SilosI’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career shuttling between departments and scaling silo walls, and now I find myself working with and mentoring individuals that do much the same.

Hey executives, haven’t we advanced at least a few steps beyond the work style and structure invented somewhere around the industrial revolution?  Or is organizing in and hanging out in self-referencing professional or vocational groups a distinctly human issue?

Instead of attacking the root causes and managerial laziness and lack of leadership creativity that perpetuates siloism in so many organizations (a good post for my Management Excellence blog), let’s dispel some common myths about people in other roles in your organization and focus on why you should spend some time knocking holes in the silo walls.

Some Observations About Our Still Siloed Workplaces:

  • Contrary to popular myth, the people in other departments are not evil, don’t desire to take over your function (in most cases), and have not recently taken any members of other functions captive as a means of placing demands on your function to step it up a bit.  The reality is that most organizations are filled with good people, working hard and wondering whether their work is making a difference for anyone else.
  • Another popular myth that there are “the idiots around us,” is perpetuated by the everyday street slang of your co-workers. The phrases usually sound something like this: “Those idiots in marketing…” or “The idiots in IT…”  There are far fewer “idiots” than you might think and often this unfortunate labeling comes from a wholesale ignorance of the challenges and activities of those distant colleagues.
  • While the world of projects and project management is increasingly the norm for how work gets done inside organizations, there is still too much “throwing it over the wall” versus good coordination and collaboration.
  • No one organization or function is any more or less important than another, yet to listen to some of my favorite professionals in marketing, sales, IT or Engineering talk, you would rightly conclude that they missed that memo promoting equal importance across functions.

How You Can Make a Difference and Enhance Your Reputation and Career:

  • First of all, chase away thoughts of functional self-importance, and don’t engage in the cross-group criticisms. Instead, seek out colleagues that you interact with in the various functions and spend some time getting to know them, their roles and their challenges.  Where appropriate, share these insights with your direct colleagues.
  • If cross-functional animosity is high, serve as the peacemaker and broker. The issues are often something trivial…process problems, lack of understanding or a breakdown in communications.  Learn to seek the root causes of problems and help broker process and communications improvements.
  • Manage projects to include shared goals, and rewards and to encourage collaboration.  Even if you operate in a heavily matrixed environment, every project team has the opportunity to coalesce as a high performance team or to languish as a transactional entity.  Support and help promote a culture of involvement, engagement and share lessons learned, draw from a wide audience to solve problems and celebrate victories.

The Bottom-Line for Now

You can make a difference in strengthening and improving the culture in your firm.  Doing this often requires that you run alone instead of with the herd, and that takes some courage and fortitude.  The reality is that if you stay true to your approach of brokering relationships and building bridges, you might just find yourself in charge of the herd.