No Silos

We have No Silos

We are one team. Politics, titles, and departments do not create barriers for us or prevent us from accomplishing our priorities. Instead, we are all equal; we just have different roles in the contributions to the success of the company.

No Silos is a mindset. We need to be able to work with anyone in the company. It does not matter if you work in the same department or not. I worked in too many companies where the leader or another employee gave me information on a need to know basis. For them, knowledge and information kept close to the vest was their power and currency. I could have done the job so much better if I just could have had the information, training, and ideas before I failed!

As I began to study the concept of organizational silos, I learned that business loses real productivity and profit when divisions or departments don’t play nice in the sandbox! Think this is not a big deal? In reading about Steve Jobs, I learned that he got iTunes to market successfully by being one team across marketing, design, manufacturing, and finance while Sony had both the music rights and the hardware built. Why did Sony fail? The music division and the electronics division were siloed. The leaders were worried about their own goals and compensation plans. They could not get along!

Just listen to one of your customers. We have several that can’t get accounting to cooperate. And the stereotypes around getting sales and marketing or corporate and the field working together are legendary!

My goals are for all of us to share information freely.

We need to realize we are all on the same team and that each of us is critical to creating an Outside-In® customer experience.
This grey area of silos is a mindset. We protect our turf when we should be thinking about being on the same turf. We keep information from others because we think it might give us an edge.

We can all avoid silos by understanding we have one company profit and loss statement, and by stomping out silo behavior. Sometimes we do it by accident or because we are busy. Be conscious of avoiding siloed actions and we will serve our customers well.

With No Silos, we can all feel that we are on the same team!