How Organizational Barriers Form

This is part one of a four-part series on Organizational Barriers. Look for part two, “To Remove Organizational Barriers, Start Here,” part three, “Designing Future-Proof Organizations” and part four, “In Practice, Removing Real-World Barriers” soon.

They sneak up on us with a whisper but resonate loudly for decades. It can be hard to explain how they form and even harder to undo them once they have taken hold. We don’t plan for them and we don’t mean for them to happen. But they do.

Organizational barriers (or unhealthy silos).

After many years of coaching organizations of many shapes and sizes, much of the dysfunction in these companies can be traced to the formation of silos, the inability to recognize them or the lack of energy to remove them. Not surprisingly, one of the reasons Agile was developed was because of the historical divide between business and technology and the waste and pain caused by not working together.

And yet most organizations, even those attempting a shift to greater agility, are still struggling with the effects of long-lasting or lingering barriers caused by their silos. This is even after attempting to change personnel, remove hierarchies, introduce new processes, buy new tools, or improve the culture…sometimes at great expense. What we know about silos are they are like weeds and if the roots aren’t pulled out they will return with vigor no matter how much money or effort you throw at them.

So let’s attempt to get to the bottom of what they are, how they form, and how to remove them (and maybe keep them from coming back).

What Are Organizational Barriers?

The simple definition of an organizational barrier would be: any part of an organization functioning without regard for the greater whole. A more complex definition could be: any barrier between or inside of teams, groups, or departments keeping the organization from bringing valuable experiences and products to their customers.

The symptoms of a siloed organization can be noticed by how customers are treated.

• “I’ll need to transfer you to another department.”
• “We will get back with you in [insert number of days here].”
• “This has been held up by [insert department here].”

Silos can be identified by the language used while observing how people work. Siloed organizations use plenty of third-person pronouns.

• “My team is working just fine. I wish they would get their act together.”
• “Their processes are so cumbersome. It takes forever to get something approved!”
• “They will never change.”
• “If they would only pull their own weight.”
• “We need to check with the business.”

Silos can also be identified by the layers of meetings or interactions required to make decisions or communicate with each other.

• “We need senior leadership to buy-in/get approval for this. Can we get on their calendar?”
• “We need to schedule a time slot for legal to approve this.”
• “My boss will need to talk to your boss.”
• “We better spend our budget or we won’t get it next year.”

What Silos Feel Like

I will often describe working in a siloed organization as it feels like constantly rubbing 240-grit sandpaper on your arm. Though not lethal, it is irritating, annoying, and painful.

Silos feel like there is:
Toleration but no community. When things go wrong there is finger-pointing and when things go right the accolades are kept close. There is very little joy when interacting with each other. We see this between functional areas such as legal, HR, IT, sales, marketing, and compliance but silos can happen anywhere. Between teams, inside of teams, between departments, inside of departments, anywhere.

Busyness but little progress. If one were to watch a siloed organization for any length of time, on the surface it would appear as if nothing was wrong. Everyone seems busy and productive but dig a little deeper and we discover layers upon layers of wasted energy focused on navigating the bureaucracy of their silos.

Grand plans but painful delivery. The barriers created by silos means getting things done feels like constantly running on a treadmill with a 10-degree incline. Everything takes a heroic effort. Eventually, groups, teams, or individuals will find ways to work around each other. Especially high-octane, get-things-done, productive people as they will find a way to get their job done one way or the other.

So toleration feels like we are connected (but we’re not). Excessive planning feels like we are productive (but we’re not). Activity feels like progress (but it’s not).

It might feel like things are ok. It might even seem like we’re successful. But we have likely just become oblivious to the existence of our silos or numb to the impact they are having on the people and customers we serve.

How Silos Form

Digging into the reason why silos form will be a challenge but I’ll share a hypothesis on how I think it happens. Let’s start with a picture.

This diagram is meant to explain how events and behaviors (ranging from small to large and from unintentional to intentional) can create an environment ripe for silos to emerge. Let’s drill down a little deeper.

Silos can be seeded through consistently poor personal behavior (A)

This is the first place to look when hunting down the origins of your silos. When the words or actions of individuals negatively impacts other individuals (unintentional or otherwise), the environment is ripe for organizational fractures to emerge.

Poor behavior could be things like: words and actions not matching up, responding in critical and reactive ways, being dismissive and disrespecting, ignoring people, taking credit for the work of others, a command-and-control managing style, etc.

We will all have bad days in which one or more of these behaviors bubble up. When they go unconstrained and become the default way of treating each other, however, its just a matter of time before they cause massive divisions.

Why? Because poor personal behaviors can either be ignored or addressed. If we chose to ignore it, the natural response will be to isolate ourselves from the source. When we isolate, we have lost the ability to connect on a level deep enough to solve any meaningful problems together.

