Silos: The Silent Killer Of Businesses And Teams

This is SSN: Story Studio Network.

Lauren: Welcome to the Biz Doctor Podcast. My love letter to business owner is the World Over. I’m your host Lauren Goldstein, award-winning business consultant and advisor whose fondly nicknamed the business Doctor by my [00:00:30] clients. My clients call me the business doctor because I help business owners who are burning the candle at both ends, diagnose what is actually keeping them stuck in and buried under the day-to-day of their business, and then formulate a business treatment plan to help them adjust their business and team to fit them.

And most importantly, support them in having what I call true entrepreneurial freedom. If you’re ready to look at your business in a different lens and elevate yourself out of the business operator in the trenches 24 7 to visionary business owner and leader who can take a breath vacation and have more fun making an impact with your business, then grab your favorite beverage and your earbud.

And let’s dive into our latest episode.

Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode, I’m gonna share with you a silent killer. I see tanking a lot of teams and businesses today, especially with a lot of the workforce being remote, and that is silos, specifically disconnection between teams, employees, and leadership. To illustrate this, I’m gonna tell you a story about one of my clients.

Now, to set the tone, this client has a 35 million business and a team of about 120. Now, the reason they brought me on is because the leadership is buried and on the verge of burnout. Two of the three partners are burning the candle at both ends and starting to feel like a, there’s  no hope that they can get out of the day-to-day trenches.

But fear not friends. This is my specialty. Extracting business owners and B, starting to resent the third partner who has a whole bunch of time leverage that allows him to travel and do what he wants in a much higher amount than the other two. So I was brought in to do what I do best as the business doctor.

Diagnose. Diagnose what is keeping both the business owners stuck in the day-to-day operations, and also what is keeping them at this monetary threshold and prohibiting sustainable scaling. Well, in this case, I put on my interim COO hat. They did our Diagnostic Plus, which is a hybrid between our basic diagnostic and my interim COO services, which is very effective for businesses like this because I get to talk one-on-one with their top leaders.

Now, honestly, this is one of my favorite services I offer because I actually get to dig much deeper into the inner workings of their business and see if what the leadership thinks is going on is really going on. It is absolutely fascinating. When I do these calls in an hour or less, I can suss out exactly what’s working and what isn’t, both in their employees role and in the company.

From there, I create a stoplight debrief that takes all the aggregate data that I collected from the team and separates into green light what’s working yellow light, what they need to be aware of, because it has the chance of becoming an issue and red light issues that need to be immediately addressed.

Now, I tell you all of this background because it is most often on these calls and my inklings about what isn’t working, aka my diagnosis is proven right. For example, when I had our diagnostic kickoff with these three partners, I told them that based on what they were sharing during this call, I believe that one of their biggest concentrated risks preventing them from scaling and more profitability is the team is siloed.

Well, sure enough, yesterday on two calls, the team told me that they feel like they have no idea what the other teams are doing and feel disconnected from the team as a whole, which is impacting their role. You see in this particular company, the teams are actually more critical than most to one another because if one team makes a mistake before handing it off to the next team, then it creates a huge loss in company, both in time and revenue.

So you would think that the teams would be collaborating and working together like a well-oiled machine, right? Well, I would hope so too. And that is honestly my goal with this client, but is sadly not the reality at this moment. And honestly, something I see in a lot of teams, big and small. Now, you might be saying to yourself, well, of course they have issues.

They have a big team. But the truth is you can have silos in tiny teams too. A silo is simply a wall real or perceived that inhibits the transfer of knowledge resources in collaboration in small teams. It manifests like this. I’ll use another client example here and of course change names. Julie is undermining Brian because she’s second guessing his quotes for projects and materials.

So now instead of them working together, because they both need those numbers and Julie has information, Brian needs, and Brian has the ultimate report that Julie gets to clients now, Brian creates a silo by refusing to work one-on-one with Julie, resulting in the business owner having to pay peacekeeper and intermediary, wasting everybody’s time and energy, and causing general frustration and mistrust.

