Break it Down or Risk Sinking It!
Breaking down Silos could be an arduous task but not an impossibility. Here are the significant tips from Casciaro et. al (2019) and my ideas that you need to break down silos and create more value by connecting experts from inside and outside the organization to build a collaborative and cross-functional work environment in your organization.
Vertical and horizontal collaboration:
Vertical relationship i.e. relationship among members of the same team within the organization is the most widely reported relationship at work. A horizontal Relationship, on the other hand, is a relationship with people with complementary expertise outside the organization. This promotes the cross-sharing of ideas and expertise that enriches the acquisition of new skills and knowledge for better work experience, increases revenue flow, and opens the window of negotiation and digital partnership.
Integration:
Breaking the Silo mindset involves a horizontal relationship. It calls for the need to go beyond one’s limited area of expertise. Integrating other resources and ideas beyond one’s limited scope.
Organizational Redesign :
Redesigning an organization can be costly, time taken, and slow. It also impacts organizational culture. But it is the principal strategy to break down organizational silos.
Training and support:
Training has been identified as a way to facilitate organizational redesign. It involves training employees to readapt their thinking by opening up to collaborate with colleagues who come from different industrial backgrounds and think differently. There may be resistance but it opens them up to new perspectives, and to be part of implementing the new strategy of organizational redesign and to work in line with a new organizational culture and processes. Leaders need to help people to overcome the challenges associated with interfacing with others through training and support.
Identify cultural brokers and help them increase their impact: These are individual who is better equipped( have multicultural and multifunctional backgrounds) and experienced in cross-organizational collaboration, they need more support to take a position in the organization to cross-collaborate work via acting as a bridge or adhesives.
Moving into different roles:
Leadership can develop more brokers by encouraging changing of roles e.g. from a sales manager to a marketing manager, and working across different departments in an organization. This is increasing portfolio agility.
Ask the right questions:
Working across boundaries requires asking the right questions. Being curious to find out more or how things work helps in building networks.
Building confidence through questioning, humility, and inquiry:
Leaders can build the confidence of people in the organization to ask questions by being role models, showing interest in what others are doing,g and asking questions. This expression of humility is needed to bring people together in a complex, challenging world.
A leader can also teach employees the art of inquiry:
Which involves asking objective questions that are motivated by a genuine interest in understanding another’s view.
Perspective-taking:
Secondly taking into account and acting based on others’ points of view is very important than just asking questions. This means the ability to see the world through the eyes of others. This increases information sharing and the team’s creativity
Cross-silo dialogue(e.g. FEA is a good strategy to encourage taking the perspective of others and hiring for curiosity and empathy.
Collaboration on a single initiative:
Working together in a cross-functional team can broaden employees’ vision. Exploring distant works by tapping from expertise outside the company and industry. Finding relevant domains to key business goals might be changing, so leaders can take a top-down( eg sending employees to attend professional conferences to gain relevant knowledge to be shared within the organization) or a bottom-top approach when it is difficult to determine which outside connection to connect with. In this case, employees scan themselves to identify external domains to connect with.
Reference: Casciaro, T., Edmondson, A. C., & Jang, S. (2019). Cross-silo leadership. Harvard Business Review, 97(3), 130-139.
