Strategy #31: Tear down the silo walls

When Jack Welch was CEO of General Electric, one of his top corporate goals was to create a “boundaryless” organization. By bringing down the “silo walls” that separated departments, he knew he could cultivate an organization that was more efficient and more innovative.  He also knew that this would foster teamwork, and hence loyalty.

I was recently giving a talk for a hospital audience, encouraging them to cultivate more of a support group environment. As a hypothetical example, I asked them to imagine that the director of the intensive care unit, at the end of a long and stressful shift, called down to foodservice and placed an emergency order for 18 root beer floats to give to her staff before they went home to dump all that stress on their families.

The director for one of the intensive care units at that hospital happened to be in the audience that morning. She raised her hand and said that she wouldn’t waste her time on such a phone call, because she’d only be told that it wasn’t in the foodservice budget. (Have you ever seen a balloon run into the business end of a safety pin?  That’s sort of what happened to the punch line of my story.) After the session ended, I tracked down the director of foodservice at that hospital and asked him what he would do were he to receive a STAT request for root beer floats in the ICU because they’d had a bad day. He told me that (even though root beer floats in fact were not in his budget) he would move heaven and earth to honor that request. So I asked him to go ahead and act as if the request had been made.

At shift change that afternoon, a round of root beer floats was delivered for all of the nurses on the intensive care unit, to the astonishment of the director.  By choosing to say no for the foodservice director without even asking, she had missed an incredible opportunity to bring down the silo walls, and to promote teamwork and fellowship. She’d also missed the opportunity to allow the foodservice director to be a hero. She later told me that she’d never miss those opportunities again.

Think about your organization. What can you do to bring down the silo walls, and to enhance a spirit of cooperation and teamwork between the various divisions (that very word connotates something divided, doesn’t it?).

I’ll say more about tearing down silo walls in Silo Busters, which will be one of the tools included in the Values Coach Cultural Transformation Toolkit due out in Spring of 2007.

“The best team leaders are able to get everyone to buy into a common sense of mission, goals, and agenda. The ability to articulate a compelling vision that serves as the guiding force for the group may be the single most important contribution of a good team leader.”

Daniel Goleman: Working With Emotional Intelligence

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