by Jared Thatcher
There is a trap in human psychology where it is easier to blame others than to take personal responsibility for our shortcomings. No place is this more destructive than within corporate silos. The tendency for a department to blame both upstream and downstream of their work product is rampant. One survey found that 83% of respondents felt that silos existed in their organizations, and 97% saw those silos as having a negative impact on performance. Animosity, blame, and a host of other negative emotions can lead to poor working conditions, but ultimately if left unchecked, the demise of the organization itself.
But what’s the solution? How can we make a difference in fostering cooperation and unity by breaking down silos? The following 5 steps should help you to make a tremendous difference for your department and your organization. Best of all, you can do this without being in a leadership position.
1. Seek First to Understand
Yes, I know this is the Fifth Habit of Stephen R. Covey’s, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” but it also has its roots in ‘Respect for People’ a core principle within Lean. When people know that you care, that you understand where they are coming from, then magic begins to happen. Trust is built. You see things from a different perspective, allowing you to diagnose before you prescribe a solution. If you miss this first critical step, then you are waging an uphill battle, and without controlling the high ground, you will lose.
To enhance your understanding of the organization, get to know key players who perform various jobs at each department. A great place to start is to do informal voice of the customer interviews with the admins. They possess valuable insights into the inner workings of the departments and can point you in the direction of who else to interview. As you continue to reach out and meet with silo leaders, over time you will grasp the complexities and nuances of each department’s purpose, capabilities, and pain points. This knowledge will help you to contribute to process improvements as you will readily be able to identify potential collaborators to address and solve problems.
2. Conduct Value Stream Mapping Sessions
Too often the focus is on process mapping when developing improvements. Take a moment to understand how the process fits into the greater value stream of the organization. For example, at one organization I was tasked with improving the product scheduling process. By taking time to also map the entire value stream, it became clear that every department within the entire company was directly impacted in some way by the decisions of the schedule planning process. At that time the team did not realize the far-reaching impacts their decisions had upon the entire company.
Value stream maps are a holistic view of how a request for work moves through the entire organization until delivery to the end use customer. Often, people working in the various processes have no idea of just how far reaching the impact of their work is upon the various silos. By taking the time to map the various value streams, you begin to see just how interdependent each group is upon the other. This understanding of how the various silos fit together shows the need for cooperation and coordination.
3. Align Silos KPIs as Part of the Hoshin Kanri Process
At some level every business should be employing Hoshin Kanri or Strategic Planning into their process. One of the biggest pitfalls that I see is when the silos are independently linked to Hoshin planning. Goals that are mutually exclusive of the other departments are doomed to further fortify the silos, producing conflicts and impact both the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization.
In one company my role was to look for improvements within our supply chain and parts. I was part of the operations group, but dotted lined to purchasing, working closely with them to find opportunities for continuous cost improvements. Purchasing had a strategic goal for cost reduction of parts. Unfortunately, that did not align with the strategic goal of engineering which was the production of the newest product model.
When I had a change to a part, whether a redesign or supplier change, it needed to be approved through engineering. It felt like being in a ‘hurry up and wait’ cycle. The approvals came only when engineering got around to it. Delays in implementation sometimes amounted to over $500,000 per month in opportunity cost savings, with several month delays not being uncommon. Purchasing blamed engineering. Engineering blamed purchasing.
I finally took the approach of camping out in the cubicles of the lead engineers I was waiting for signoffs from. Until I got their signature, I couldn’t move on to the next step. One time, after sitting at the lead engineers’ desk for an hour-and-a-half, he looked up from his computer and said, “You aren’t going away until I sign this, are you?” His astute observation, and my dogged determination, soon prompted the needed signature.
The next year, during the Hoshin Planning, leadership tied the KPI goals of purchasing to engineering and the KPI goals of engineering to purchasing. This new approach allowed us to generate over $1 billion in savings over the next three years. Find the commonality between departments and create the KPIs that will drive teamwork to start and break down the silo shells that prevent the flexibility of cooperation needed for a growth mindset.
