Team work: 'Silos' vs. collaboration

Silo mentality is the mindset of people or groups, which ensures that they are only interested in their own local activities rather than collaborating with others to achieve overall organisational goals. When groups suffer from silo mentality, they are analogous to relay teams who continuously drop the baton, rather than seamlessly coordinating activities to achieve overall success. No business, institution, or government agency is immune from the silo syndrome where barriers develop among the organisation's many divisions.

Marketing may develop its own culture and have difficulty interacting with other functions such as finance or supply chain. This manifestation of the silo syndrome breeds insular thinking and suboptimal decision-making negatively impacting the overall performance of the organisation.

Collaboration roadblocks

Command-and-control-oriented or regimental cultures breed silos. In such cultures, fear prevails. Managers focus on guarding turf rather than on engaging colleagues outside their group. Instead of reaching across the organisation, people in command-and-control cultures primarily move information and decisions vertically not horizontally. If it seems necessary to involve another department or function, a team member runs the idea up the flagpole within his or her silo. Then it's up to a more senior manager to decide whether to engage another department, function or business unit.

Unless an organisation does something to break down silos, the challenge will only get worse as the amount of information trapped in silos grows. Senior leaders are by no means immune to the silo syndrome.

In some organisations, leaders of business units and functions focus more on managing their teams and their relationships with the CEO than on collaborating across the organisation.

Silos can also occur at organisational levels when team members are either inhibited or discouraged from engaging senior leaders without going through channels. Also, senior leaders may feel inhibited from engaging front-line workers.

Critical distinction

Smashing silos is not the answer to the problems silos cause. To break the organisational silos barrier, the goal is not to destroy silos themselves but to eliminate the problems that silos cause. That is a critical distinction.

Managers may be tempted to think that getting rid of silos is the answer. But the structure that silos bring is important in terms of creating accountability and responsibility within a function - after all, every function has to deliver its own functional goals, but the important thing is to keep the end game in mind which is the overall goal of the organisation.

Silo managers know clearly what they are responsible for. Cooperation, communication, and collaboration are the three keys to working across silos. Those are components that ideally any successful working relationship would have, but they are must-haves if you are going to break the organisational silos barrier. You can break this barrier when knowledge, focus, and control are shared among more than one silo.

The solution is about losing tower vision and looking at and seeing things from a different person's or department's point of view. Breaking this barrier is also not about proving who is 'wrong' and who is 'right'. It is perfectly understandable why silo heads have different priorities and why they believe that they are doing the best thing for the company when they are doing the best thing for their silo.

When managers have been given responsibility and authority, it is only natural that they will choose to exercise them - and not always in moderation. When decisions to reprioritise do get made, it is because collaboration or communication has allowed a shift in perspective.

Human nature forces people to want to do the best they can within their own 'sandbox' at the expense of everybody else. 'Owning' a function or a part of a business naturally brings forth a manager's entrepreneurial spirit, and you don't get to be head of a silo without being competitive.

Managers rationalise their lack of cooperation as "I've been given this area to run as I see fit and I need to do the best job I possibly can." This is easier said than done, of course. We are, after all, in typical silo heads talking about a group of more focused, highly competitive individuals.

A good process to remove barriers, highlights where cooperation is not taking place, and points out the consequences of the lapses. It puts in place measures to ensure that decisions are not made in isolation.