Smash Siloes, Build Trust, Drive Performance

Have you been in the meetings where there is a stand off between departments?

The classic is sales and marketing. Sales blames marketing for the lack of opportunities and customer leads and marketing tries to argue that they aren't accountable for lead generation.

Another is product development who create incredible innovative product ideas that customers simply don't want. They have failed to connect with other departments such as customer service and sales to understand what customers are asking for.

Finally, there are finance teams who manage the accounting and planning processes. They appear to build the structure without any regard for the time required from other teams to input on it and the lack of value it seems to deliver for them.

All these issues create internal tension, politics and friction within organisations that should be working jointly to deliver business performance.

There is a lack of empathy, understanding and trust between departments and as time passes, beliefs become embedded and are hard to change.

Breaking Siloes as a Leadership Mission

It is well understood that these engrained beliefs and siloes are unhealthy and damaging. Leaders and managers can become obsessed with finding ways to build bridges across departments.

Typical examples include;

• Sharing Events - departments hold events such as 'lunch and learn' to share more about what they do and how they work.
• Guest Attendance - representatives from different teams join meetings to participate more actively
• Cross Functional Teams - groups are formed around tasks that involve several departments to shift the functional structure of the business and break boundaries.

These are all helpful, but are limited in their effects because they do not always result in sustained engagement nor do they contribute to the major elements of trust building commercially.

The Five Elements of Commercial Trust

At Foxleigh Commercial Performance we teach there are five elements that as they increase, increase the levels of trust that exist.

Lunch and learn events, attendance at meetings and working in cross-functional projects can all help build a greater understanding and awareness of shared value. They will also aid greater evidence of reliability and credibility, but they are less able to demonstrate vulnerability.

Reciprocal Mentoring to Smash Siloes

On a recent episode of The Commercial Edge Podcast I spoke with Dr. Gillian Shapiro who is pioneering a programme of reciprocal mentoring.

The results are incredible.

What Gilly and her colleagues have noticed is that over the programme of development and implementation trust grows, as does the level of understanding, support and ongoing partnerships.

They walk through the process with the group in a set of pre-determined stages that are designed to support success.

1. Partners are carefully connected to cross internal boundaries such as function and people are paired based on a matching process.
2. The programme is launched through a workshop
3. The pairs are given a structure and encouraged to meet and mentor each other
4. The whole group is regathered to review and discuss successes
5. Pairs are supported and challenged to fully embrace the reciprocal nature of the mentoring.

Gilly admits that at first what happens is traditional mentoring where one partner takes the lead. But, over time, with encouragement and some challenge the relationships evolve and indeed become reciprocal.

What Gilly and the team have seen are the formation and establishment of true partnerships that endure for much longer than the programme length.

Effect of Vulnerability

We do not trust people who appear to be perfect.

Whether we are choosing a restaurant in a strange city or building a relationship at work, we know that humans are fallible and therefore when we cannot see failings, we are suspicious

Mentoring requires us to ask questions and advice from someone else.

We are demonstrating vulnerability at significant levels.

Furthermore, the advice that we receive, builds credibility, and reliability and must come from a good understanding of our challenges otherwise it is useless.

This combination of reciprocal mentoring and its enduring nature could be the secret to why it is so powerful and why it could be the answer to smashing siloes across your organisation.

Consider what you could gain from better, closer relationships across your business and the blurring of barriers between teams.

There is a lot of research into the impact of cross-functional teams on performance so the evidence is there - you simply need to find the way to deliver it.

Reciprocal mentoring could be the answer you are seeking.