Let me challenge your thinking…

There is much talk about these days relating to breaking down silos. Creating Cloud or As A service teams with specialists from hardware, compute, storage and networking. VMware likes to call them a “Center of Excellence”.

What are these made of? You take all the best people from the silos and put then together into one team. In this team they will work well together to achieve the outcomes. That the theory. Just make sure that are a great team and not a team of greats.

This sounds great. Have your best IT people working together.

Hang on, isn’t this what you always want? Why is this only apparent now?

Why do you have underachievers in your teams at all? Are you focused on people or outcomes? Outcomes come from people, yet in many organisations the focus is seemingly _only_ on outcomes. I could rant all day about ineffective managers and lack of leadership. If you focus on your people and provide leadership the outcomes will be achieved.

Back to the silos. Why do silos exist in the first place? In bigger organisations you have HR department. I put it to you that this is also a silo. A silo of specialists for specific tasks for which individual mangers will not have the exposure and therefore the built in expertise to deal with effectively. If do not do HR tasks very often you will probably not be very good at it. Practice and continuous exposure makes you better, more effective and efficient. Does this mean we should break down this silo too? Make all the individual managers responsible for all HR related items? Who thinks this is going to work effectively for large organisations?

My proposal is that it is not the specialist teams that are the problem. It is the people, they way they think, the way they act.

When you talk, do you use the words, “us” and “them”?

If so, drop them. Talk to each other and work out the best way to interact that achieves result for all.