How to Tear Down Corporate Silos

Featured article by Hayes Drumwright, Founder of PoP

It has been reported throughout many different businesses how silos, no matter the size, can be detrimental to an organization’s ability to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Having silos in place can cause a barrier between the individual employee and senior level management. Often times, senior leadership can be completely isolated from lower management levels.

It’s defined by the Business Dictionary as a “mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. This type of mentality will reduce efficiency in the overall operation, reduce morale, and may contribute to the demise of a productive company culture.” Make no mistake; the silo mentality becomes synonymous with power struggles, lack of cooperation, and loss of productivity. And always, the customer/client is the ultimate loser.

We’ve seen firsthand what silos can do to an enterprise: The organization dissolves into various groups of isolated camps, with little incentive to collaborate, share information, or team up to achieve any large corporate initiative. Leaders will focus on serving their individual agendas and companies will witness the inevitable internal battles over authority, finances and resources. Sadly, the result is poor productivity and missed opportunities.

What can be done to tear down silos, reduce conflicts, and increase collaboration? Here are a few ideas:

Reward collaboration

Too many companies talk about collaboration yet reward individual achievement. Therefore, the first obvious solution is to change the reward system. Define and make collaborative performance objectives part of the employee review process. Recognize and promote people who work across organizational boundaries – and tell their stories to the whole organization.

It is also important to make other divisions in the company share data with one another so people understand how each division is performing, what customer or external stakeholder complaints are, and where this room for improvement.

If you frame the organization’s need to break down silos as a positive opportunity, you will see more people raising their hand to do it and be more willing to collaborate with one another. Help people in different divisions understand how they have a chance to make the organization better and more powerful by eliminating the barriers between divisions or management levels.

Focus on innovation.

Innovation is triggered by an interactive mingling of ideas, such as when the “right people” happen to meet at the right time and discover that each can offer something in the mix. It is in the combination and collaboration of ideas that creative breakthroughs happen. So anytime an organization can put serious focus on innovation, the natural result is bringing people together with different perspectives and skill-sets. And this will absolutely help in breaking down barriers and silos in the process.

Communicate transparently

Silos cut off clear communication between different business units or managerial levels. People can fall easily into only communicating with those directly around them or those who are at the same level in the organization. When there is little or unclear communication between groups, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. As a leader, you fall out of touch with employee sentiment, lose track of important resources at your fingertips and don’t hear crucial feedback.

In Patrick Lencioni’s book Silos, Politics and Turf Wars he states; “Silos – and the turf wars they enable – devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals.” For many companies, this shows a need for employees and executives to be able to be transparent and engaged and at the forefront. It is crucial that the leadership team agrees to a common and unified vision for the organization and communicates that throughout. A unified leadership team will encourage trust, create empowerment, and break managers out of the “my department” approach and into the “our organization” approach.

Encourage networking

We are big believers in networking within a company. It goes a long way in facilitating collaboration. Workplace relationships and communities can then happen organically in a very positive and supportive manner and you’re well on your way in developing a much shared environment.

It is not an easy task for companies to break down silos however; ignoring the issue can be detrimental to the employees and ultimately the overall health of the organization. It is important for companies to help facilitate a unified vision and establish realistic steps to providing team members with a clear purpose and means to accomplishing the ultimate common goal. There is nothing more powerful in any company than having all employees working towards one unified goal.

Hayes Drumwright is the founder of PoP, an invite-only process and funding platform that al­lows IT professionals to leverage crowdsourcing, crowd-solv­ing and crowdfunding to meet specific business challenges, and to spin out new companies. In 2010, Hayes was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Orange County and the Desert Regions, California.

Drumwright is also the Executive Chairman of Trace3, a business transformation solutions company that empowers organizations to lead their market categories by keeping pace with the rapid changes in IT innovation. Trace3 works with clients on specific business initiatives to maximize growth by leveraging the latest in cloud, big data and IT infrastructure technologies, while also focusing on improvements to organizational health.