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The Smarter Collaboration Master Class: Advanced Practices to Transform Client Service and Engage Your Workforce provides a practical guide to drive collaboration-backed transformation in your firm.

Now open to leaders from any professional service firm including accounting, consulting, engineering, law, and other professions.

Professional service firm leaders are being asked to solve increasingly complex problems and provide comprehensive solutions to clients and boost profits. In her books Smart Collaboration and forthcoming Smarter Collaboration, Dr. Heidi K. Gardner shows when specialists collaborate across silos, firms can earn higher margins, enhance client service, engage and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge.

Smarter Collaboration Master Class: Advanced Practices to Transform Client Service and Engage Your Workforce focuses on how to capture those benefits and shows senior leaders how to move from a collaboration-backed strategy to real behavioral change. This engaging, highly interactive program, focuses on the structures, tools, and practical steps to promote collaboration and drive business performance.

Through case studies, interactive simulations, and in-depth discussions, participants will gain the knowledge and tools to put collaboration into action to achieve business objectives. Participants will have the opportunity to connect with Harvard faculty and peers from a variety of sectors to learn and gain insights from their experiences.

Participants are expected to have foundational knowledge of Smart Collaboration before this advanced program; materials for pre-work will be provided.

Read more about Smart Collaboration:

Coming this fall:

Managers are Trapped in a Performance-Compassion Dilemma

Alumni Story: Taking Collaboration to the Next Level; a Critical Component to Not Only Survive but Thrive

7 Strategies for Promoting Collaboration in a Crisis

About the Smarter Collaboration program

  • PROGRAM GOALS

    The Smarter Collaboration Master Class provides a practical guide to drive collaboration-backed transformation in your firm. You will learn how to:

    • Close the gap between strategy and execution: how do you move from general buy-in to the concept of collaboration to specific actions that generate measurable advantages?
    • Revamp your performance management and compensation systems to drive out individualistic behaviors and encourage collaboration.
    • Boost your collaborative leadership skills by deploying your strengths and avoiding pitfalls.
    • Foster collaboration in hybrid working environments.
    • Develop a collaborative roadmap for enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes.
    • Avoid collaboration overload and teamwork fatigue.
  • CURRICULUM

    The program’s distinguished faculty provide practical frameworks to cultivate collaboration that drives business performance. The curriculum includes:

    • New research on KPIs, performance management and compensation structures to promote collaborative, cross-silo working.
    • Case studies that explore the cultural, behavioral, and structural elements underpinning the execution of collaboration.
    • Tools for analyzing collaboration including tech-enabled solutions and strategic analysis.
    • Strategies for fostering, engaging in, and leading collaboration in ways that play to individuals’ unique strengths.
    • Research on the implications of collaboration on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • PARTICIPANTS

    The Smarter Collaboration Master Class is open to senior leaders and partners from all professional service firms including accounting, engineering, design, architecture, law, and consulting.

    This master class is ideal for people in the following roles: Partner, Practice Group Head/Leader, Industry/Sector Leader, CEO, CMO, COO, CIO, CHRO, Chair, Managing Partner, and Senior Partner.

    We recommend participants attend the program as part of a small team from their firm. Joining as a cohort boosts accountability and the likelihood of successful implementation.

  • ADMISSIONS

    Visit the Admissions page for information on the process.

  • FACULTY

    Our core faculty are members of the Harvard Law School faculty – distinguished academicians, educators, researchers, authors, and practitioners in their respective fields. Representing various disciplines, they are close to practice through relationships with law firm leaders and through personal involvement as consultants for top firms around the world.

    Teaching Team

    Heidi K. Gardner, Harvard Law School – Program Chair

    Rebecca Newton, CoachAdvisor and London School of Economics