This frustration is actually why the client came to me in the first place to solve this personnel issue and get her out of the management role. See, again, this is another example of a business owner that’s stuck in the trenches day to day. This case, mostly management, which she has self-disclosed that she doesn’t like doing, but because she’s the leader of the business, she’s been doing it.

So now what we get to do is get her out of that role by strategically hiring someone who does like managing people, so she can go back to being the visionary, creative business owner, working with her clients. Another way that this can manifest is with overly competitive peers or with deliberately withholding key information for a project because you don’t want someone to steal your idea.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this happen before where somebody has a great idea, puts together this project, shares it with another team member, and the team member goes to the boss and shares it like it’s their idea. It’s really unfortunate, but it does happen, and this is definitely a symptom of silos because.

One of the things that I see happen when you do have silos is the lack of trust and transparency, because if you had trust and transparency both between the team, the leadership, et cetera, then no one would ever Dan to go and make it seem like they had done the work when they hadn’t. Also, the leadership would know the team well enough to know that something was amiss.

The third part of that is there would be a trust component where. The employee that actually did the work wouldn’t be apprehensive to go and show it off. Lastly, it can also manifest in something that seems harmless, which is over autonomy. This is someone who’s so independent that they actually stop playing team.

No, don’t get me wrong. Having an autonomous team is the goal. That is where someone can work without your step-by-step direction towards a project. That’s also the definition of a player. Somebody who can take the end goal project, step out the steps necessary to get there and run like the wind. But when someone is autonomous and also on an island, which is what someone who is over autonomous is, that is a recipe for disaster because it makes collaboration, knowledge, sharing all the things, almost impossible.

So now that you know the danger of silos, I bet you’re asking yourself, well, how the heck do I actually break down silos? Here are four ways that I have found to be most effective. The first is an all hands meeting. The tech world made these famous, but boy oh boy, are they actually really effective across the board, no matter your business.

It’s essentially a time for the whole company to come together and see what everyone is working on, what the wins are, where the challenges are, and see how each department is interdependent on one another. Now some companies do monthly, all hands, some do quarterly. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody do weekly, but I do recommend getting yourself on an all hands cadence.

It’s going to help so much with collaboration and communication, and also making it very clear to your employees that they’re part of something bigger because no employee wants to just be a cog in. A machine, they wanna see how they’re impacting the future of the business. And so this is a great way to have not only communication and collaboration  increase, but also make your team feel more connected to your mission and vision and get their buy-in over and over again.

And to this point, monthly department head meetings are also very effective. Some do weekly. It depends on the cadence and rhythms of your business to figure out. What kind of meeting cadence you want? I will say this caveat though, a lot of meetings are not necessary. So if you think you need to meet weekly, you might, and I’m encouraging you to check in and see if that’s actually true.

Would biweekly be okay? And just be very cognizant of how many meetings you’re putting on your employees calendars because for every meeting that you put on a calendar, Their production time where they’re actually working on the projects that you need them to be working on to move the business forward is cut down.

So don’t create death by meeting. That’s my caveat.

Before we dive into the next bit, I wanna take a second to share with you something that I’ve seen drastically change businesses and teams for the better. Imagine waking up every morning with a team that knows exactly what is expected of them and how to achieve success without you having to micromanage them.

Imagine how much time and dollars you will save by hiring the right team member from the start, not to mention getting the most out of every current member of your team. That is what’s possible with our tried and tested tool, the Golden Key Scorecard. The scorecard is a simple, impactful, and fillable tool for managing your team ditching inefficiency, and I guarantee.

We’ll help you stop playing whack-a-mole, chasing team docks all over the place. It’s as easy as filling out a form if you wanna get out from under your business, shifting from business operator to business owner, and take your business to the next level while reclaiming your time. Then our golden key scorecard is just the ticket.

