sophisticated legal work, or would its lawyers inevitably start to keep work to themselves as the firm navigated an ever-more competitive environment?

This note suggests an approach for developing an effective "career narrative" - a tool for packaging and sharing a professional's past achievements, long-term goals, and forward-looking needs through a compelling story. It focuses mostly on the ways junior professionals can leverage their career story, but also consider what role more senior mentors can - and should - play in cultivating and sharing juniors' career narratives.

All teams would like to think they do their best work when the stakes are highest-when the company's future or their own rests on the outcome of their projects. But too often something else happens. In extensive studies of teams at professional service firms, Harvard Business School's Gardner has seen the same pattern emerge over and over: Teams become increasingly concerned with the risks of failure rather than the requirements of excellence. As a result, they revert to safe, standard approaches instead of delivering original solutions tailored to clients' needs. Gardner has a name for this phenomenon: the performance pressure paradox. Here's how it develops: As pressure mounts, team members start driving toward consensus in ways that shut out vital information. Without even realizing it, they give more weight to shared knowledge and dismiss specialized expertise, such as insights into the client's technologies, culture, and aspirations. The more generically inclined the team becomes, the more concerned the client grows, which turns up the pressure and pushes the team even further down the generic road. But forewarned is forearmed. By measuring each person's contribution deliberately, ruthlessly insisting that no one's contribution be marginalized, and framing new information within familiar contexts, teams can escape the performance pressure paradox and keep doing their best work when it matters most.

Dr. Barrett Rollins, Chief Scientific Officer of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, attempts to engender cross-scientist collaboration by applying project management principles to medical research. The resulting innovation, Integrative Research Centers, are novel in this field and present a substantial challenge to the Institute's culture, which had previously allowed faculty scientists complete autonomy over their research. Center leaders are required to develop a business plan, adhere to agreed-upon performance metrics, and undergo regular progress reviews conducted by a peer-led oversight committee. In the "A" case, the Center for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a new but crucial center in the program, had failed to meet almost all of its objectives in the first year, and a heated dispute between two faculty members in the center had complicated matters significantly. The "B" case outlines the decisions Rollins took in terms of leadership and other strategic matters, and shows how the Center is performing a year after its initial disappointing progress.

Dr. Barrett Rollins, Chief Scientific Officer of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, attempts to engender cross-scientist collaboration by applying project management principles to medical research. The resulting innovation, Integrative Research Centers, are novel in this field and present a substantial challenge to the Institute's culture, which had previously allowed faculty scientists complete autonomy over their research. Center leaders are required to develop a business plan, adhere to agreed-upon performance metrics, and undergo regular progress reviews conducted by a peer-led oversight committee. The Center for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a new but crucial center in the program, has failed to meet almost all of its objectives in the first year. Furthermore, a heated dispute between two faculty members in the center has complicated matters significantly. Rollins is flummoxed by these problems because he thought he had provided resources and clear objectives to all of the centers. He must urgently diagnose the main reason(s) for the center's shortcomings and develop a plan of action so that this center's problems do not undermine the whole initiative toward greater scientific collaboration.

CEO Kelly Browne wrestles with the design and roll-out of a new compensation system to promote the collaboration necessary for supporting her firm's new strategy. Marshall Gordon International, a global public relations (PR) firm, has recently expanded its service offering to include Executive Positioning, which requires significantly more teamwork, higher-level client interaction and more strategically-minded consultants than their traditional PR work. This "B" case focuses on the choices the firm needs to make about roll-out, including how to measure aspects of consultants' performance, what performance management systems and processes need to support the compensation system, and who should have decision rights about consultants' variable compensation.

CEO Kelly Browne wrestles with the design of a new compensation system to promote the collaboration and cross-selling necessary for supporting her firm's new strategy. Marshall Gordon International, a global public relations (PR) firm, has recently expanded its service offering to include Executive Positioning, which requires significantly more teamwork, higher-level client interaction and more strategically-minded consultants than their traditional PR work. The CEO is pressured to find a compensation system that helps retain and motivate the firm's valued PR consultants, attract new talent, and get all professionals aligned behind the new strategy.

This note outlines how leading professional service firms operating in China revise their standard hiring practices to fit local challenges and customs. Based on interviews with professionals in a number of established accounting, strategy consulting, and executive search firms presently operating in China, it explores best practices they use to hire exceptional professionals who will succeed in building high quality client relationships, delivering appropriately innovative thinking, and helping their firms grow and improve performance - all within China's unique political and cultural context.

The best hiring practices help professional firms attract successful employees, equip newcomers with critical support networks, increase the firm's diversity and enhance its reputation. This Note delineates how leading firms manage these multiple objectives throughout the entire process of forecasting, sourcing and onboarding top talent. It also expands on potential misalignments that can arise and tradeoffs firms face in building and executing an integrated hiring strategy.