During the cold war era (1947-1991)
between the United States of America (USA) and Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR). The united states built many missiles armed with nuclear
warheads. They individually hid these missiles inside underground silos to
conceal it from detection by the USSR. These missile silos were independent from
each other and it can launch a nuclear armed missile by itself.
Many organizations today have a literal
silo existence among its departments. For example, the four functional areas of
an organization: human resource, accounting, marketing and manufacturing
departments. These four functional areas/departments function independently
from each other. Inside these four major organizational departments are layers
of many more departments with the same
behavior.
These departments if not carefully watched
could imbibe a silo mindset. This means that there is a possibility that they
could function independently from each other. Which obviously is counter
productive in the life of an organization.
So, how do we cure this silo mindset? And
how can we transform this independent departments to become interdependent departments?
How can we break the attitude of competition and selfishness among these
departments?
The person that will lead the curing of
the silo mentality is the top gun of the organization. It’s the CEO or company
president for big corporations and the managers for small organizations. What
they have to do is to organize a permanent grouping of employees who will
represent the different departments.
Their extra task is to see to it that the
department where they belong is still in harmony with the overall objective of
the organization. The moment these members observe that their department is
slowly veering away from the objective of the organization. It is their responsibility
to re-align again the department which they represent to the overall
organizational objective.
Together with the organization’s top gun,
these members will serve as the catalyst in curing this dangerous silo mindset.
How would they do it?
The following are my humble suggestions: 1. Emphasize the
need to align with the overall organizational Vision/Mission 2. Use face to
face communication once in a while rather than always using electronic
communication 3. Encourage unity instead of diversity 4. Break existing
behavioral arrogance, closemindedness and egotism then replace it with humility,
openness and the willingness to listen. – Marino J. Dasmarinas
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