When poor behavior occurs within leaders, the impact of isolation is magnified and will trickle-down to everyone they come in contact with. Other leaders will begin to isolate themselves from each other and the first fractures of an organizational silo have formed.

Silos can be incubated through poor relationships (B)

When unresolved personal blindspots or those hurt by poor behavior are introduced into a group and that group doesn’t know how to address them, the first fractures of division will become widening gaps of indifference. In rare cases, it may lead to toxicity or hostility.

But most of the time, we just begin to not care about each other. We smile and nod in meetings and say the words people want to hear but inside we are just going through the motions or not speaking up when we should.

So we begin to avoid each other. Maybe not physically but emotionally and mentally we start to check out. This is when toleration without community begins to take root – /isolation becoming indifference/. It is heartbreaking when I see this happen.

Silos can be reinforced through poor organizational design (C)

When we isolate from each other and when we are indifferent towards each other, the way we think about how our teams, departments, and functions should work together will be shaped by these experiences. Instead of thinking creatively and connectively, we design from a place of reactivity, protectionism, and ego – causing well-intended people to make poor enterprise decisions. See endnote (1).

Poor decisions around how the organization should work together seal our fate. Isolation and indifference will finally lead to estrangement. We no longer do things together and the organization becomes characterized by extreme localization.

We know extreme localization has taken hold when:

• Vision is local. Local leaders override what is best for the whole and do what they think is best for their group or function. And their people follow their lead.
• Constructs are local. Org charts are optimized for creating “empires” and the hoarding of “resources” is a common practice. The tools used and the reward systems used work for some but not all.
• Culture is local. The use of us vs. them language escalates. There is a stronger identity with your group or department than with the purpose of the organization as a whole. The language between silos is unhealthy while inside of our team or group everything appears to be fine.

When any one of these is true (local vision, constructs, or culture), silos exist in your organization. The magnitude of the gaps between your silos is in direct correlation with the intensity of poor personal behaviors, level of brokenness in your relationships, or how poorly the system is designed.

It’s important to note that well-behaving, healthy people and leaders can be triggered by bad relationships in their teams. People may act in ways they normally wouldn’t. (D)

Or a healthy, well-functioning team populated by healthy, well-behaving people can be triggered by a poorly designed organization. They will relate to each other in ways they normally wouldn’t because the system demands it of them. (E)

Traditional Attempts to Remove Silos

When organizations become aware of their silos, the good news is that there are often valiant and well-intended attempts to remove them. These attempts often focus on organizational design (C) but end up just designing around the brokenness.

Here are a few ways this happens:
Shuffling around the brokenness. The attempt to remove silos through movement and/or restructuring. Shuffle people around the nodes of an org chart (often without their input), maybe rename a group or two, attach an acronym to it and our troubles will be gone. Sometimes this involves bringing in leaders from the “outside” for a fresh perspective and sometimes this results in the letting of people go.

Controlling the brokenness. The attempt to remove silos by overlaying new processes, roles, workflows, or queue management on top of a hurting organization. This might entail organizing ourselves around a new methodology or framework for how we should work together or we might install governance bodies (i.e. portfolio or program management, advisory boards, control gates, etc.).

Short-term soothing of brokenness. The attempt is made to minimize the silo problem by creating cross-functional teams. People are brought together from our siloed departments and are asked to work together in Agile ways or as a task force to solve our issues. In the short-term, this may feel like its working but the deeper reasons why silos formed in the first place or still exist are often left unaddressed.

Ignoring the brokenness yet demanding healing. The attempt to fix the siloed culture by creating new values, principles, or “new ways of working” and expecting them to trickle down from the top, typically shared as presentations in town hall meetings or with posters placed on the wall. Leaders will often espouse this information with the expectation that everyone will adhere to it and change their behaviors accordingly.

None of these techniques to remove silos are “bad” and we may need some of them to a degree (movement and fresh perspectives, new ways of working, focus and prioritization, cross-functionality, and inspiring values and principles). But when they are attempted without addressing the underlying conditions causing our silos to form the impact will be negligible or short-lived.

But more than that, the outcome of continuously designing around our brokenness without digging into why the dysfunctions exist will eventually (if it hasn’t already) cause fatigue, frustration, confusion, and helplessness among those we are designing around.

Endnote:
(1) While the question of designing “how we work together to get things done” is always a complex one, here are a couple of thoughts on how we may unintentionally design our own silos:

• Poor organizational design happens when we focus on what makes it easier for us than it does for our customers (i.e. hierarchical org charts based on the functional output of a group).
• Poor organizational design happens when the people in the system don’t design (or have a say in) their own system. (ie. someone (or a team of people) who are not doing the work or interacting with customers hands off a design, structure, or org chart to those who are actually doing the work).
• Poor organizational design happens when we are reacting out of desperation or crisis. (ie. reorganizing in response to a new competitor, introducing “Agile” because other companies are doing it).

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