Silos
“You’re kidding!” I said. “You don’t have a ‘we/they’ syndrome here?” Kevin, a vice president of operations, sat smiling and shaking his head as I continued. “No cross-functional friction? No field-versus-corporate mentality? No management-versus-employees attitude? No ‘we/they’?!” I couldn’t believe it. If it were true, his would be the first organization I’d ever seen that didn’t have this problem.
“Nope,” he said and added with a grin, “there’s no ‘we/they’ here. But it is ‘us against them’!”
Kevin was having a little fun. “Of course,” his humor implied, “of course we have a ‘we/they’ syndrome. Who doesn’t?”
I met another executive who had a more direct way of putting it: “John, I can sum up all our problems in a few words: ‘silos and butt-covering.’”
Do you have silos in your organization called accounting, sales, manufacturing, marketing, R&D, operations, administration, the home office, or the field? Can people be heard claiming in some way, “That’s not my job,” while the walls grow taller, stronger, and more difficult to overcome? I know of one company whose field sales organization actually refers to its own headquarters as the “Sales Prevention Club”! Then there was the customer service rep at a mail-order company (I’d called in to check on an overdue order) who told me, “Yeah, the shipping department is doing it to us again!” Us? Whose team does she think she’s on?
For all the time and resources our organizations spend on team-building, we still seem to forget one simple truth: We’re all on the same team. Every day, we see groups, departments, regions, and individuals work at cross purposes. Our so-called teams bicker and complain about the “others” who don’t “do their jobs right.” This kind of compartmentalization and infighting drains the life right out of an organization. It’s like having a tandem bike with the riders facing in opposite directions: lots of activity, lots of exertion, but no forward movement.
With competitors working to beat us every day, can we really afford to be working against each other, too? Let’s climb out of our silos, forget the “we/they,” and remember: We’re all on the same team.