Teams vs. Silos

A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve their goal.

Our need for a sense of belonging is such that we like to be part of a team or community. In sport, many of us have allegiances to a particular team and form a bond with anyone who also supports that team. For no other reason, we like and bond with these people in preference to those who follow another team.

In business, these allegiances are quick forming too. You work in a department and protect and favour those in that department. As a leader of a multi department company, this poses a challenge. How do you encourage teamwork beyond the immediate team? The leaders who work for you will develop their teams with this sense of belonging, but the downside is that this often leads to silos, where teams operate for their own purpose at the expense of the success of the other departments.

How do you encourage pride in the team but retain the cooperation across departments so that everyone is working together? The bigger the business, the more likely that there will be silos across departments.

The key is ensuring that there is a common purpose and that the objectives of the teams are linked. Where only by working together can the KPIs and OKRs be achieved.

An element of competition can be healthy, but if taken too far, teams can compete, and success is win/lose rather than win/win.

It’s important that when your business objectives are set, they can be filtered down, through the teams so that everyone is aware of how they contribute to the purpose of the business, and appreciate the roles that the other members of their team, and other teams play in reaching the targets.

This means that OKRs and KPIs should demonstrate what is important to the business and the measurements and monthly reports are communicated well throughout the organisation. If anyone doesn’t feel that their role contributes to the success of the business, they will become disengaged and feel unvalued.

The role of the leader is therefore to engender that purpose and belonging within their team and also to the wider organisation. They also need to demonstrate how they are working closely with leaders of other departments.

Demonstrating this, by inviting other leaders to your own team meetings can be a great way to build a common purpose and sense of the wider community across the organisation. Similarly, extending team building events or combining them with other teams can be really beneficial to the overall performance of the business.