Are You Spreading "Silo Disease"? 15 Ways to Spot It and 10 Ways to Stop It.

Even in very small nonprofit organizations, I’ve seen “Silo Disease” develop. It creeps in stealthily, infects the staff, and insidiously leads to poorer outcomes and a reduced ability to create real mission-based change.

Some Warning Signs & Symptoms

• Worry about Position: New hires are worried about what job title they will be given, and long-timers want a different one.
• Avoidance: People don’t grab coffee or eat lunch together or gather for informal discussions, either at work or after work. In fact, people may not even look each other directly in the eye.
• Clock-Watching: Non-hourly/exempt team members watch the clock and others watch them watching it.
• Overly-Layered Org Chart: The organization’s structure is highly departmentalized, with lots of middle managers, who don’t meet regularly as a leadership team and who “do their own thing” with their teams. The right hand and the left hand rarely know what the other is doing.
• Task-Focused: People regularly use the phrases “job description,” “tasks and duties,” and “policies and procedures, ” instead of “vision and mission,” “outcomes and objectives,” and “benchmarks and accomplishments.”
• White Knights: Personal heroics are rewarded frequently and more strongly prized than team accomplishments.
• Turf Battles: People guard or hoard information. There’s obstinance or even outright refusal to disclose and share unless “approved” by supervisors.
• Weaseling: People regularly try to avoid meetings because their “plates are too full” or “they are a waste of time.”
• Finger-Pointing: When deadlines are missed, no one takes responsibility and it’s all about “who wouldn’t do this” or “share that” in order to meet the goal.
• Speaking “At” not “With”: When meetings are held, they are a series of non-helpful updates, instead of creative brainstorming and action planning.
• Special Rules: People complain that some staffers are treated like “golden children.” People are more affiliated with departments than the organization as a whole.
• Indispensability: When someone goes on vacation, no one else can fill in, and that person must stay available and on-call the entire time.
• Ducking and Hiding: Although there’s an open door policy, the doors are never open.
• Somberness: Laughter, celebration, and genuine emotion are rarities.
• Command, Control & Fear: Middle managers micro-manage and get upset when “standard operating procedure” isn’t followed up and down the “chain of command.” They are afraid when “the boss” wants to interact directly with the people they manage.

Does it feel like your organization has “Silo Disease”? Or do you want to inoculate before you get it? Here are some pro-active steps to take.

Preventing and Curing Silo Disease

• Codify Your Values: Include information-sharing, collaboration, and team-based work styles as part of your organizational values. Add these values to your Code of Ethics and formalize them as part of your modus operandi.
• Hire for Culture Match: When you hire a new employee, don’t give them a task-based job description during an interview. Instead create a description of the “ideal match” for the person who would fill this position and craft behavioral interview questions asked by a cross-functional team to assess whether this would be a good hire. Include sense of humor, passion, and other emotional strengths as priorities.
• Ditch the Titles: Unless essential or requested on formal paperwork, de-emphasize job titles in regular communications like email signatures, and routine correspondence. Consider taking job title completely off of business cards the next time you order. People can be “go-to point-people” without having a title listed after their names.
• Make Meetings Engaging: Start every staff meeting by talking about some great things that have happened for the organization as a whole or some challenges that everyone shares. Focus discussions around vision, mission, goals, objectives, and benchmarks. Make the meetings “planning” meetings instead of “reporting” meetings so that people stay engaged and action-focused. Use email for “informational updates” and make sure that everyone who is “need- to-know” is regularly cc’d as a matter of course. Other tips about keeping your mission front and center.
• Set Organization-Wide Goals: In larger organizations, look for opportunities to create matrixed teams that share organization-wide goals instead of crafting and rewarding departmental goals. When those goals are met, inspire the team with praise. More on praise.
• Eat, Share, Laugh: Bring your lunch to work, and instead of eating it at your desk, find a spot in the kitchen or conference room where you can join others and they can join you. Make a point to check on people’s family, pets, and car troubles. Contrary to popular opinion, eliminating water cooler conversations actually may decrease productivity, especially with small teams. Actively look for opportunities to laugh together, and you'll build "trust" (also known as "silo anti-venom"). More on trust.
• Train, and Train Some More: Make sure that everyone is trained to answer phones, do routine data entry, and respond to concerns or requests for basic information. These functions should be comfortable and familiar to everyone in the organization, regardless of their position or title. Encourage cross-training for other mission-critical functions, so that no one is indispensable.
• Use Your Brains: Foster innovation and creativity from everyone on the team. Both are needed to generate strong outcomes. Build regular brainstorming into your culture, and reward it. More on innovation and creativity.
• Value Line Staff: Make sure that “point people” come from all levels of the organization and have input into important mission-based decisions to diffuse command-and-control leadership. Make “skip-level“ communications a routine part of doing business. Regular contact from leadership with line staff should be the norm, not the exception.
• Unlock the Secrets: Keep doors open. If something is truly so confidential that it must take place “behind closed doors,” get in the habit of taking a walk or meeting offsite to discuss it. Even in non-siloed organizations, frequently closed doors may increase anxiety levels. Make sure that Board-level commitments to transparency are valued and acted upon by staff as well. More on transparency.

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