101: Breaking silos
A siloed organization keeps information secret from the rest of the company, where it can’t be of benefit. Whether due to power struggles or organizational inefficiency, silos can cause a lack of trust among co-workers, communication gaps and cultural complacency. Every department of your organization can suffer as a result, without the information it needs to take advantage of opportunities.
Know the signs. Duplicating tasks is a giveaway that your organization is siloed, says Ken Tacelli at CMSWire.com, a site for senior digital leaders. Without communication, he says, there is no way to know if your work is being duplicated by another department. This can lead to a lack of productivity, inefficiency or worse, such as with data analysis, for example. "The best-case scenario for this duplication … is that teams came up with the same result. However, in many cases, these individuals or teams produce different numbers, causing disagreements about who had analyzed the correct data and which can be fully trusted,” he says.
Band employees together to train and work. Cross-departmental development and collaboration is a great way to dovetail already-budgeted training with silo-breaking practices, says Melissa Agnes at Salesforce.com. These inter-company interactions breed understanding, she says. Agnes suggests, when feasible, physically moving people’s workstations from other departments to be near one another to further build rapport.
Train team leaders to ask frequent questions, not just those prompting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. A 2019 Harvard Business Review article advises requesting information in the least biased way possible. “This means asking open-ended questions that minimize preconceptions … For instance, ‘What do you see as the key opportunity in this space?’ will generate richer dialogue than ‘Do you think this is the right opportunity to pursue?’ Posing those inquiries in your organization’s departments will garner the information you need to eradicate silos.
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