Breaking Down Barriers: Silo Busting in the Organization
We are often asked to find ways to break down barriers between people. Owners will talk about trouble between competing senior management, where territorial and political power-plays bring competition into the organization.
Such negative behavior often becomes incredibly intense, where individuals stop communicating. People become more focused on their own part of the organization rather than on the whole, aiming for win-lose situations against other individuals, teams, departments, divisions or companies within a group.
This totally counter-productive activity is often referred to as ‘silo-behavior’. When we review organizations with competing silos, we find ourselves seeing many dangerous ‘silo-behaviors’ and characteristics.
These include senior leaders of functional activities who constantly disagree with each other. They do not, nor cannot, cooperate with leaders from other functions. We recently watched in awe at one company where the director of sales and head of finance literally could not look at each other. They did not make eye contact and their body-language exhibited pent-up violence and aggression with grimacing, tightly screwed-up faces.
Silo-behavior leads to political posturing and internal competitive activity. Individuals within the organization fight with each other, making each other’s lives more difficult. Others within their span-of-control join-in this tribal behavior until teams and departments find creative ways to trip each other up. Allegiance is committed to their leader within their immediate silo rather than to the organization overall.
This silo-behavior leads to politically-motivated internal conflict, and at worst tribal warfare, exhibiting an insular cleaving-together of competing groups. We can see lack of collaboration with other tribal groups, productivity-inefficiencies, time-wasting, lost-sales, poor-delivery on those sales which are made and lack of useful-communication. The self-interest of these warring tribes leads to direct extra costs to the company, damages the reputation of the organization and destroys morale amongst those who do not wish to take part in such counter-productive activity.
Things might not be as bad as the warfare just described, but there can still be indicators of silo-behavior within an organization. This may include people falling into comfort zones in their work, resisting changes and attempting to defend themselves and their jobs. If they were to work differently in order to develop cross-functional relationships, would they expose weaknesses and thus risk being terminated.
Most miss-behaviors, at worst tribal-warfare, are driven by lack of trust leading to anxiety and ultimately fear. Uncertainty and change can cause disorder and perceived chaos, and most of us want an orderly stable place to work, earn our living and succeed. Unfortunately, people within most organizations need to face up to a world with a constantly changing future.
Breaking down barriers within an organization can challenge people’s tried and tested ways of how they do things, making them vulnerable or exposed. When facing change, anxious individuals will need to shift their beliefs and behaviors and their view of themselves.
Change causes familiarity to give way to uncertainty and the need to take ownership, accountability and responsibility in new situations. When they are faced with their beliefs and feelings being challenged and new behaviors being sought by senior management or owners, people will initially resist until they realize changing is actually to their benefit.
We encounter many situations where a change in relationships and ways of working are needed, the owner or C-Suite can see this, but many resist at every step. People will give strong arguments as to why change is impossible, why things should stay the same and why current activities and processes should not be tampered with by anyone, especially someone from outside the tribe or silo.
Silo-behavior leads to talented people leaving the company, lost-productivity, non-existent innovation, employee and thus customer dissatisfaction and ultimately poor financial performance as the numbers reflect these morale issues, internal inefficiencies and falling revenues. Insular, individual silo-behavior is self-serving. Change-resistant and risk-averse behavior harms organizations and, ultimately, individuals themselves.
Most people prefer to work in an environment where people are close, have a sense of shared purpose and mission, where they trust their leaders enough to take risks, and are able to balance their personal goals and needs with those of their teams as well as being seen to play their individual part in the overall vision of the organization.
Stimulating an environment where people trust each other, where people laugh easily and where good ideas are shared and success is honored, celebrated and genuinely recognized across the organization is a sure way to bust silo-behavior. Encouraging space where people show initiative, create, innovate, and take ownership, accountability and responsibility will help with the change-process within an organization. Spending energy focused on competing with outside rivals and not each other is a must for all organizations.
But of course we should also encourage friendly and healthy competition among people, teams, departments and divisions; but should always discourage silo-behavior.