With her Gardner & Co. team, Dr. Gardner partners with boards, executive teams, and other senior leaders to boost performance by embedding the practices of smarter, cross-silo collaboration within those groups and across the broader organization and ecosystem. This results in concrete, quantifiable performance improvements.
Altogether, Dr. Gardner has authored (or co-authored) more than 100 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. This includes best-selling books Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work (2022) and Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos (2017). Her research received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management, and has been selected five times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. Her work has been featured in major media outlets around the globe, including ABC, the BBC, Børsen, The Boston Globe, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, Les Echos, The Economist, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, MSN, and Time.
In a business world defined by volatility, complexity, and speed, collaboration is often treated as a buzzword. But according to Dr. Heidi Gardner collaboration isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s a growth engine.
In a recent talk, Gardner shares that smarter collaboration isn’t about working more, meeting more, or agreeing more. It’s about connecting the right people, at the right moment, around the right challenges and doing it with trust, precision, and purpose.
Whether you're leading a cross-functional team or navigating internal silos, here are five key takeaways that build into a clear, transformative approach to collaborative leadership.
We often think of collaboration as something you lean on when you lack expertise. But Gardner turns that notion on its head. True experts, she says, must collaborate—because today’s most pressing problems (AI ethics, geopolitical risk, economic uncertainty) are simply too multidimensional to solve alone.
The first step is getting clear on your own specialization – your spike – and then intentionally seeking out those who complement it. “Depth creates blind spots,” she reminded us. “Collaboration helps you see around corners.” The best leaders aren’t generalists. They’re specialists who know how to build networks that fill in their gaps.
Gardner’s research shows that leaders with diverse collaboration networks consistently outperform their peers. But she’s careful to clarify: it’s not about being popular. It’s about being purposeful.
Instead of trying to know everyone, start with your thorniest challenge. Then, ask: Who sees this differently than I do? Who works in an adjacent space? Who has failed at this before and learned something I haven’t?
This kind of “network thinking” creates smarter teams and better outcomes, but it also requires intention. In Gardner’s words: “Start with the problem. Then build your network to solve it.”
For collaboration to yield results, not just camaraderie, you need both kinds of trust: competence trust and interpersonal trust. In other words: Do I believe you’re great at what you do? And do I believe you’ll treat me with respect?
Gardner emphasized that without both, collaboration collapses. A brilliant but difficult colleague won’t get looped in early. A kind teammate who drops deadlines won’t be trusted with critical work.
Building trust is about being reliable, curious, and open to influence. These are the social cues that say: “You can bring me in and I’ll help us get somewhere better.”
One of the more surprising (and refreshing) parts of Gardner’s framework was her call to “right-size” collaboration. More meetings don’t equal more innovation. And more voices, if mismanaged, can lead to noise not clarity.
She encouraged leaders to be decisive: invite people in when their expertise adds value, and release them when it doesn’t. Create opt-out cultures, where stepping back is a sign of maturity not disengagement.
“Collaboration isn’t about everyone being involved in everything,” she said. “It’s about aligning the right minds to the right moments and giving them space to solve.”
The most effective organizations treat collaboration as a performance driver, not a personality trait. Gardner’s firm uses network analytics to track collaboration patterns across teams and tie them to business results, like client retention, employee engagement, and innovation speed.
But even at the individual level, leaders can act on this insight. For example: assign someone to be accountable for a new hire’s network-building. Ensure your high potentials are known beyond their silo. Use project debriefs to ask not just “what did we do?” but “who made it better?”
In short: treat collaboration like a KPI. Because, Gardner argues, it is.
Viewed together, Gardner’s approach is a call to lead not just with vision, but with connection. The future belongs to leaders who can span boundaries, build trust across expertise, and solve in synergy.
