eTip #639 - Busting Department/Team Silos in Your Organization

Every business needs some type of structure, but that’s especially true for larger companies. Once a business reaches 15+ employees, the team is usually broken into departments by role.

In many cases, these divisions turn into silos. Business advisor Michela Quilici defines silos perfectly: “Organizational silos are when individual people, departments, or companies, conduct business in a vacuum, without taking into consideration the impact their actions have on the entire organization. The term silo literally means a ‘storage tower’ – a tall, cylindrical building that separates and stores material on a farm.”

There are a few types of silos you should look out for:

• Hierarchical silos – When people stick to their own level within the company and communicate poorly with superiors or subordinates.
• Virtual silos – When remote workers don’t integrate with your office staff.
• Geographical silos – When people limit communication to their own branch/office/region/time zone.
• Departmental silos – When people limit themselves to their team or teams with the same purpose. This is the most common type.

Silos can handicap your business in several ways:

• Time and resources are wasted.
• Information isn’t shared so needless mistakes occur.
• Learning isn’t shared. Multiple teams fight the same learning curve.
• Investment dollars are wasted because knowledge/solutions/tools are trapped in one part of the company.
• Staff morale fails because people don’t feel like their work has much impact.
• Tasks/tools/solutions are duplicated in different teams.

In the worst cases, siloed organizations experience a failure to collaborate so tragic that teams actively work against one another. For instance, a marketing team who is measured by their generation of leads might pass leads to the sales team they know won’t convert. If there is no communication or cross-measuring between departments, marketing would have no ability or incentive to properly qualify their leads. The result is an ineffective sales team.

Breaking through silos can only happen at the top levels at the company. Their insulation prevents them from working together on their own, so only the top dogs can break the barriers.

1. Encourage mistakes for the sake of learning. One of the reasons silos develop is because people want to protect their jobs. It’s easier to blame another department when things go wrong. Create an environment where failure is permissible if it creates learning for the organization. Instead of focusing on who was responsible for mistakes, spin them into opportunities to prevent them in the future.
2. Direct competitive personalities externally. Healthy competition is good for an organization, but not if teams are competing against one another. No team is truly working in a vacuum, so leadership should help teams understand how their work is interconnected. This is best done by creating a set of shared values for every team to follow.
3. Provide greater flexibility and autonomy. Do you encourage innovation and creativity? Can your employees find better ways to do their jobs? Processes and workflows are important, but the people who use them should have the autonomy to make them better. Growth and new ideas come from testing the status quo.
4. Build trust throughout your entire organization. In medium and large businesses, employees aren’t fully aware of the contributions of people in other departments. You might hear talk like “Sales throws out our leads,” “HR takes forever to respond,” or “Product never uses our recommendations” even though you know those teams are doing their jobs. This is because teams can’t see into the operations of other teams in a siloed organization.

Build trust across teams by making everyone’s job transparent. If sales is disregarding leads, make it clear why. If HR is busy, explain their priorities. If product teams disregard ignore feedback, have them educate the organization as to why so feedback can improve.

Silos don’t form overnight and they can’t be busted in a day either. They require deft leadership (which is something we teach in our Leadership Training for Managers course). But with a little vigilance, they can always be broken.

Bob Dickson

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