Silo Organization

If the growth of your company is not proportional to the growth of the result, If synergy is not created in the team, they do not talk about their mistakes and do not share their experiences. Then your organization may have an silo mentality and the organization itself is an silo organization.

What does a Silo organization mean?

A silo organization refers to a situationally small organization, divided into small, mechanical groups, where employees create a subculture adapted to them and, in some cases, develop terminology, a colloquial language characteristic of the subculture.

A subculture can be formed by departments, organizational ranks, and/or even a few individuals within a department. The steps, changes and sentiments made in such subcultures are unknown to the other group.

The formation of mechanical subcultures, the same silo subculture, is a hindrance to the organization because it separates it from the overall purpose or mission of the organization. At the same time, they operate with their own micro-interests in mind, reducing efficiency and synergy at the organizational or departmental level.

 

Why does a silo mentality develop?

Silo organization - formed by the style of silo thinking, originating from the archaic past, tribal principles.

People still retain the impulses of tribal organization and tend to form a small subculture, have a sense of belonging to this subculture and enter into competition with another subculture, “resist” it, these impulses dictate interaction in small subcultures and other subcultures. - Competition with cultures[1].

When an organization lacks the opportunity for communication and quality connections at a cultural or system level, when the organizational culture is not based on respectful relationships, and when senior management rewards only results-oriented and competitive behavior, it reinforces the silo mentality. For example, the principle of competition between departments increases disunity and kills the desire to cooperate. Tolerance of such an environment by management causes significant damage to the culture of the organization and leads to increased silo thinking/mentality.

Interestingly, silo thinking/mentality can form unintentionally when one team, a department, tries to quickly improve efficiency but fails to consider the processes and activities of other teams.

Why is silo thinking harmful?

Silo thinking has a major impact on organizational performance and can take several forms:

 

Low employee motivation and high staff turnover

Most of the team that leaves a job within a year of starting feels isolated, lacking the ability to collaborate and lacking a sense of unity with the team or leader.

Inefficiency, increasing number of unsuccessful projects

Teams with a silo mentality often fail due to a lack of communication and reluctance to share expertise, and their project completion rate is low and/or slow.

Missed opportunity

Silo mentality perceives the environment from a narrow perspective. Such teams are less likely to accept and share the experiences and perspectives of a new team member. In such an organization, there may be a feeling of missed opportunities, which can be expressed in words and/or actions, for example: “I already tried this method and it didn’t work,” “I tried talking many times, but it didn’t work,” etc.

Lack of alternative way to solve the problem.

Due to lack of communication and silo mentality, companies and teams miss out on alternative ways to solve problems and achieve goals. They lose the opportunity to creatively analyze the current situation.

Changing the Silo Thinking

There are several ways to change silo mentality, all of which involve improving collaboration and communication.

Let's look at some possible steps to help you change your silo organization:

Understanding the mission and vision of the organization by the team

An important way to overcome silo mentality is to define a clear, vibrant, authentic mission and vision. An equally important step in defining the mission and vision is to involve senior management in the development process and explain the importance of the mission and vision to each team member, showing their role in achieving the larger goal.

Leader's role

Silo mentality can be changed through an engaged and engaged leader who encourages employees. Ask questions and create appropriate platforms for them.

To change silo mentality, it is important for a leader to be a role model, empathetic and open to employees' ideas and initiatives.

Changing components of organizational culture

Changing silo mentality is very difficult without rethinking and changing the organizational culture and values in the organization. The main principle is to discover values that are organic to the organization and at the same time define success, emphasize it and take into account it in every process or standard of the organization.

In building culture, it is important to replace negative or neutral connection (causing silos) with high quality connection (HQC) in the organization. Also informal leaders in the organization, the so-called Involvement of cultural intermediaries and their support in changing the thinking of subcultures. Emphasizing the importance of cultural intermediaries in shaping organizational systems and making them a core component of the system.

Mobile organizational structure

It is an organizational structure that facilitates the organization and ability of departments to work together. The best example of such an organizational structure is the flexible structure.

When reviewing the structure and changing it, it is important to identify challenges in the organization, successful and unsuccessful examples of communication and collaboration, and establish an inclusive framework that will help:

• Establishing clearly defined roles and responsibilities;

• creating collaboration platforms and simple processes to get work done quickly;

• clearly define the responsibilities and powers of the organization's middle managers and strengthen them;

• clearly establishing the management style in the organization and uniting people around a common goal.

Cross-functional teams (also called tiger teams)

This arrangement of teams is fully consistent with modern business standards and involves bringing together people from different departments, functions, skills and knowledge to implement one common project and/or goal. The composition of cross-functional teams can vary depending on the goals and objectives. There are two types of cross-functional teams (“tiger teams”). In one case, the team meets once when a big problem arises. An example of this is the principle of teamwork in crisis management. In the second case, the team is more permanent in nature - for example, where a person on the team has a role parallel to his day-to-day responsibilities in the organization, for example, in an organization, the person may be a financial manager and at the same time be a member of a cross-functional team formed to share experience, whose task is development of organizational development and exchange systems. In both cases, periodic rotation of team members is desirable.

Information flow 

To avoid organizational silos, it is very effective to use a common management platform that will share news/information across the organization and reflect the status of completed and/or ongoing projects. It is also important to have a communications scheme in the organization, which will detail the principle of managing information flows, as well as the type and frequency of information dissemination within the company.

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[1] The book "Cultural Puzzle" by Mario Mos, Derek Newberry and Greg Urban.