We would all like our organizations to operate as one big team, with individual departments harmoniously working together for the greater good. However, in many cases, that is far from the truth. The sales department isn’t speaking to manufacturing before making big promises to customers about delivery, purchasing is chasing its own agenda, and engineering is doing its best to outshine every other department. Meanwhile, discord is growing among the workforce.
Instead of operating as a team, the organization is populated by department silos acting in isolation. Open communication is non-existent, as is a culture of collaboration and any hope of team-based success.
In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, co-hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh discuss the destructive nature of silos to a team-based continuous improvement organization. They explore why silos form and delve into methods to knock those silos down.
The Why
Dyer outlines three factors that allow silos to form:
Competition—Department or business unit leaders try to make themselves look good in aid of a future promotion, either by building up their department or tearing down other departments.
The “blame” game—A catastrophe occurs, and finger-pointing begins. “It wasn't our fault. The drawings were right, and manufacturing just didn't make the parts correctly,” Dyer cites as an example.
Departmental measures—Are your departmental measures/goals/metrics aligned with a well understood common vision of where the company is headed? “If these objectives don't align with each other, then you could have departments that are fighting against each other,” Dyer says.
Saleh ties the three factors to flawed organizational design principles. “Obviously there isn't, in this scenario, a shared mental model, which ultimately hinders people's ability to want to speak up and talk to one another,” he says.
The Fix
The continuous improvement experts explore two ways to knock down silos. The first: Develop a shared vision and determine how all the departments can work together to make it happen. If excellence in the eyes of the customer is the goal, for example, how can engineering and manufacturing and purchasing work together to make that happen?
“It's how did everybody work in concert with each other, and we either win as a team or we lose [as a team],” Dyer says.
The second way to knock down silos is to promote a better understanding among the departments about what each other does. Dyer relates an experience he had as a facilitator for a process-mapping exercise and how it helped departments understand each other’s challenges.
Such activities, Saleh says, “bring awareness to upstream and downstream processes. And what happens in that process is that people have an appreciation or a shared mental model on the true purpose behind what we're all trying to go after.”
“That’s why having cross-functional teams is critically important,” Dyer adds.
Saleh and Dyer conclude the podcast episode by teasing a third method to break down silos and promise to follow up on a future episode.
