Busting the silos
Silos are seductive. They promise control, efficiency, and neat little boxes where everything makes sense. But they're lying to you.
The most successful organisational cultures that I work with don't build walls — they tear them down. They understand that productive collaboration happens at the edges. In the spaces between teams, in the collisions of different perspectives and ideas.
Yet we cling to our silos because they're comfortable and familiar. ‘We do it this way because it’s what we’ve always done and we don’t want to change it’.
However, the solution isn't to force everyone into one cultural box. In large organisations it’s simply not possible to build a culture to serve everyone. That's like trying to make every restaurant serve the same menu.
Instead, smart leaders embrace the power of subcultures — providing managers with the skills to build effective teams connected to a central purpose or set of values. This is how the ‘one team’ dream is achieved. Managers with the knowledge of how to build a great team culture aligned to a coherent set of values, who set clear expectations, and hold each other to account to deliver results.
Most managers don't know how to do this. They haven't been taught how to inspire team members whilst nurturing healthy subcultures that collaborate instead of compete. They are mostly measured on individual achievement not values alignment and most senior leaders wonder why collaboration is poor.
Middle managers are the key to organisation success and they are crying out for development. Give them the tools to build bridges, not walls. Because in today's connected world, the organisation that invests in meaningful management development wins. The rest become corporate dinosaurs, trapped in old fashioned approaches that develop silos not teams.
