Has anyone ever said to you: “Who said that you could talk to them?”
This phrase is not a red flag. It is a blood-spattered crimson banner of doom fluttering in the nuclear wind of annihilation. It is a flashing EXIT sign pointing the way for you to move forward.
Don’t get me wrong. People need space and time to do their work. If they have their headphones on in the office then they should be left alone. Unless they are playing their music so loudly that everyone can hear it. That’s almost as obnoxious as using a speaker phone in a common space. But lest I digress, people do need time to focus. And people need an opportunity to work in their teams, functions or business units. None of these are bad things.
Except most organizations take it too far. They may do this unconsciously. They may say that one of their core values is “Collaboration”. But all the incentives and metrics are around individual team performance. No time is budgeted for inter-team performance. No meaningful projects are set up across teams. No structured events allow people to meet others outside their team in a work context. Process handover points are sharp ravines down which unwary travelers fall to their deaths. Information is captured in forms and then left in solitary confinement to slowly lose its group on reality.
At the Christmas party, everyone gets together and asks each other’s names and makes awkward small talk and then waits until the next year to do that all over again.
Some organizations go even further. Managers are hostile warlords controlling their territory. If you speak to a member of a rival gang colleague in a different department then you are obviously a traitor. Not to be trusted. We can only succeed if they fail. Resources are scarce. Trust is low. Never walk into a meeting without gigabytes of spreadsheets and a smooth powerpoint.
Ray Winstone asking if you can send him a link to your powerpoint presentation (Manager, 1979, Dir: Alan Clarke)
Why does this matter? Well, it means that your organization is almost certainly operating sub-optimallly - with each silo doing its own thing. If you operate as a conglomerate with each silo having no need to talk to each other then who cares? But if, god forbid, you actually need to work together to achieve a common goal then that’s a problem. It’s not enough for the senior leaders of these siloes to meet for 1 hour once a month. You actually need some kind of connectivity across your siloes from the top to the bottom.
You might do this through moving people around between the siloes. Amazon decided to do this by making all its data internally accessible through APIs. Whatever you do will have some combination of people and machines talking to each other.
Siloes are a Goldilocks phenomenon. You can have resources too widely distributed and disconnected to be of any use. But too often your people are too isolated from each other. A Marxist might say it’s a conspiracy to keep the workers down. But we need to give Marx a quick shave with Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.
To go deeper into this topic - and to explore some simple remedies - I recommend The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett.
Talk to someone new - if you dare.