Podcast: Break Down Barriers Between Departments: Dr. Deming’s Ninth Point for Management

Building silos is no way to organizational success. Thought leader Dr. W. Edwards Deming knew that when he stated in his ninth point for management transformation: Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer continue their examination of Dr. Deming’s teachings, focusing this time on his message to remove departmental barriers.

Their discussion points include:

The importance of how a “team” is defined. “If my team is my department, then guess what? I want my department to win,” Dyer says. “That leads to internal competition, internal strife. ‘I'm going to meet my objectives, even if that means you don't meet yours, and I put that over everything else, including the overall success of the organization.’”

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How silos aren’t accidental. “Silos are very deliberate, and they're deliberate because it's an outcome. It's predictable,” Saleh says. “You (can) see how silos happen, and that's usually because of functional (organizational) charts, even department KPIs, sometimes have incentives that create silos.” Those incentives reward local optimizations, he says.

Adds Dyer, “It just baffles me, it really does, how few organizations take the time to sit down and lay out every department's objectives and look for areas where there are competing objectives.”

Cross-functional methods to break down barriers. These include an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration during organizational strategy sessions and for problem-solving; developing metrics that are shared horizontally (cross-functionally); and performing cross-functional gemba walks that help you understand your department’s impact on internal customers.

Ultimately, silos, or departmental barriers, are a leadership design problem, Saleh says. The continuous improvement expert says leaders can’t demand collaboration but must design it in from the start.

“If leaders don't think systemically, silos will always win,” he says.