4. Challenge Assumptions
One of the biggest barriers is overcoming the belief that if only the other department did this or that, things would be better in our department. This toxic silo mentality is at the core of everything wrong with organizations struggling to become better. As a Lean or OpEx professional, our job is to challenge this mentality. A common mantra we use is, “be hard on the process, easy on the people.”
Your job is to break the stereotypes that the other department is out to get you. To destroy the myth that if only they did X, Y, or Z, things would be better. When facilitating process improvement events, it is absolutely critical to have both the upstream and downstream teams in the room. They will better appreciate the work that the team working on the improvements is doing, and they might have suggestions that can better the process for both teams. When we try to work independently of others, we are hurting not only ourselves, but those that could help us. As a facilitator, challenge, challenge, challenge, until the battlements of the silos begin to crack, and then challenge some more. Bring them together and find the common goals that will provide the synergy needed to make the improvements sustainable.
5. Develop an Andon System
Andon (行灯-pronounced “on”·“don”[’t]) in Japanese means ‘lantern’. The idea of an Andon system is to shine a light on the problem, to make it visible. This concept is often associated with a line worker pulling the Andon cord to slow the line and light a signal that there is a problem. This is the critical final step to breaking down silos. Unless a notification and accountability system is put into place, it is impossible to fully break apart the toxic silos. A system at this level might need to escalate all the way to the CEO or the Board, to address any changes.
One option for this is to create a cross-departmental review board that meets frequently to check on the health of the process, vote on any proposed changes to the process to stay informed about what is going on and make recommendations for change if there are issues.
In the case of the department that made changes to the schedule that impacted the whole organization, creating this cross-departmental review board allowed for a fast reaction time for decisions, avoiding surprises that might negatively impact one or more departments, and created a collaborative environment where everyone felt like their inputs were heard and considered. The transparency that this review board brought to the entire organization not only helped to inform the organization about how schedule changes would impact them, but it also gave better insights to the scheduling group so they could be more responsive to the needs of the rest of the company.
By working together, commonality is discovered, synergies are built, open communication brings trust, and the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the entire organization improves. Creating a mechanism for reporting problems in real time is essential for destroying silo mentality.
Where can these steps lead you?
My single greatest improvement came from following these 5 steps, and it took less than ten minutes in total. While conducting a voice of the customer interview with the operations folks, they said, “Jared, we know this is out of scope, but could you help us to get customer data in real time. We have been asking IT to build us a dashboard with this live data for over a decade, because the data we are using is a few days old. If you could help us to get IT to prioritize this, it would help us so much in making production decisions.” They were right, it was out of scope, but I told them I would see what I could do.
The following morning, I had a meeting with the finance department. The thought occurred to me that finance loves their numbers, perhaps they might have something that would work. I explained the plight of the operations group in about three minutes and asked if they had a dashboard with the information they were requesting. I was told that not only did they have that information, but they had additional data points to give deeper insights into production. Within 45 minutes of that conversation operations had access to the data they had been begging IT to develop for them for over a decade. All of this in less than 24 hours from the initial time they had first asked for help.
A month later, operations told me that because they now had current data, they believed that the daily decisions they made would help them save the company over a million dollars a month. Imagine the calculation of the ROI on that improvement!
The fact was, because I had been using these 5 steps to break down silos, I was able to quickly provide the strategic changes we needed to accomplish our goals. By following these steps, you too will be in a better position to help your organization make the transition away from the silo mentality to a system that embraces the collaborative nature of Lean Thinking.
Jared Thatcher is passionate about Lean and sharing its principles with others via the Virtual Lean Summit. He also runs the in-person event, the Global Lean Summit. Jared is a CPI Program Manager at the Port of Seattle, and is the author of the book, “Parenting the Lean Way”
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