Do you know why farmers keep grain, feed, and other materials in silos? Because they don’t want them to get contaminated and run together. The same is true in our organizations–silos keep things organized and separate.
Too many companies today are trying to tear down silos to create a more “open” and “cohesive” environment, but it sounds like a disaster!
Silos help everything stay in place so people don’t get distracted by information or input from other parts of the company. Each department and team can focus on its own area of expertise without having to listen to ideas from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Why should your creative team have to work with the finance department, or IT with HR? When you have strong silos, departments don’t have to worry about any group but themselves. Everyone gets to focus on what matters most to them without getting distracted by what’s happening in other parts of the company.
Silos give you more control as the leader because people can’t make connections or collaborate with other employees. That means fewer suggestions or innovations from the masses. By keeping groups separate, you’re limiting the chance of them joining together to challenge the status quo. If you tear down silos, the company will become a free-for-all, and you will lose all power and control.
Breaking down silos means employees have to interact with and get to know people from other teams. And that requires you to hold your employees’ hands as they become friends with other departments and learn to work together and share resources. This isn’t preschool–your job as a leader isn’t to help your teams be friendly with each other.
In fact, silos do the opposite of encouraging friendship between departments–they create a sense of competition, which keeps people on their toes and helps them do their best work. When departments don’t know what other groups in the company are doing, the pressure is on them to work hard and become your favorite department. You don’t want employees to become complacent, which is exactly what happens without silos, and they think another department will take care of things.
HBR even listed the benefits of silos, including providing focus to develop expertise, boundaries and hierarchy to drive accountability, and a sense of identity. When employees work in silos, they know their exact role, where they fall in the pecking order, and who is in charge.
Silos have worked for decades. There’s no need to change them now.
And when you start to tear down silos, it opens employees up to change more things. The last thing you want is silos crumbling and employees feeling like they can make any change they want to the company!
So don’t tear down your silos–strengthen them! Keep employees in their place to stay organized and on task.
-The Outdated Leader
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Over the last 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of speaking and working with some of the world’s top leaders. Here are 15 of the best leadership lessons that I learned from the CEOs of organizations like Netflix, Honeywell, Volvo, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and others. I hope they inspire you and give you things you can try in your work and life. Get the PDF here.
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