Internationally celebrated for her expertise in fostering collaboration and excellence within organizations, Dr. Heidi K. Gardner is a powerful thought leader in the legal and professional services sectors – and beyond. With a rich tapestry of experiences spanning academia, consulting, and global research, Gardner guides individuals and organizations towards collaborative practices, systems, and cultures that drive strategic outcomes.
Gardner has a keen ability to bridge diverse perspectives and empower people to leverage their strengths for collective success. She’s committed to nurturing talent and driving foundational change; her leadership exemplifies a rare blend of vision, empathy, and effectiveness. Through her firm, Gardner & Co., and executive teaching at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, Gardner inspires leaders and their teams to cultivate high-quality networks and achieve their top goals through effective collaboration (what she calls smarter collaboration).
Journey and Inspiration
While working at McKinsey & Company, Gardner had a burning desire to understand why some teams are more effective than others at fully using their members’ expertise. She would observe two equally diverse and capable teams but one would create a highly innovative solution while the other would come up with something that was solid, but “ho-hum.”
Gardner has spent nearly two decades at Harvard University researching ways to harness expertise and unlock it from silos so that people and their organizations perform better. With her Gardner & Co. teams, she uses this knowledge to help senior executives and their organizations enhance smarter collaboration to achieve their strategic goals.
Law firms and in-house legal departments are prime examples of entities that need to harness cross-silo experts in order to provide the highest-value solutions to their clients’ complex needs. To help more lawyers and related business professionals benefit from bringing smarter collaboration into their daily work, Garder and her team will soon launch a suite of cost-effective, scalable tools that embed the right kinds of collaborative mindsets and behaviors in organizations.
Key Responsibilities
Gardner splits her time between advising global clients (through her research and consulting firm Gardner & Co.), teaching executive leaders at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, and developing online collaboration tools through her technology business (Smart Collaboration International). What she loves about her roles is there is an incredible amount of variety, and no two days are the same.
Clients come to her and her team with many different collaboration challenges, from lacking collaborative leadership skills, to not trusting their colleagues, to being over-committed on lower-value tasks. It’s rewarding to diagnose their specific issues, work with them to design and implement appropriate solutions, and then observe and measure their progress over time.
Leadership Style and Strategies
Gardner practices what she preaches: she has built a rich, global network of high-caliber experts to complement her own knowledge, and she actively nurtures those relationships so that the whole ecosystem is available to collaborate – when necessary – on research and client work.
In her firm, her classroom, and with clients, Gardner continually strives to help others understand their strengths and growth areas – and then use these traits to more deliberately collaborate and thrive in their careers. As part of her emphasis on smarter collaboration, she appreciates when teammates help create an environment where healthy debate flourishes. Similarly, they acknowledge that they don’t know all the answers – nor should they.
The beauty of smarter collaboration is that it frees people up from the pressure of needing to know everything. By bringing in the right experts and viewpoints at the right times, the whole team produces a comprehensive, even “magical” result.
Effects of Generative AI
The promise of truly collaborating with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and how to do that exceptionally well is fascinating. Gardner’s team has launched research on how team members can engage GenAI “bots” as synchronous members of their team during problem-solving or other team sessions. For example, they can use a GenAI bot to fill in a knowledge gap, like asking it to provide the perspective of a regulator, a client executive, or even a customer. Or it can play a “devil’s advocate” role by challenging the team to be more commercially aggressive or take on the persona of someone with a different cultural background.
As part of their investigation, they are pushing their understanding of collaboration traps. For example, what are the potential repercussions of increased human-GenAI collaboration, including the possibility of weaker talent pipelines and reduced age diversity?
Work-Life Balance
One way she navigates a demanding career is through on-the-job exercise. She has a habit of leading meetings while walking on her treadmill. Neuroscience supports her view that this practice not only reduces stress but also sparks creativity and problem-solving. A lot of people expect academics to be oddballs, so she uses it to her advantage!
Although she travels more than 30 weeks a year, she also blocks out sizable amounts of time for nature breaks at her home in the New Hampshire mountains and on trips with her husband (and Smarter Collaboration coauthor) and their family. Complete resets are sometimes essential.
Background and Educational Journey
Perhaps because Gardner was a first-generation college student, she leaped at learning opportunities, especially cross-cultural ones. As a Japanese major at the University of Pennsylvania, she later worked alongside the German Ministry of Education as a Fulbright Fellow in Dessau, Germany. In between, she was a manager at Procter & Gamble, leading some team members who had worked for the company longer than she had been alive! Those early experiences shaped her understanding of psychology’s role in business success and the way leaders need to adapt to people’s radically different motivations and cultural expectations.
Gardner deepened that knowledge with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, McKinsey experience while based in London and South Africa, and another master’s degree and a PhD in organizational behavior from the London Business School.
Her experiences living and working on four continents have undoubtedly inspired her approach to collaboration and leadership. She saw firsthand how many different approaches and perspectives exist across the globe, and that when these are effectively brought together the possibilities are endless, unimaginable, and life-changing.
Collaboration and Excellence
To foster a culture of collaboration and high achievement, people need to understand the research-backed benefits of smarter collaboration – including higher revenue and profit, faster innovation, and stronger employee engagement. If unfamiliar with the science, then they are less motivated to invest in building relationships. In her keynotes and workshops, Gardner often shares case studies of legal teams using collaboration to boost their own and their clients’ outcomes.
Next, people must know how to collaborate – the right way. They can follow general advice and best practices, but the ideal scenario is implementing a customized plan to jumpstart and/or embed smarter collaboration. This plan should take into account an array of inputs, such as the organization’s top collaboration barriers, success stories, and strategic priorities, as well as executive leader feedback.
Simultaneously, you can (and arguably must) cultivate collaboration through role modeling it yourself. Think like a smart collaborator and act like one, even if this goes against the culture of your company. Observers will see the successes you achieve and ideally want to emulate your behavior.
Importance of Collaboration
Embedding smarter collaboration across a law firm or legal department requires a whole system: skilled leaders who role model the right mindsets and behaviors, structures (including but not limited to incentives) that support cross-silo working, and a clear business rationale for change. Occasionally, Gardner encounters prospective clients whose top leaders (or board) are either unwilling or incapable of changing their own way of working.
As a matter of ethics, Gardner and her team tell them they won’t work with them. Their investment would be wasted and could even backfire by breeding cynicism. They hope their candid input will prompt them to consider foundational changes. In more than one case, this has happened, and the organization re-approached them (after a leadership change) to make real collaborative progress.
As the CEO of Gardner & Co., Gardner chooses only to co-invest with firms and companies whose leaders have a true appetite for transformation – it is a far better experience not only for them but especially for her consulting team. She hires people who are both highly capable and extraordinary team players, and they expect to make a significant impact on their clients.
Advice to Next-Gen Workers
Gardner advises aspiring leaders to develop a high-quality collaborative network both in and outside their organization. When looking at diagrams of highly productive collaboration patterns (like her go-to “twin 1 and 2” diagram), it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion that bigger networks are better. This scares introverts because they don’t want to have to be the life of the party or have to glad-hand lots of people just to build better networks.
Collaboration and business performance
To be clear: Bigger isn’t better. Better is better. To build a higher-quality network that gives you access to knowledge and deeper trust relationships, Gardner recommends:
- Seeking out a diversity of expertise
- Fostering connections across generations
- Reaching out to people with different behaviors
- Making sure these relationships are reciprocal
Creating high-quality networks has a ripple effect. Whatever your role or seniority, be generous with your contacts. Introduce your peers and less-connected colleagues to people you value, allowing them to grow in new ways and serve as resources for your network.
