Imagine a basketball team whose players never pass, never set screens so a teammate can get open and focus purely on shooting the ball to run up their own stats. The chance that this team will win is extremely low and the players will grow to resent and despise each other. One might say that these players are in “silos” and have no interest in anything but their own success. How might things change if these players decide to put their team’s success above their own accomplishments?
Silos, usually formed around company functions or business units, are one of the more common reasons for internal company processes to falter. An order from a customer might cross a dozen functional barriers before the product or service is provided. If there is even a slight chance that a problem will occur at each of these hand-off points, then the probability of total process failure increases greatly and the customer will suffer.
This seems to be fairly well known within many companies, yet the silos still exist and in some cases, the walls of those silos get thicker every day.
Silos can form over time for many reasons. I suggest that the majority of the silos begin to form because of a rivalry (real or perceived) between company leaders. This can be driven by how the leaders are compensated and by the metrics used to measure their performance. If there is a history of promoting the manager whose function performs the best, then there are two ways to win; either lead your functional team to do better than all of the others or point out the faults of your peers in order to tear their function down (more likely a combination of both).
Another reason silos form is due to a lack of knowledge and understanding about what happens in the other functions. I have led many process mapping sessions where we will invite people from other functions to participate. It amazes me how little the people outside of the function being mapped understand what transpires to get the process completed.
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By John Dyer, from: http://www.industryweek.com/change-management/why-do-silos-form-and-how-can-we-knock-them-down