Silos — and the turf wars they enable — devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals.
In his 2006 book Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors, Patrick Lencioni said that silos are nothing more than barriers that exist between an organization’s departments, causing people who are supposed to be on the same team to work against one other. Now, pandemic-related forces are reshaping higher-education silos and their respective turf wars — an opportunity that calls for collaboration across campus departmental silos.
Campus leaders must provide themselves and their employees with a common goal that they all must work towards. Without it, employees at all levels may easily get lost or even move in different directions, often at cross-purposes.
Here are three key ways to get your organization out of its silos and working collaboratively — during the pandemic and beyond.
1. Acknowledge Shared Responsibilities & Goals
Employees being pulled in many directions may begin to wonder why their colleagues in other departments aren’t on board with a given idea. Both departments may see the other as a competitor, someone to work against rather than with. But if you can help both sides to see that they share a common goal, those silo walls just might begin to crumble.
Let’s look at a goal that many college departments share: meeting enrollment quotas. In the past, many departments viewed enrollment as solely the purview of Student Affairs. However, over the past few years — and particularly during the pandemic — enrollment has been seen as an all-campus effort, even if each department’s role and goals are different. For example, because we moved many services of UHMC’s The Learning Center (TLC) online after the pandemic hit, our campus was seen as forward-thinking and proactive — two characteristics that made us highly desirable to prospective enrollees.
Every department is responsible for enrollment, because if they aren’t holding up their end, then that piece of campus life deteriorates and becomes unappealing to a prospective student. So when it came to enrollment, the mindset had to be changed: All departments, not just Student Affairs, were made to feel as part of a team working towards a common goal. Student Affairs may lead the charge, but each department has a role to play. Today, there is much more collaboration in enrollment initiatives because each department understands and accepts its role and impact.
2. Understand Your Department’s Unique Role in Reaching Those Goals
As discussed in the previous point, while enrollment may not have been the original goal when TLC moved services online, the change definitely impacted that area. By underscoring enrollment as a goal for all, departments can better analyze their roles and successes.
Since each department’s role is different, be sure to highlight the specifics for each. Student Affairs, for example, takes responsibility for the bulk of the goal, so its measure of success is in the actual enrollment numbers.
But TLC has different measurements for its success, and while those metrics weren’t developed with enrollment in mind, they can be used for that purpose as well. For example, TLC conducts surveys in student satisfaction, including convenience of hours the facility is open, how conducive the atmosphere is to testing, the quality of the center’s services, and how efficiently tests are administered. High scores in these areas can be used in recruitment materials, extolling yet another one of the campus’s many benefits to prospective students.
Once each department has identified which of their goals can be used for the overall common goal, those can be communicated to all key players. Communicating each department’s role helps to foster a sense of belonging to the same team, rather than opposing ones.
3. Embracing Collaboration
Why don’t employees just learn to get along better with people in other departments? Don’t they know we’re all on the same team?
In order to rid departments of the “us versus them” attitude, leaders need to reset employee mindsets by creating an atmosphere that fosters cross-department collaboration. In other words, there needs to be constant reminders that everyone is on the same team. There are two main ways to do so: sharing resources and communication.
One of the most common shared resources is employees. Instead of “belonging” to a single department, individuals work fluidly across department lines. In addition, they are made aware that one of their main functions is to bridge the gap, whether that be between departments or institutions. Not only does that employee see the bigger picture, but their mere presence communicates the idea of teamwork any time they interact with others.
When I worked for UHMC as articulation coordinator, my role was to align career pathways between high schools and colleges. My work overlapped with so many institutions — high schools, UHMC, the Hawaii State Department of Education (DOE) — that many of my own colleagues didn’t know that I worked directly for UHMC, not the DOE. That was a constant reminder to everyone that we were all working toward a shared goal: improving career pathways so students could transition seamlessly from high school to college.
When employees see other departments sharing resources, they are more open to sharing their own. Likewise, the mere idea of sharing fosters the visualization of openness and movement, rather than resources being out of reach behind a silo wall. By viewing a resource as shared, the definition of “ours” expands from “our department’s” to “our organization’s” — and, ultimately, to “our students” (because they’re the real reason we’re all here).
Cross-department communication can have a similar effect. Continuing with the enrollment example, UHMC Student Affairs uses its position as goal leader to communicate to all departments about goals and successes. For example, the department could send out a newsletter about enrollment numbers, including key data from each department, such as TLC’s increased satisfaction rankings.
Institutions — academic and otherwise — are using the pandemic to reassess traditional methods and systems. That makes it an ideal time to reassess cross-department collaboration by breaking down the silos that have long been a feature of our institutional landscapes.