A New Silo; A New Obstacle

Do you find your workplace projects going through rework over and over again? Does your workplace encourage collaboration? As we embrace knowledge-based operations and performance, we realize there are departmental silos, where departments function in a linear process to accomplish tasks. Such that department A does its work then passes the project to department B, which then passes to C and so forth until the process is done. In some cases, like supply and order provisioning, this linear approach works. However, in other situations such as new initiative development, this linear approach almost always results in rework which causes missed deadlines and budget overages, or in the worst situation, a failed initiative.

Many of my connections are already aware of departmental silos and have begun changes to eliminate them. What’s interesting is once the departmental silos are gone, a new one may appear – functional silos. The functional areas of a workplace include Process Engineering, IT, HR, Training, Quality, Legal, Sales, Service, Production, etc. I’ve seen this obstacle appear throughout my entire career. It never fails that any number of functional areas are not invited to participate in a project at the initial brainstorming.

So why is it that all functional areas aren’t invited? Well, it usually comes down to a fear of expense and loss of time. The traditional view has been that one area owns the project and all others are just order-takers. This is usually the result of a leader in the organization who practices a dictator style of leadership. “I’m the leader and I know what’s best, so don’t question, just do what I say.” Back when knowledge couldn’t be shared as easily as today, that style of leadership may have been the right style. But today, knowledge isn’t limited to leaders, in fact, as Generation Y and the Millennials come into the workplace; they bring a wealth of knowledge about technology and current-day trends.

Eliminating functional silos probably won’t happen overnight. I’d wager that if you simply invite a representative from each functional area to your next brainstorming meeting, many of them will just sit there not knowing how to contribute. I’ll further wager they sit there in that state because they do not have the vision to see how their role contributes to the overall performance of the workforce.

So there’s the obstacle. How to get each functional area to contribute to overall workforce performance? To complete this cultural change, you need a systemic view and understanding of the workplace. A robust workforce functions as a single inter-connected web of knowledge and excellence. It is very important to recognize how and why the workforce needs to act as a single unit. Your customers see your workforce as the product, not as 100 individuals in 10 departments. Think about the last time you bought a mobile phone. You compared products, i.e. iPhone vs. any one of the numerous Droids vs. Blackberry vs. any number of standard phones. You didn’t compare Apple’s workforce to Google’s to HTC’s to etc…

It is an interesting phenomenon in that when wearing the shoes of an employee we quickly forget what we think about when in the shoes of a consumer. This is why that systemic perspective is so important. As individual contributors we have two responsibilities: 1) we need to contribute excellence in our craft (function) to the workforce and 2) we need to contribute by incorporating the brand (personality, edge) and company vision, mission, and purpose into every project we work on. Once we contribute in both of these ways, we begin to eliminate the functional silos.