Less silo mentality - more collaboration

Silo thinking is the big obstacle to digital transformation and corporate success. Drivers for a world with fewer barriers can be technical solutions, reorganization and cultural change, because only with a trusting collaboration culture can the challenges of a crisis-ridden and uncertain future be overcome.

Silos are bad for business, but they also help in uncertain times

When consultants discuss transformation, they often complain about silo mentality and its negative consequences: At one pharmaceutical giant, for example, hundreds of millions of euros are at risk of being sunk because each division is planning IT renewal independently of the others. At another, branding and digital strategies are developed in parallel without coordination, both globally and in each market. This means that duplication of effort, waste of resources and a suboptimal result are inevitable. In medium-sized companies, many digital transformation projects get stuck in the marketing department or IT because the other department or sales/field service or someone else is blocking them. In small companies, the silo mentality of individual managers not only inhibits digital development, but also customer acquisition or business field development. It jeopardizes growth and sometimes even the very existence of a company.

A look at companies, literature or the web reveals countless other examples of departmental egoism, closed departmental boundaries and compartmentalization with negative effects. Therefore, the call is getting stronger and stronger.

Get rid of the business-damaging silos

But it is not so easy to eliminate them. Silos exist because division of labor, specialization and expertise require structures. These structures made growth and prosperity possible in the last century, and they continue to give companies and employees security today. Self-contained organizational units are better suited to deal with volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Following the probably best known term from the sociological system theory of N. Luhmann, it can be postulated:

Silo mentality helps to reduce complexity

As a result, even with organizational structures that are actually open, flexible, and innovative, new silos continue to develop.

Break open silos in the right places and with suitable means

If you want to combat silo mentality, it is therefore not a matter of tearing down the protective shells altogether, but rather of first determining where the walls are particularly thick and for what reasons, and where it is worth breaking open the silos, cutting holes, windows and doors with the flex, so that collaboration and communication can take place across departments, divisions and even companies.

Appeals such as creating synergies, improving collaboration and communication culture are of little help. The hyped agile teams or Scrum are often not effective either. Instead, it is important to identify the causes and then decide on different approaches with a view to the prospects of success.

• Technical solutions: better networking These can be drivers for a world with fewer barriers as well as supporters of the process. Systems talk to each other better than ever. Data silos can be minimized. Cloud communications are seen as a key technology for networking and collaboration. Teams, Salesforce, Veeva and many other communications platforms promise to integrate seamlessly with business systems, even if they still sometimes struggle with each other.
• Reorganization: more collaboration A radical reorganization with freedom from hierarchy and constantly changing roles promises to prevent silo mentality. Some smaller companies in the creative services sector are trying this out, most start-ups are beginning this way and are also having success with it; often so large that, once they reach a certain size, they then need not only generalists but also teams of experts again, who then sometimes quickly entrench themselves behind silo walls again. In large, traditional companies, cross-departmental teams for special projects can teach us how to become faster and more effective through collaboration. If these teams do not isolate themselves as elite teams (which unfortunately also happens again and again), they can become role models for the further gradual opening of silos.
• Cultural Change: More communication, less competition silo mentality often results from a poorly thought-out target system in the company. If departmental goals dominate and harm others or the company as a whole, if rewards are given on the basis of such individual goals, or if areas are favored at the expense of others, then opening up hardly works. The struggle for resources and budgets and for the attention of top management leads to communication and knowledge exchange among each other being cut off and customers being forgotten. Strengthening identification with the company through clear purpose and incentivizing overall company goals instead of individual or departmental goals, rewarding collaboration, networking and recognizing better cooperation and a sense of community can help here. Successful collaboration requires trust among each other. Often, collaboration projects fail because other teams are not trusted or too little is known about them. Mutual honest communication about strengths and weaknesses and transparency helps trusting collaboration.

Marketing as a driver and pioneer

Silo mentality hinders innovation and digital product development and stands in the way of customer-centric processes as well as business development. This is where marketing can make its mark as a driver for overcoming departmental boundaries, breaking down silos and improving cooperation.

• Marketing and business development
  If marketing, sales and business development as well as the strategy department always consistently keep an eye on the overall business goals and use market and business intelligence data together, this can have a very positive impact on the company's success.
• Marketing and Sales
  Clear role definitions and absolute transparency help with marketing & sales alignment.
• Marketing and IT
  In (digital) innovation projects, intensive cooperation between IT and marketing is particularly necessary. Ideally, a fruitful network will develop with external organizations from science and service providers who share their knowledge.
• Marketing and all areas
  CX/PX projects (i.e. consistent patient or customer orientation) and brand identity projects require the commitment of all employees and collaboration across all departments. It is important to get all employees and managers to put themselves in the shoes of the doctors and patients and to ensure that people and their needs are always at the center of all decisions, from drug development to market launch, from administration to service. Marketing can / should be the driver for this, setting the necessary impulses and involving all departments with an internal campaign.

Collaboration, guarantee for success

For the positive further development of each individual company, but also of our economy, breaking out of silos and more collaboration, even across company boundaries, is extremely important, and even necessary for the survival of individual organizations. "Brand eins" writes: "In order to master major challenges, from the climate crisis to the transformation from industrial to knowledge work, isolation - in the sense of compartmentalization and not wanting to know - is a very bad idea. Much smarter is to exchange, to combine interests, to use experiences, as far as that is possible."

You can start with individual projects, hang it on the digital transformation or on the organizational transformation, but in any case there needs to be a change in culture or values: collaboration and public spirit need to be recognized much more by both companies and society.

We, the brandguards of Wächter Worldwide Partners, help clients to break down silos in change management, culture change and digital transformation projects.

This article appeared in slightly abbreviated form in Healthcare Marketing 9/2020, in the section where GWA agencies write on the topic of "thinking beyond the day".