Getting people to unite for the sake of the company–and forget about their differences–focuses them on working together to benefit the whole.
by Jay Richards
For Industry Week
Does it feel sometimes like your people spend more time battling each other than they do the competition? This is silo behavior. Turf wars. In essence: Cross-function dysfunction. It is “us” versus “them” or “floor” versus “office.” Call it what you want, but at the end of the day it is simply cross-functional waste.
We usually tolerate these little flare-ups as nuisances that occur naturally among people (i.e. “Oh, they just don’t get along. No big deal.”). In reality, they create real disruptions that result in real drama and headaches.
If you want to put an end to this cross-functional behavior, look to your managers and supervisors from top to bottom. Instead of looking at those who create silo behavior, look at those who break down walls. What do they do that resonates with people?
Using our Denison Leadership Development 360 Survey (DLDS) and pulling out 3,000+ manufacturing leaders from the Denison database, we looked at the qualities of leaders who are effective at creating cross-functional harmony. (The DLDS is a leadership assessment that measures a broad range of leadership behaviors and their relation to organizational culture.)
With 3000+ Leaders, we get a picture of these qualities from over 32,000 peers, bosses and direct reports who rated them on their assessments.
The next step is to simply look at the leadership items and correlate them with a silo index. The top five items where the leader’s boss, direct reports, and peers correlated the highest were: