Tilting at Silos: Fostering Teamwork Between Insulated Groups
When closely knit teams are asked to work together, animosity can flare up quickly, leading to an "us versus them" mentality in both teams. Unfortunately, many of the traditional strategies to address these rifts just don't work. We offer tips for workable solutions.
Sun, June 10, 2007
CIO — Don Quixote famously (and fictionally) attacked a series of windmills, trying to topple what he thought were monstrous giants so that he could rid the Earth of their evil breed and take their spoils to fund his quest for the hand of (not-so) fair Lady Dulcinea. While his intentions were good, he was, of course, unsuccessful; a spear and an old mare are not exactly proper weaponry to face off against a foul giant made of stone.
In the tech industry, we don’t have windmills or spears (unless you count toy lightsabers), but we do have silos. Sometimes silos can become so thick-walled that they pose a real threat to worker productivity and overall project success. It’s then that you need to start knocking them down—or at least chiseling them down enough so that employees in one can see eye to eye with those in another.
A silo, of course, refers to a generally close-knit team put together for a very specific purpose. That purpose might be the development of an isolated end-to-end project or maintenance of a highly active and important system: some goal that allows the team members to put their heads down and focus on an immediate task at hand. The problems begin when someone from another silo taps them on the shoulder, looking to interface with their system or to impose some new sort of process.
Then the silo approach backfires a bit. The things that help the silo members work so effectively—strong team relationships and isolation from distractions—start to become hindrances. When two closely knit teams are asked to work with each other, animosity can flare up quickly, leading to an “us versus them” mentality in both groups. That’s a problem when the overall success of a project or indeed an entire company depends on cooperation.
The specific problems leading to the animosity vary, depending on the situation, but the root cause usually is a communication breakdown at some level. Ultimately, it’s not surprising that two teams that are used to working closely within have a hard time reaching out to another group on the “outside,” especially with the potential extra work and extra stress at stake. It’s difficult to come to the table with an evenly balanced opinion about a person or group of people who ask impolite questions about why your system is failing, or who exhibit stubborn reluctance to implement the new standards you and your teammates devised.
