Thriving in a World of Silos

If you've ever driven across agricultural landscapes, you'll see giant round structures dotting the horizon. These are silos, used to store grain. They're a good metaphor for teams in an organization that work without taking into account, or or even being aware of, what other teams are doing. Like they're in a physical silo. But teams working thus are limiting their potential.

How are you measuring your team's performance? Is it the immediate deliverable (how many invoices are closed in a month?) or the wider corporate outcome (the balance of accounts receivable at the end of the year)? Most organizations tend to measure the more immediate impact, as it's easier to capture, directly motivates an employee (they see exactly what they need to do to "succeed"), and allows for departmental Profit and Loss (P&L) measurements. Organizational silos tend to emerge as an unintended consequence of narrow KPIs. Ironically, individual silo success might lead to overall organizational decline (think of IT "optimizing" storage, or HR "saving" on salaries).

As silos tend to emerge organically, we're all bound to run into them. As a leader, or a team member, how do you ensure silos don't threaten the health of your org? The following tactics have helped me and will hopefully help you too:

1. Encourage individuals to climb out of the silo. If we take the metaphor further and think of the organization as a field of silos, the first step is to climb out and see the whole field. Climbing out of the silo means understanding not just how your team is measured, but how it contributes to the overall success of the organization. Helping your team understand where they fit in the overall picture helps them see how sticking to small details or insisting on "doing their job" might actually hurt the overall organizational outcome. That big picture is often missing, and it needs to be explained over and over, with emphasis at every step of success.
2. Allow teams to peer into other silos. While every team contributes to organizational success, no team is solely responsible for it. Seeing what other teams do, how they do it, how they're measured, etc., brings a sense of camaraderie and understanding that no amount of KPI setting can. It converts the conversation from "that team always does this" to "in this situation, person abc did this because x, and they've contributed 123 to the overall success". It changes relationships and interactions from blackbox input/output to more human understanding.
3. If you're wheat, try thinking like barley. This is about inviting teams to think about how they can make the lives of other teams easier. In most corporate environments, work tends to happen in steps/deliverables/outcomes that are handed over from one team to another. If we try to think of how other teams do their jobs, and what they contribute, we can start to see the steps we can take to make it easier for them. Conversely, what small change can the other team make to make our lives easier, and can we tell them about it? Better yet: mix wheat and barley; simply allow people from one team to shadow/observe other teams. I've found that while official job exchanges are most effective, even a quick shadow/"day in the life" exercise will help teams open their eyes to how other people work.
4. Setup red phones between silos. At one point in the Cold War, to avert accidental nuclear war, an emergency "red phone" communication channel between the US & USSR leadership was set up where they could immediately and directly speak to each other during a crisis*. No matter how well-intentioned we all are, miscommunications and conflicts arise. Instead of the default approach of adding managers on email CC, I found that having individuals speak one-to-one diffuses crises while preserving trust and empathy. In each team there are usually trusted, respected, communicative team members, and those would be the ideal "red phones" - task them with finding a peer in the other team and hashing out with them.

A final thought: modern, large organizations can't operate without some level of specialization. Focusing on a role allows an individual (and by extension, their team) to become better at what they do and is a definite competitive advantage. With this in mind, I don't think we need to do away with specialization altogether, but we do need to be vigilant of the side effects; in this instance, silos. If the vision is clear and communication is encouraged, working in silos doesn’t have to be the default way organizations operate.

How are you helping your team climb our of silos in your org?

*There was never a physical red phone; that's a movie prop. It was actually a teletype machine, to ensure no miscommunications or bad connections derail a critical detail.