Overcoming Silos (Part 2)

My previous blog acknowledged the reality that organizational silos are common and problematic. But if you ask leaders how to overcome these silos, their answers often lack clarity. To bring focus to the issue, I outlined the first two steps for removing silos: do no harm and seek to understand. Those two steps are foundational. Even though they may seem like your mom’s advice to “play nice,” they are essential before you advance to the more difficult levels. If you want to create a culture with minimal silos, you and your colleagues need to:

• Move toward collaboration. When leaders talk about the need to overcome silos, an improvement in collaboration is most often what they have in mind. This requires clarity about the areas or initiatives where cross-departmental effort is needed. Collaboration takes time and energy, and it’s not always required. So don’t simply issue a call for collaboration. Identify a major organizational goal, one that doesn’t fit neatly within a department, and then invite others to the table to accomplish this objective. As an organization learns to collaborate, this practice will begin to spill over to other areas.
• Invite honest input. The rarest form of anti-silo behavior is when a person invites genuine feedback from others. This goes beyond collaboration on broad organizational goals. It occurs when a leader asks a colleague, “What do you see (in my department) that I’m missing? What ideas do you have for how we can improve our ministry?” This requires a high level vulnerability. It often takes years to build this level of trust, and only minutes to destroy it. But when this behavior becomes the norm, the tall walls of the silo have been reduced to the height of a picket fence.

One final caveat. At the end of the day, each person and/or department has a distinct task to perform. It is not a silo when the music director leads the choir rehearsal or the accountant prints the payroll checks. In fact, it’s chaos if this doesn’t happen. Where are the silos that need to be overcome in your church or ministry? What evidence do you see of silo behavior? And most importantly, as you identify silos, what steps do you need to take to overcome them? It’s easy to receive my blogs by email. Just sign-up on Feedburner by clicking here.]]>