Our scorecard provides the time tested framework and process to get you and your team out of the weeds and into a well-oiled machine that can scale without you. It’s time for you to run your business instead of the other way around. Become an expert in this critical piece of the foundation to creating a high performing team.

Download the Golden Key Scorecard for free at goldenkeypartnership.com/go. Now back to the show.

The second way is through Google Drive. I know you might be rolling your eyes right now, but hear me out. When you make collaboration and communication easy, they’re gonna do it. If it’s hard. There’s gonna be resistance. So if it’s difficult, aka, you gotta download the spreadsheet, then send it, and then wait for somebody to edit and send it back.

So you just twiddle your thumbs till you get it back. You get the idea that’s gonna be fertile, fertile ground to build silos on because nobody is gonna want to really collaborate and do that because it’s just wasting time. So really look at how your team is communicating within the resources that they need to share and make sure it’s really easy for them to do it.

The third way is to nip it in the bud. So this is the one that unfortunately is gonna hurt the most upfront, but it will pay the most dividends later. Find the people who are creating silos or doing any of the naughty behavior that I mentioned above and cut it out of the team. Sometimes it’s putting them on notice and just sharing with them that you see what’s happening, that it will not be tolerated, and for them to move forward and continue to be part of the team.

These are the expectations, but sometimes it’s that they’ve got to go. See, the thing with toxic people in the work environment is that they’re actually causing dis-ease. They’re like cancer. Soon they will infect the whole team to keep your ear to the ground and get ahead of it. Trust me, if you tolerate this, you will start to lose your top players because they don’t tolerate this and they’re collaborators and wanna focus on how everybody wins, how they win, how the company wins, how the team wins.

They’re very big on team players. Now the fourth way is through transparency. Celebrate it and make it something that’s very normal for the company. A lot of times I see silos created in teams because the manager talks one-on-one instead of to the whole team. Now, a great example is, If a mistake is made, the manager talks to the person one-on-one instead of letting the whole team learn.

Now, I’m not saying you need to call the employee out in front of everyone, but it is important for your team to know what’s happened and have a postmortem for more on postmortems. I did a whole episode about this. So I recommend listening to season one, episode 32, how to make the most out of employees’ mistakes and reduce the chances of them happening again.

And more importantly, than the lessons, though, you wanna celebrate the wins, acknowledge the team member and the teams who made it happen so that you can get them to, again, see how it’s all connected and get them to play Team. And another note about transparency. I was actually having a client conversation a few days ago where I noticed a really interesting trend in the team that a lot of mistakes were being made, but the mistakes were being corrected one-on-one and not actually shared with the rest of the team.

And so I was really curious about the reasoning behind this. And um, and he said, well, it’s simple, you know, praise in public discipline, in private. And I said, well, that’s really interesting. However, do you think it would be valuable for the whole team to know what the mistake was that was made so that when they come across it or somebody else comes across it that they can problem solve it without you?

You could just see the wheels turning. And he said, you know what? I’ve never really thought about it like [00:15:00] that. I just didn’t wanna embarrass them. You know, like, it’s bad enough when you make a mistake, then it’s worse if everybody knows you made the mistake. And I said, well, yeah, I get that. I mean, I’m not saying, you know, just take ’em to the public square and, and stick ’em there for everybody to see.

I’m saying that it’s an opportunity to say, Hey, this is what happened. This is why it happened. This is how we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t happen again. Basically the perfect recipe for a postmortem. So I’m talking to this client and I’m asking him how often they do postmortems and he said, hardly ever.

And I said, why? And he said, well, I mean we do it as a leadership team, but we, but we rarely ever do it with the team. So again, I said, why? And he said, well, I don’t know. I feel like it goes in one ear and out the other, or they don’t really care cuz it’s not their department. Et cetera, et cetera. You see what’s happening here?

He inadvertently created silos and he didn’t even know it. As I’m talking to this partner, I said, for the next few weeks, I want you to do postmortems on every mistake with the whole team. And he’s like, that’s gonna take forever. I’m like, yeah, might take forever. But think about this, when you are able to be transparent about what’s happening, the good, the bad, the ugly.

