The benefits of collaboration to individuals are equally quantifiable, if less intuitive. My research clearly shows that professionals who contribute to colleagues’ client work sell more services to their own clients. Why? When you team up with colleagues, they better understand what you have to offer, and that knowledge makes them more likely to refer work to you down the road. Because referrals are a more-efficient way to generate work than prospecting on your own, they make it easier to reach revenue targets. In one law firm I studied, a single work referral typically generated about $50,000 of extra revenue for the partner who received it.
Of course, not all colleagues who come to appreciate your capabilities will send you work immediately; they must wait until their clients require your expertise. On average, partners in my study got a new client referral within a year from one in every six colleagues they teamed up with.
But even when teammates don’t send work themselves, they are likely to spread word of your expertise to colleagues who need it. At the law firm, it took working with just two extra teammates to generate a referral from someone who had never sent work to that individual before. That might not seem like much, but the compounded effect of word of mouth is powerful: As colleagues recommend your work to others in the firm, your reputation is likely to grow significantly over time.Collaboration raises a partner’s profile not only with colleagues but also in the wider market. Professional services are notoriously opaque: It’s hard for clients to judge their value, even after the fact. At least in the near term, it’s nearly impossible to answer with any certainty questions like “Did the consultant’s recommendation lead to our bankruptcy?” “Did the executive search firm place the absolute best candidate in the role?” or “What risks would we have faced without the vast legal expenditure?” That uncertainty means that clients rely heavily on a professional’s reputation, gleaned from word-of-mouth recommendations, when making hiring decisions. Those recommendations carry a lot of weight; they lead not only to more work but also to more-sophisticated and more-lucrative work. At the law firm, the more cross-discipline projects partners worked on, and the more complex each one was, the more partners could charge for their work in subsequent years.
Working on multidisciplinary projects also helps professionals learn how to sell more-sophisticated work to their own clients. Take Laurie, a consultant specializing in operations efficiency for automotive clients. Two years ago she was drawn onto a postmerger integration project for a pharmaceutical company because many of her colleagues in the operations practice had conflicts of interest. Laurie was introduced to the frameworks and approaches used by her colleagues in finance, regulation, and branding, and she began to understand how those disciplines informed one another. With these new lenses, she could spot a broader array of issues for her own clients. Laurie stayed in touch with several of the experts from other specialty areas, and their informal talks bolstered her ability to strike up conversations with her clients about issues beyond operations. Some 18 months later one of her automotive clients engaged Laurie’s firm for a wholesale restructuring of a division, and Laurie is now leading the cross-practice team.
Complex projects give individuals access to those high-level executives in the client organization who have more responsibility and larger budgets. One chief executive I spoke with recalled a consultant he had worked with earlier in his career. This consultant, a marketing specialist, tended to focus exclusively on brand-related issues in her clients’ product portfolios, and so her influence never extended beyond the marketing department. The CEO contrasted her with one of his current consultants, who drew on cross-specialty experience to recognize that the company’s product portfolio affected its offshoring operations and in turn its tax regime. This savvy consultant identified a complex project involving not only marketing but also operations, strategy, and finance experts. The project commanded higher fees, and the consultant established a reputation as a go-to person for sophisticated issues.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration also helps insulate professionals from economic downturns. I found that professionals who were even moderately connected to others in their firm—that is, they had worked each year with just 10 other partners in the three years prior to the 2008 recession—preserved their revenue during the downturn, whereas the revenue of those who were more isolated dropped significantly. And collaborating partners’ revenue climbed much more quickly when the economy recovered. Some of this benefit derives from the social cohesion that stems from collaboration: Those who had teamed up before the downturn were more likely to con