The joy and necessity of silos at work

I was recently invited to a dinner where one of the topics in a facilitated conversation was:

“How do we break down silos to collaborate better?”

This is, unfortunately, typical of the poorly framed bullshit questions that these types of gatherings explore. There followed much earnest conversation about the attendees’ efforts to tackle the lamentable scourge of silos in their businesses. Yawn.

Photo by Thomas Marthinsen on Unsplash

We have all been conditioned by leadership literature and accepted wisdom to take the simplistic stance that all silos are bad. This is, of course, complete nonsense. No business of any meaningful scale could operate without silos. They are essential to focus, specialisation, and efficiency. They are a beautiful and necessary thing.

Silos exist for good reasons: to cluster expertise, streamline work and foster a sense of identity. Much has been written about how silos can lead to turf war, inward focus and lack of collaboration. However, a deeper look will typically uncover the unintended consequences of overly functionally oriented incentives and rewards alongside the predictable effects of power on behaviours.

I suggested as much to my shocked fellow diners. My example was to consider a large hotel chain business. If I were running such an organisation, I would be very happy to keep my Sales & Marketing team in their silo and my Field Maintenance engineers in theirs. I would want these very different groups to focus on their specialist tasks. They don’t need to collaborate. I would not want a busy boiler engineer immersed in the finer technical points of Salesforce Marketing Cloud any more than I would want my head of digital marketing debating the merits of condition-based preventative boiler maintenance. They need to focus on where their skills and strengths are.

The key is to exchange relevant information between the two groups at the right time. For example, suppose the Sales & Marketing team sold two weeks of accommodation in one hotel to a group participating in a wheelchair basketball tournament. In that case, the Field Maintenance team should know this and ensure all the elevators are in service and extra maintenance support is on call. Similarly, suppose a hotel’s planned exterior maintenance required scaffolding that restricted light to some rooms for a period. In that case, the Sales & Marketing team should be informed to decide whether to take those rooms out of use, discount them, or, at the very least, notify customers in advance to manage expectations.

Yes, there is a case for cross-functional collaboration, but only for specific and timely uses. In the hotel chain example, this might include functional leaders periodically coming together briefly to discuss allocation of resorces across the business. Another example might be ensuring a range of views contributed to a project designing the next generation of hotels. However, these types of projects are the exception, not the rule. And they are not without risk.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled Why Employees Who Work Across Silos Get Burned Out(1), UCL School of Management Professor Martin Kilduff and Associate Professor Sunny Lee summarised their research on the benefits and hidden challenges of focusing on cross-silo collaboration efforts. They looked at the impacts on over 2,000 employees engaged in these efforts (whom they called “boundary spanners”). They found that exposure to strategic information and insights from across the organisation could benefit careers in some cases. However, they also found that employees engaged in such collaboration often experienced heightened levels of burnout and were prone to developing negative social behaviours, including abusive behaviour towards colleagues.

So, let’s stop the simplistic narrative that ‘silos = bad’. Silos are essential. Instead of talking about ‘breaking down silos across the organisation’ as if that was a) desirable and b) even remotely achievable - why not focus on getting the points of information exchange right?

Excerpts from Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make it Go Away

Need any help sorting out nonsense in your organisation? www.disruptionspace.co

1. https://hbr.org/2024/05/why-employees-who-work-across-silos-get-burned-out