Then your team also gets more vested in what’s happening because they don’t wanna spend their time going through mistakes. Right? And I said, chances are when you do postmortems, they’re gonna get better. They’re gonna see patterns, and you’re gonna spend less time firefighting for a little extra time.

Now you’re gonna get a lot of time back later. I really cannot emphasize transparency enough because I know that as business owners sometimes we wanna protect our employees or we don’t think they need to know something. And in certain cases that’s true. But in other cases, the more transparent we can be about what’s working and what’s not, the more surprised you’ll be when your employees come to you with solutions that you hadn’t thought of.

Because the thing about being a business owner is recognizing that just because you’re the leader doesn’t mean you have all the answers, right? Sometimes when we have a problem, I’ll say to the team, Hey guys, this is the problem we have. Who’s got a creative solution? Or if somebody comes to me with a problem, I’ll say, what do you suggest we do?

Because sure, in a lot of cases, I know how to solve the problem. But I’m also looking to be wowed, for lack of a better word, with the creativity and ingenuity of somebody else solving the problem in a different way that I hadn’t even imagined. And that’s what transparency creates. It creates trust, it creates autonomy, and it creates collaboration.

So if anything, this is in my opinion, one of the best ways to cut silos down. All right, because I’m a giver, I’m gonna give you a fifth way. A fifth way I suggest breakdown silos in your company is more fun. I know you might be rolling your eyes right now, but honestly, find more ways to interact outside of talking about work.

I know it’s easy just to talk about work and. Set the standard that even when you’re on vacation, just check in on Slack. Stop doing that. Please stop doing that. But when you bring it back to human, human connections so that people get to know one another, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their struggles, it creates an amazingly cohesive culture.

Now remember that they’re not just a cog in your business. They’re working for you to also make their dreams a reality. So when you get to know them, you have fun with them. It’s not just about clocking in, clocking out. I’m using air quotes right now. The team will follow. Plus you can do team building even when your team is remote.

There’s a million different ways you can do this and build this rapport, but something that needs to come back to business that I’m very passionate about is fun. It shouldn’t just be going through the motions day in, day out until you reach your goal. There should be an element of fun. Personally, I love doing activities that everyone can do, whether it’s top golf or laser tag, or bumper carts, or go-karts or whatever.

I act my shoe size a lot, but fun opens up flow and it gets people outta their heads. And you know what’s really crazy about fun? It actually increases productivity and profitability. You would be surprised that so many problems get. Solved when people are having fun cuz they’ve stopped thinking about it.

Alrighty guys. That’s it for this weeks episode. I hope I gave you some golden nuggets and tools to take into your business and your team and knock down those silos because trust me, Silos will be the kiss of death for your business. So if you can figure out where your silos are, hopefully you don’t have any.

But if you do, figure out where they are, why they’re being created, why they’re sticking around, and get rid of ’em. Your business, your team, everyone will thank you. So thanks so much for listening in. If anything I shared sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you. So let’s connect, tag or DM me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the interwebs.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe, so you’re the first in enemy. Notified when our next episode is live and ready for your ears. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.

Thank you for listening to The Biz Doctor Podcast. Now, I like to say that friends, don’t let friends WebMD your business. So if you’re wondering what your next steps could be, here are some options for you no matter what. Head to the show notes or to my website, goldenkeypartnership.com for some impactful resources to support you getting out from under your business.

That’s also where you’ll find the links to learn more about our services and how we support business owners just like you, who are ready to make the successful jump from business operator in the trenches to visionary business owner with more freedom and flexibility. All that info is on our website, so pop on over to learn more or get in touch.

Goldenkeypartnership.com. Finally, if you love The Biz Doctor podcast, I’d be so grateful if you would share it with your friends and network and give us a five star rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast.

This is Story Studio Network.