Free Climbing
High Performance Silos
If you tell a CEO that he or she has too many silos in their organization then they will probably take offense. But yet all businesses continue to operate in hierarchical silos because that it is still the best way to build a high-performance teams. The issue is not the silos, but the lack of communication between them and the lack of dedication within them.
If you look at almost any high performance team you'll see that they are indeed, a team of silos. In an F1 pit crew, each and every person has a job with almost no built in redundancy.
In other words, the entire series of functions required to get the car in and out of the pits is executed in silos. Each silo looks inward and dedicates itself to inching closer to the unachievable perfection for which it yearns. However, should one silo fail, another silo knows that its job is to act as the redundancy and help.
This pattern is repeated in every NFL, MLB, EPL [add acronym here] team. There is a head coach, a defensive coach, a midfield coach and so on who helps each silo within the team become the best at what it does. Then, between those sessions, each silo returns to the head coach to get its directions on how it will help the team as a whole achieve its goal.
The negativity around silos comes from those who are looking to others to solve their silo's problems rather than deal with them as a part of being in a high performance team.
While every silo does not want to unfairly disadvantage the other silo's ability to be successful, it is focused on being the best silo it can be in accordance with the team's objectives. That is how high performance teams work.
If you've ever worked in a low performance team one of its hallmarks is the amount of time people in different silos are telling each other how they should do their job. In many instances this starts with the good intention of helping someone recognize that their silo is not high performing, but once it becomes a distraction from that silo bettering itself, then it begins to decrease performance.
This is how professional services sometimes looks from the perspective of other silos. Professional services teams that use the poor state of SoWs as a reason for the poor project execution appear distracted.
They spend time trying to tell every other department how they should run their business, yet continue to not execute their own business in a high performance way. There is little to no value in this approach.
However, a part of being a high-performance team is the ability to listen to the non-expert feedback. We want the communication between silos to be consistent and with the aspiration of improving the accumulated successes of the team.
To do that, feedback must be asked for and appreciated. Learning to digest and implement feedback is one of the greatest skills a high performer can learn. Without it, we simply can't improve at an accelerated rate and will continue to convince ourselves that we are better at achieving success than we actually are.
What should also happen is that the silo providing the feedback needs to walk a mile in the shoes of those receiving the feedback to understand their challenges.
In many situations, this is the missing piece of team harmony. SoWs aren't misaligned because Sales can't sell, but mainly because customers are unable to give perfectly clear requirements to build a solution they don't understand during a subjective and competitive buying process. Realizing this creates empathy for the other team's situation, which then aspires us to attack and resolve the challenges that inevitably result.
Service delivery (and any other team trying to provide high performance outcomes) must always focus on minding their own business first. They must be maniacal about customer-facing project execution. If not, then they aren't reflecting the same level of commitment that other silos are putting into become the experts at what they do. As such, they have no right to ask for improvements from other silos that would make their job easier while also degrading the performance of the silo from which the change is requested.
This how we build high performance teams.
So, as a PS Manager ask this at your next team meeting.
"What are we doing to become the experts at what we do?"
"Have we demonstrated a commitment to excellence that gives us the right to ask others to do the same?"
"How can we deal with the imperfections of other silos in how we deliver our silo?"
When we do these things, we are acting within our silo in a way that creates a high performance team.
