MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Improving the Rhythm of Your Collaboration

Alternating between always-on connectivity and heads-down focus is essential for problem-solving.

In the workplace, leaders help set the beat for their organizations’ and teams’ collaborative efforts. For at least a century, they have done this largely by planning working-group meetings, huddles, one-on-ones, milestone reports, steering committee readouts, end-of-shift handoffs, and so on. Through 30-, 60-, and 90-minute calendar meetings scheduled weeks in advance to prevent conflicts and at odd times to accommodate global team members, they have established the patterns of active interaction (“sound”) and individual work (“silence”) that form the rhythms of their employees’ collaboration.

But such rhythms have gotten much more complex and less controlled in recent years.

About the Author

Ethan Bernstein (@ethanbernstein) is the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he studies the impact of increasingly transparent workplaces on employee behavior and performance. Jesse Shore (@jessecshore) is assistant professor of information systems at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business; he studies social networks and collective intelligence. David Lazer (@davidlazer) is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard; his research focuses on computational social science, collective intelligence, and misinformation.

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