Avoiding Siloed Execution of Cross-Functional Strategies

?Today’s business strategies are about driving a great customer experience.?Yet, most companies are set up to create fragmented, hyper-specialized, and focused work units that are rewarded for activity, not the collective pursuit of shared goals.??

?Think about it. Practices such as budgeting, headcount, hiring, and skill development are linked to the organizational chart. It's a convenient way to create control, but customers don't care how your company is organized. That's a big "hidden problem" for executives because the entire business landscape is set up to reinforce silos. From management consultants to budgeting and hiring, it's all tied to the organizational chart. And that's creating barriers to successful execution.

Most organizations are intentionally siloed. Take a second and think about your workplace. How are you organized? Most people can't talk about their work without their department (on the org chart). That means most people end up working within their own bubbles, typically on their own or in smaller work units. Siloed culture and practices used to be great for defining the span of control and aligning internal operations to create efficiency and throughput in the industrial era; however, with more customer-intimate business strategies, and the virtual nature of distributed work, the reality of forward-leaning business strategy is colliding with legacy management thinking.

Initiatives collide. Prioritization happens at individual keyboards. Departments hoard people and value. And cross-functional teams like strategy teams, sales teams, and customer experience teams spend more time trying to influence and get mindshare internally than growing the company. There is much organizational drag holding your company back, and executives don't know what to do about it, so they create more initiatives to help, which creates more work to do. And the cycle continues.

In this article, we will cover the pitfalls of siloed organizations and the importance of implementing a team capital strategy that fosters networking, teamwork, and open communication to drive shared goals and create cross-functional accountability to the business strategy.

What Does a Siloed Organization Look Like?

Siloed organizations tend to be broken into different silos per department, meaning that resourcing, prioritization, and skills are perceived to exist in specific departments on the organizational chart. ?A siloed culture means that people will only talk to those within their departments versus co-creating value with others throughout the company based on the shared goals they are supposed to pursue. This alignment and pursuit of shared goals are very different from receiving emails and attending meetings with other groups to coordinate activity.

Silos can also be less physical and more psychological, where there’s competition between different departments. Recent work by Accenture found that 75% of executives believe that departments compete internally.?That competition for headcount, specialized skills, and preferred processes separates employees with different experience levels. In addition, the specialization found within silos creates myopic decision-making and leaders who want to include some people and exclude others based on previous relationships, not the needs of the business. To sum it up, a siloed culture results in a separation culture, which reinforces, and hardens the status quo and the way things have always been done.

The Pitfalls of Siloed Organizations

When people work in siloed environments, they adopt a “silo mentality.” A silo mentality is when people only think about their work and not how to think beyond strategizing with others. Most people believe that they individually are doing well, but “everyone else” is not.?That’s siloed thinking, and it’s rampant in today’s organizations. When a company has team members and employees who only care about themselves and not the collective work of teams, quality, performance, and strategy suffer.

?Some pitfalls that are the result of a siloed culture include the following:

• Limited Interaction with Others: If silos separate your employees, they are most likely not communicating with one another. Without communication, work processes slow down, and output isn’t as exceptional as it can be. Not to mention, it can result in serious division within the organization as people are most likely going to only hang out with those in their silo.
• ?Teaming Barriers to Change: Once people are used to working in a silo, they have a hard time accepting goals and objectives that disrupt or alter them. For example, “improving customer experience” becomes someone else’s responsibility.?As a result, employees can become attached to silos and see themselves as an isolated part of the organization, detaching their work from adding value to other people and teams.
• ?Resistance to Cross-Collaboration: A major pitfall of siloed culture is that it results in less cross-collaboration between silos. When more departments can come together to drive corporate goals together, the solutions become more powerful because people are working on the project. Collaboration across teams, functions, and even departments is necessary for every organization to produce exceptional results. Without it, the quality and consistency of the collective work across teams can fall short of expectations because of low work quality and slow output that goes unnoticed due to siloed perspectives.

