Collaboration without Burnout

by Rob Cross, Scott Taylor, and Deb Zehner

“SO MANY DIFFERENT people can get to you through different channels, and the pressure is enormous.”

“Constant e-mail, international travel, calls at all hours—I was exhausted. The collaborative demands eventually wore me down.”

“I always felt I had to do more, go further, save the day. I would become people’s life raft and then almost drown.”

These are the voices of collaborative overload.

As organizations become more global, adopt matrixed structures, offer increasingly complex products and services, and enable 24/7 communication, they are requiring employees to collaborate with more internal colleagues and external contacts than ever before. According to research from ...

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