Skills UP: Be a Silo Buster!

Crystal Bruce

If you missed our Skills UP professional development webinar, “Be a Silo Buster: The Key to Increasing Collaboration in Your Organization” - you can still watch it here on demand. We'd love to continue the conversation! How does your organization break down silos? How do you encourage cooperation between departments? What were your key takeways from this webinar? Let us know in the comments!

Sara Niemiec

@Crystal Bruce, I took extensive notes while tuning in to this webinar. I absolutely loved hearing from industry professionals! Below are a few of my takeaways:

• Be aware of internal versus external timelines
• Be willing to accept that “good enough is good enough.”
• Find the right ally to champion things, someone who is well-liked
• Senior leadership establishes an organization's culture. They're looked to for habits, behaviors, and expectations of collaboration
• Leadership will be more receptive to things if you ask for their expertise and/or guidance
  

Kimberly Pierce

@Crystal Bruce None of us is as smart as all of us. When people recognize their own erroneous beliefs regarding collaboration and work to change them, silos are broken down, failures are turned into successes, and breakthrough results are achieved at every level.

Tracey Harrow

We encourage cooperation by having department planning and get togethers once a month to check in on each other.

Lauren Henderson

@Crystal Bruce
Communication is key! Getting information to everyone who needs to know in a predictable way (e.g. for our school, enrollments and withdrawals in an automated weekly email) helps to keep all departments and divisions on the same page.

Sharon Sandberg

@Crystal Bruce there has been so much conversation about that at our organization. And we're really still working through this. As someone said, communication is key. Having products that allow for cross-communication (such as BB products) really does help foster the environment we're hoping to create.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

@Crystal Bruce

One of the “Silo” issues I've run into over the years is scheduling challenges, especially between Marketing, Development, and Data Management. Holding an annual or quarterly working meeting to review calendars and cross-schedule marketing campaigns, direct response campaigns, events (with all their emails, data, and cross-team needs), and data requests with key team members (Marketing team, Event Manager, Development team, Database Manager, etc.) at the table helps in two ways.

First, we can flesh out mailings, emails, and data needs workflows to prevent unnecessary scheduling conflicts (small teams should bring their personal vacation calendar as well). Second, these meetings create a culture of awareness and advocacy across the different teams. When new things pop up, team members are more considerate and advocate for each other's needs.

JoAnn Strommen

@Crystal Bruce Communication so key - challenge is even physical location/separation of offices and those who are reluctant to share data/plans = power. Tough silo to crack.

Tatiana Tuccio

@Crystal Bruce
The more communication, the better. We have implemented a weekly VP meeting to help keep everyone informed across all teams. This meeting always takes place in person. I will say having it in person really improves the productivness for this meeting.

Katie Farkas

@Crystal Bruce Communication has been key at my organization! Keeping those lines open and accessible is so important and having weekly team meetings where everyone can come together and share the projects they are working on is a really valuable time for our team to bounce ideas around, bond, but also to know what everyone does and how each person is essential for the functionality of our organization.

Phillip Shipsides

@Crystal Bruce
Communication and being sure to take people along with you are key. Cultural change won't happen overnight.

Hannah McKinney

Increased communication and facilitating a real understanding of how collaboration is mutually beneficial is key! @Crystal Bruce

Jordyn Kieft

@Crystal Bruce What I learned from this webinar is that leaders have a very important job! Being able to motivate their employees is difficult, and I think can only be done by looking inward first. Figuring out how you are motivated and then leading by example is huge. Plus, you are able to learn how to translate the skills you learned by asking questions to yourself and building accountability to create a motivating relationship between you and your employees.

Rachel Kauer

@Crystal Bruce
I can't seem to register, error says “Please schedule at least one event.”

I would love to watch and learn from this, at my org we currently not only have silos - they are on separate farms, each trying to buy each other out! In my role as the gift processor, I am often the go-between for the directors and the teams of both departments. Sometimes it leaves me feeling like the child caught in a bad divorce. I know there's not much I can do on my own to bust the silos, but I'd like to learn some tools for encouraging more dialogue and start working on opening them up.

Lee Grisham

@Crystal Bruce Two things that were important to me: Listen to what others are saying. What are their goals/outcomes they are looking for and how do they want those to play out.

Also understand where they are coming from. They may not have the same motivations as you and concessions may need to be made around those in order to move forward.

Christopher Horn

@Crystal Bruce
It's always helpful to remember that, for every one time there's a situation where one has to use official authority to declare what will be done, there's probably ten where one has to use soft authority, to use one's knowledge of people and their personalities and connections to figure out how to get something done. That's where humility, empathy, paying attention to people, and connections and respect one has already built up can really pay off. I appreciated the discussions of how to move towards goals when people are being difficult and you can't make them do what you want, because that problem never really goes away even when you are the executive sitting in the big chair. You still can't control many things, and need to rely on soft authority skills.

I do suspect that there are tactics at the organizational level for silo-busting that could be taken. Oftentimes there's a breakdown of communication in what tools the organization has access to, and who has them. Something like a yearly meeting going through workflows and tasks just so people are aware of what other departments do would help with that: as a DBA, the number of times that someone simply wasn't aware that we've been tracking something, or that we can report on something, or that I wasn't aware that tracking something would be useful, or that some report or dashboard would be helpful adds up. When I was teaching at a small school, it was irritating sometimes to have to sit through all staff meetings and long discussions about say, frustrations with getting parents to cooperate with the Kindergarten and 1st Grade reading curricula. I was teaching 3rd-8th grade classes, so it wasn't in my department. But it did help everyone, including the principal, to have an organization-wide big picture viewpoint, and sometimes someone would know about something that might help with a problem.

Susan Neyman

@Crystal Bruce while much of the discussion related to much larger organizations than the one where I work, a couple of items that resonated regarding silos include:

1. Job creep can blur the lines of the silos. This is PARTICULARLY pertinent to smaller shops since it is often a case of “whoever can get it done, do it!”
2. Making clear definitions of a task and who is actually carrying out the task.