Silo Syndrome: Overcoming the Mentality that Holds Companies Back

When Phil Ensor first tried to warn the world about the perils of the silo mentality, he did not mince his words.

It was 1988, and Ensor, an executive with The Goodyear Tire & Rubber company, had just coined the term “functional silo syndrome” to describe organizations that are structured as an array of independently operating departments or divisions that do not collaborate, share information, or solve problems with each other.

Organizations with this kind of structure, Ensor wrote, have “a very damaging learning disability—it has not learned how to learn, that is, how to diagnose itself and solve its own problems.” Moreover, Ensor argued that organizations afflicted by silos “behave out of a foundation of mistrust and a lack of mutual concern. The genius of people is wasted; individuals are uncommitted; groups are not cohesive. No shared vision exists for people to rally around.”

It is hard to find anyone, even today, who disagrees with Ensor’s decades-old premise. And yet, when I talk with senior business leaders about the biggest challenges they are facing, one of the first things they bring up is their inability to break down silos.

The good news is that we’ve evolved to the point where we know silos are a problem. The bad news is that, nearly 40 years after the problem was identified, we don’t know how to get rid of them.

Why is the silo syndrome so stubborn? For insight, take a look at your executive team.

Senior leadership teams naturally gravitate to a silo structure

The need for internal collaboration and partnership is more important now than ever before. With AI, economic conditions, and global tensions driving a fearsome pace of change, organizations must have a high degree of trust at the very top. Executive leaders must share information on what they are doing and the impact it has across the enterprise and look for ways to support other leaders in their challenges.

That’s the theory. In practice, far too many senior leadership teams are living, breathing metaphors for the silo syndrome.

In some ways, this isn’t surprising. Senior leadership teams almost always comprise individuals with profoundly different subject-matter expertise and experience. While they worked their way up through the leadership ranks to the executive team, these leaders were afforded a certain degree of independence and encouraged to lead in whatever way they thought best as long as they were producing results.

At the executive-team level, however, the demands and stakes change drastically.

Now, leaders are being asked to interact with people of different backgrounds and skill sets. This can be a jarring experience for some newly promoted leaders; the comfort of being surrounded by people of similar background is suddenly replaced with the discomfort of increased scrutiny. The end result is often that fear, judgement, and distrust cause them to retreat into the relative safety of their silo.

To avoid falling prey to silo syndrome, executive teams need to learn the skills that promote collaboration and trust.

Breaking down the silos in your senior leadership team

Specific strategies for breaking down silos and promoting trust can be both formal and informal. But it all starts with setting clear expectations.

1. Define trust. Before you can build trust, you need alignment about what it means and what it looks like in action. The CEO needs to set expectations—we are going to operate as an enterprise leadership team, which means sharing information, collaborating, and putting the company, not function, first.

2. Demand curiosity. In meetings, encourage leaders to ask questions about the other silos. If they don’t understand something, tell them to speak up and ask for an explanation. Remember, senior leaders can be reluctant to admit that they don’t know everything about everything. CEOs should always ask other team members to weigh in with observations or analysis of challenges offered by their teammates.

3. Troubleshoot problems. One of the best ways of demonstrating trust is to share setbacks or failures with an eye toward problem solving. This requires the team to be vulnerable and willing to openly express challenges. Using the team to diagnose a problem and build solutions can be a powerful experience.

4. Create informal opportunities to build relationships. If you’re in the same location, stop by someone’s office for a chat, or take them out to lunch. And then, share the challenges you’re facing and how it may affect other teams. If the team is highly dispersed, schedule a virtual coffee chat. The sad truth is that informal doesn’t happen on its own; it may be necessary to mandate the team to make these gestures.

5. Create formal opportunities to build relationships. The pace of business today means many executives don’t carve out time for team building that can break down silos. You don’t necessarily have to sequester your team at an elaborate wilderness retreat. But you do need to create formal opportunities for the team to socialize. Remember, this is a journey; building relationships among executive leaders won’t happen in a single session or a weekend. There needs to be a significant investment of time and effort to change the trust dynamics of the team and reduce those silos to rubble.

6. Encourage guest appearances. Task executives to attend meetings with other executives’ teams. At those meetings, share your own challenges, ask lots of questions, and relate points of common experience. This is an opportunity to share challenges and stories. The willingness to attend another silo’s meeting sends a strong message on the power of positive leadership and collaboration.

7. Set shared goals. Each executive should have at least one annual performance goal that is shared cross-functionally. This sets the expectation early on that leaders must partner together on major business initiatives and that they will be measured on the enterprise-wide results.

8. Implement accountability. The CEO needs to be crystal clear that collaboration and cross-functionality will be one of the major standards for assessing the performance of executive team members. Defining these expectations creates a baseline for accountability. The team should do regular check-ins to assess how they are doing and where they can improve. They must be willing to hold themselves and each other accountable.

CONCLUSION

It seems that organizations, as they grow and evolve, naturally gravitate to a silo structure without completely understanding the consequences. Although it’s not an easy fix, the challenge of breaking down these silos is relatively simple. Focus your efforts on the senior leadership team. Once they have been encouraged to share, collaborate, and support each other, the silos will dissolve as quickly as they were erected.