In today’s digital age, everyone knows that finding new ways to combine an organization’s diverse knowledge is a winning strategy for creating lasting value. Yet, it does not happen unless employees have the opportunities and tools to productively work together across silos.
Leaders prioritize breaking down silos between business units, teams and systems. They look for ways to increase collaboration across boundaries, and yet they still struggle with it!
According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, researchers posed a question to managers, engineers, salespeople, and consultants in companies around the world to find the answer to “Which relationships get prioritized in your day-to-day job?”. The responses were almost always the same: “vertical relationships”.
However, from a business perspective, when we pose the question “which relationships are most important for creating value for customer?”, the answer changes to “horizontal relationships” that focus on the integration and collaboration across business units and functions to deliver value to customer.
So, how do we solve this dilemma?
Organizational structure is costly, slow and usually it solves one problem and creates others, so it is not the answer. The best techniques are the ones that focus on boundary crossing and connecting silos where people are trained to connect and work with people who think very differently from them. Here are some techniques to connect silos and achieve greater business outcomes, while also meeting your customer’s needs.
- Shift leadership style from authoritative to participatory, consistent communication and connect work to business value.
- Bring employees from diverse groups (multidisciplinary teams) together on initiatives to establish communication channels that span horizontally and uncover different kinds of expertise in the organization.
- Map out the relationships vertically and horizontally to understand how they are connected or disconnected, then link them together to enable collaboration and break down silos.
- Democratize data to create a free flow of transparency so that teams in different departments work with the same data and make decisions that are connected to business value.
- Hack culture by using actionable, low effort, immediate, visible and emotional actions to reshape perceptions and behaviors to be more collaborative, agile, customer-focused and data driven.
At Thynkli, we use different techniques to work with your organization and culture to connect your operational silos. We work with you to enable change leadership, build a cultural hacking roadmap, and engage your “Subject Matter experts” in multidisciplinary teams to build and achieve business outcomes using Digital Twin technology. This is how we create and build relationships between people, processes and systems using data visualization and lean project management. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
To discover more about the Thynkli process using DTO see HERE.
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