Enhancing productivity in organization silos without demolishing the silos

Organization silos can negatively affect its performance when communication between departments fails. under such circumstances, organizations should quickly identify the reason for the failed communication rather than curtail a department's activities. A negative silo forms when a unit in an organization refuses to collaborate with other units. [1]

Leaders in an organization can tell silos have formed and are having a negative impact on productivity if knowledge flow and resources sharing in departments slows down or stops, driving an urgent need to either bridge the gaps in the silos or breakdown these silos. When information flow is interfered with, productivity and efficiency is well likely to be negative. [3] 

Two major ways through which silos form: [4]

• When leaders are in competition and seek to prove to be better than the other leaders. In the process, they make it their ambition to keep information as discreet as possible so as to get ahead. This impedes an organization's ability to leverage on synergy driving a lot of effort duplication and further derailing the organization from achieving its objectives
• When leaders have lots of responsibilities on them, they might fall for the trap of setting more rules and regulations for their teams, to maintain control. With time, the teams might be all drawn into such rules that they loose sight of departments outside their boundary walls.  

Silos can be made productive if:

• Leaders commit themselves to collaborative leadership styles by working with other leaders in an organization to achieve the ultimate goal. To get to this level, a leader will need to: [4]
• Build meaningful relationships across silos
• Handle all conflict in a constructive manner
• And share power and control
• Give cross functional responsibilities to members of a silo to boost a culture of offering support to different teams [2]
• Replace the many sign offs required for special requests among teams with clear guidelines for such requests [2]
• Cross functional review meetings should also be encouraged on a regular basis to enhance collaborations among teams [2]

Silos have a positive side to them as they enhance accountability. They should therefore not be dismantled but steered towards the overall organisation goals by putting into consideration the above factors.

References

1. Bento, F., Tagliabue, M. and Lorenzo, F., (2020). Organizational Silos: A Scoping Review Informed by a Behavioral Perspective on Systems and Networks. Societies, 10(3), p.56.
2. Majchrzak, A. and Wang, Q., (1996). Breaking the functional mind-set in process organizations. Harvard Business Review, September-October.
3. Serrat, O., (2017). Bridging organizational silos. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 711-716). Springer, Singapore.
4. Talsma, T.H., (2016). Eliminating silos in regionally distributed organizations to encourage knowledge sharing.