From Silos to Smart Collaboration

When you have deeply specialized groups within an organization, they can sometimes engage in risky business ventures that are not fully understood outside the team. Such was the case with UBS in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis. One small team had purchased a huge amount of risky financial assets, which everyone outside the team, including the risk management department, believed to be extremely safe. It cost the bank billions when their value plummeted. [2]

Opportunities Are Missed

When different teams share information, they can cross-reference it and find ways of accurately predicting and responding to future events. The Chicago police department successfully did this to combat gang crime, by pulling together lots of disparate data to help them predict where gang fights were likely to occur next. When the project was abandoned, all those benefits were lost. [3]

Development Is Inefficient

Despite multiple attempts to break down the silos inside Sony, Howard Stringer was constantly frustrated by the teams’ inability, or refusal, to break out of their tribal mindsets. This lack of a cohesive vision led to 13 new Sony inventions all requiring a different charger – which their rivals at Apple had addressed with a universal charger. This was symptomatic of how the company that invented the Walkman was eclipsed by the iPod. [4]

Collaboration Breaks Down Silos

The benefits of collaboration are huge. In her book, Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner looks in-depth at the effects of collaboration across professional services firms – organizations often seen as ‘dog eat dog’. Her results strongly show that as more and more departments become involved with a client, income goes up well beyond a simple proportional rise. In other words, the sum of the whole is greater than its parts! [5]

This is for a number of reasons. For instance, when a client can go to one supplier to solve complex problems, they are less inclined to haggle over price. They are also less inclined to shop around. This also makes the client more loyal to your company, and less likely to jump ship when one of your employees moves to a new firm. [6]

So with all these benefits, how do you break down silos and create a culture of smart collaboration? Here are Tett and Gardner’s tips:

Hire for Collaboration

Make collaboration part of your culture by building it into the job spec for new hires. When you’re interviewing candidates, ask them about their history of collaborating with colleagues, and make it clear this will be an expected part of their role.

Mix It Up

Create situations for people from different teams to work together. Facebook’s ‘Bootcamp’ program puts groups of new hires together for their first six weeks, regardless of position. At the end of that time, they go off to their own departments with solid relationships across the business – encouraging cross-team cooperation.

Facebook also stage regular ‘hackathons’, where everyone in the company is encouraged to develop ideas with other interested people. This social event, including a mass order of Chinese food, allows people to work with others they don’t usually encounter. [7]

These examples may not suit your organization, but find ways to have your people working across different teams to promote relationships and the sharing of ideas.

Set the Right Incentives

This isn’t just about salaries and bonuses, it’s about all the metrics you use to measure performance. However you measure people, they will try to optimize their performance in that area. So asking people to collaborate, but measuring each team’s output in isolation will be counter-productive. Look for wider signs of progress and development, like overall sales performance or company profit margins, which encourage collaboration. If you really need the individual team measurements for management purposes, try not to publicize that those measures are being taken. [8]

Sell the Personal Benefits

In the short term, collaboration may seem to be a negative. People may see it as more work, or resent having to share/hand off client work to colleagues. But in the long term, results show that individuals who collaborate extensively with colleagues advance their careers and salaries. Collaboration benefits come back to them, either as referred work from other colleagues or in enhanced reputation throughout the company, for example. [9]

Change Your Mindset

Your organization is probably structured in a way that makes sense to you for internal purposes. But how do your clients see you? What do they need from you? The Cleveland Clinic, in the US, famously completely restructured itself around patient expectations. Instead of having departments full of similar specialists working together, they created cross-discipline departments surrounding the types of medical problems their patients had. Customer satisfaction skyrocketed, as did their business. [10] Make sure you’re not stuck in a mental silo, thinking that the way your business is run is the only way to do it.

Share the Knowledge

If you’re hoping to offer your colleagues’ experience to clients, it’s important to know what they can all do! At the same time, if your colleagues know about your clients, they can offer help with situations as they arise. Communication is key to this – and Gardner recommends a collaborative technology platform, which allows individuals to share knowledge and ask for help as necessary. [11]

Change From Silos to Collaboration

All of these suggestions involve changing culture, so best practice around change management, and especially culture change, will apply. But if you can convince people of the benefits of collaboration, set the right structures to support it and create incentives to make it appealing, you might just transform your business.