Collaboration: Evan Rosen February 5, 2010, 2:59PM EST

Smashing Silos

Five steps to encourage collaboration and do away with insular business units acting at cross-purposes

Story Tools

No business, institution, or government agency is immune from silo syndrome in which barriers develop among the organization's many parts. But adopting collaborative culture, processes, and tools can keep silo syndrome in check and create greater value.

The term "silo" is a metaphor suggesting a similarity between grain silos that segregate one type of grain from another and the segregated parts of an organization. In an organization suffering from silo syndrome, each department or function interacts primarily within that "silo" rather than with other groups across the organization. Marketing may develop its own culture and have difficulty interacting with other functions such as sales or engineering. This manifestation of silo syndrome breeds insular thinking, redundancy, and suboptimal decision-making.

Silo syndrome can also impact business units, wreaking havoc with customers. In a typical scenario, separate sales organizations for each business unit fail to coordinate. When sales representatives from different silos call on the same people, customers may conclude that the vendor either has no regard for his or her time or that the salespeople and the company they represent are disorganized. Unless the vendor is the only game in town, the customer may look elsewhere.

Silos also commonly extend to systems and data. As systems fail to interact and data becomes trapped and unavailable to decision-makers outside the silo, people are less likely to interact. When people are culturally inhibited from interacting across departments and functions, they avoid sharing data and information outside of their silos. It's a vicious cycle, one that can cost an organization in agility, productivity, and responsiveness.

Collaboration Roadblocks

Command-and-control-oriented cultures breed silos. In such cultures, fear prevails. Managers focus on guarding turf rather than on engaging colleagues outside their group. Instead of reaching across the organization, people in command-and-control cultures primarily move information and decisions vertically. If it seems necessary to involve another department or function, a team member runs the idea up the flagpole within his or her silo. Then it's up to a more senior manager whether to engage another department, function, or business unit. Talk about collaboration roadblocks.

Senior leaders are by no means immune to silo syndrome. In some organizations, leaders of business units and functions focus more on managing their teams and their relationships with the CEO than on collaborating across the organization. Silos can also occur among organizational levels when team members are either inhibited or discouraged from engaging senior leaders without going through channels. Also, senior leaders may feel inhibited from engaging front-line workers.

In collaborative organizations, people interact spontaneously regardless of level, role, or region. This encourages broad input into product and service development, process improvements, and marketing campaigns. Rather than present a marketing plan or campaign after it's already developed, why not get sales, finance, and corporate communications involved early? Then the plan has cross-functional buy-in baked right in. And it's likely a stronger plan, because it reflects less-insular input.

In the product design arena, command-and-control organizations inform factory workers what they'll be building and how. These workers are on a need-to-know basis. Collaborative organizations engage factory workers in the design of the products and the manufacturing processes. This breaks down the barriers between product development and manufacturing and reduces the impact of silos. The collaborative approach also reduces product development time and ultimately produces a better result. Toyota expects team members at every level of the organization to participate in process improvements and decisions. The Mayo Clinic innovates patient services by bringing facilities people, doctors, nurses, electricians, and marketers together to develop prototypes.