How to Transition to a Networking Culture

Many companies have found a way to stop separating and slicing the organization by departments and experience levels. How did they do it? The prioritized increase communication and collaboration and they spend much time setting the right goals and resourcing those goals with the best people internally - no matter where they sit. For that to happen, silos need to be minimalized from the organizational structure. Especially where strategic execution is required. To encourage networking and cross-collaboration within your company culture, follow the steps below:

1. ?Convey the team's shared vision, goals, and purpose. One of the most important things you can do for your business is to ensure that all employees think of themselves as team members first, not job-holders. Team members put the team first, and they are vested in the quest to achieve shared goals and purpose. If people think of themselves as "employees who report to a boss," you're in a siloed culture. Our research shows that 75% of people and managers think this way instead of embodying and driving team values where they work together because of shared purpose. While individuals express intent to work together, the day-to-day involves 1-way communication, a focus on tasks, not goals, and an obsession with workload and busyness, not collaborative problem solving and creativity.
2. Encourage bi-directional communication and feedback loops. If you notice a siloed culture, one major way to break this is to measure communication flow and feedback loops. Many leaders schedule team meetings with everyone who reports to them, so they all have a chance to get to know one another and strategize. However, todays' customer-centric strategies require cross-department communication and feedback, and co-creation. This moves beyond one-way status updates and calendar coordination into blending capabilities and brain-power from across the organization for customers' good. This takes much time for everyone to get used to one another and figure out "who's supposed to do what." Many team leaders aren't equipped or trained to work this way and are rewarded for focusing on their department, not supporting initiatives, or collaborative inter-departmental workflows. Once department and people-leaders view themselves as team contributors and team leaders, the ideas put forth will be more advanced than anything your organization has ever seen.
3. Implement a Team-Capital Strategy. Efficient and effective production is the heart of any successful enterprise. But the methods of production have changed over time. In early agrarian economies, farmers were responsible for the entire production process, from planting to harvest. Then, during the Industrial Revolution, workers were made to specialize, resulting in greater efficiency but serious deficiencies in the knowledge production needed to move the organization forward into the digital economy. Today, valuable production is the responsibility of work teams – groups of people who pursue shared goals and collective accountability to business outcomes.?Team Capital requires leadership to think of the workplace in terms of the value created in multiple ways and at multiple levels. For example, the workflows and services produced at the company, the function, and team levels.?This is difficult to accomplish without a strategy because 75% of employees believe a “team” is defined as the leader they report to and the way people show up to work together. In other words, they don’t think of the collective goals and shared accountability they have to others outside their direct reporting structure.?Team capital is the strategic capability required to align, enable, and measure execution because execution requires the sum of the parts and “best of” each department involved.?For example, improving new hire productivity is a cross-departmental challenge that “nobody owns” outright.?Another example is helping sales teams sell to new executive buyers where no clear ownership exists. Yet, many people are involved across marketing, product, sales enablement, operations, and of course, sales.

Capability teams, that harness the collective intelligence of the business are now responsible for driving meaningful work. Let's face it. Customers and clients don’t care how the company is organized. They care about the benefits and value they receive from the experience your company creates.

1. ?Align Effort and Resources to Goals.?Try having two or more departments pair up with one another and give them a task to complete. Something simple, like agree to the purpose of their meetings together.?Watch what happens.?While “working collaboratively” sounds good in theory, the reality is very, very different. Most leaders and employees aren’t equipped to create something from anything where broad perspectives come together.?Instead, people leaders and managers are taught and encouraged to become experts in their people's skills (aligned to a position on the organizational chart). This approach is very different from figuring out how to work together to pursue goals broader than the department's remit.?Smart digitally driven companies are resourcing and aligning to goals and initiatives first, and organizational chart second, creating new ways to budget, resource, allocate time, and promote people.

Learn More About How to Align Your Organizational Culture

Teams that communicate with one another create unbelievable, powerful results for your business. ?When that happens, leaders and team members execute more customer-centric strategies and achieve breakthroughs – together – across silos.?We help people break free from the shackles of the industrial revolution represented by command and control, inspection, and fragmented perspectives up, down, and across the organization.?We create shared purpose, align processes and people, and equip teams to create new internal capabilities.?To do that, teams must be identified, resourced, trained, and enabled.