Leadership

Breaking down silos can spark innovation in unexpected ways.
Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect

You’ve seen it before: team members thinking about themselves more than the team; Every man and woman for themselves; a business composed of silos rather than being a cohesive organization.

Silos create inefficiency, waste time, prevent the business from achieving its vision, and hinder innovation.

So, how can you help create a cohesive team?

Here are three ways to break down silos and rally your team to success.

1. Create a Unified Vision.

Create a vision for your team that ties into the brand’s overall vision. Ask your team members to be involved in this process. Inspire them to take ownership of the business. Don’t make it complicated: create a vision that team members are passionate about and where everyone buys into its success.

An inspiring vision that everyone buys into will transition people from a “me” mentality to an “us” mentality.

2. Motivate and Incentivize.

Successful leaders identify what motivates each of their team members–it will be different for different people. Incentivize accordingly.

Motivation encompasses a wide variety of tactics including shared interests, individual investment in growth, shared voice, and positive words of encouragement. Incentives and praise should be designed to eliminate the “it’s not my job” attitude and encourage input, teamwork, and productivity.

3. Collaborate and Create Using the Six Thinking Hats Method.

The best method we’ve found for facilitating collaboration is Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. de Bono developed a simple and effective way to facilitate more collaboration and creativity during meetings by utilizing different perspectives.

Each hat represents a different perspective. Each team member wears each hat in turn. For example, “Okay, let’s put on our White Hats. Jim, you’re up first.”

Here’s a brief description of each hat:

White Hat: The neutral White Hat offers objective facts and figures and is used near the beginning of the meeting to establish relevant facts and information about the issue to be discussed.

Red Hat: The emotional and intuitive Red Hat is used to get people’s gut reactions to an idea or when you want the team to express their emotions freely.

Black Hat: The cautious Black Hat is used when you want to get the critical viewpoint of an idea or situation. The “devil’s advocate” hat helps decrease the chances of making a poor decision.

Yellow Hat: The sunny and positive Yellow Hat helps identify the value of ideas and plans. The Yellow Hat helps counterbalance the judgmental thinking of the Black Hat.

Green Hat: The creative Green Hat comes on when you want to generate fresh ideas and new directions. This is a very powerful hat that each player needs to wear.

Blue Hat: The organizing Blue Hat sets objectives, outlines the situation, and defines the problem at the beginning of the meeting and returns at the end to summarize and draw conclusions.

Remember, these six hats represent perspectives, not people or personalities. For this method to be used efficiently, each person in a meeting can and must be able to wear each hat in turn.

Breaking down silos is not an easy task for any organization but avoidance is detrimental.

A unified vision, the right motivation, and collaboration provides team members with a clear purpose and means of accomplishing the ultimate goal. There is nothing more powerful in any organization than having all employees pushing fiercely in the same direction.

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.
Larry King

Do you listen or do you just wait for your turn to talk?

When you listen, you have to be genuinely interested in what the other person is saying and be willing to let them change your mind. For most people, that’s not an easy state of mind nor is it something that naturally comes to them. Interestingly, this concept was a central theme during a recent discussion I had while exploring seriöse Casinos ohne Verifizierung. The conversation revolved around the importance of trust and transparency, not just in the context of verifying identity, but also in creating environments where people feel heard and understood. Much like active listening, fostering trust requires deliberate effort, conscious attention, and a willingness to adapt based on the needs and concerns of others. It’s why active listening is often referred to as a skill—because it takes practice to master.

Listening is a valuable activity for both yourself and the person you’re listening to: it can help build your knowledge or let you see something from a different viewpoint; and, it lets the person you’re listening to know you care, listen to themselves, get something off their chest, and let them make way for new thoughts.

Listening is powerful.

Listening isn’t about outward behavior; it’s not about nodding or eye contact—although they will happen naturally—instead, it’s about being genuinely curious. It’s attitudinal, not behavioral.

I’ve sat in on many focus groups and customer interviews that were nowhere near as effective as they could have been because the interviewer was more focused on their questions than listening to the interviewees. As storytelling expert Annette Simmons comments, many people think asking questions equates to listening: “Some people are lousy listeners because they think that asking lots of questions is good listening. Asking lots of questions is a good way to destroy someone’s story-not to mention break the flow of introspection the storytelling might have begun.”¹

And, you’ve all heard the stories about bosses that don’t listen; at some point, you’ve probably told them yourself.

Put simply, listening is about shutting up and paying attention.

One of the most effective ways I’ve found of training yourself to listen comes from when I studied Linklater Method—a voice-based acting training—in college: Once in a while when you’re talking with people, briefly pay attention to your breath; if you’re holding it, you’re focused on something else, likely what you’re about to say in response; you’re not in the moment, listening. As Kristen Linklater, the founder of the technique, says, “If you’re holding your breath in any way, you’re absent.”
²

Learn to listen. Few other activities will reward you as much as listening can.

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Recently, I was consulting a CEO on strategic presentation skills, they tended to keep talking without stopping and needed some work to better connect with the people in the room. We talked about the importance of pausing during the presentation and asking a question to engage the audience. With this small adjustment, speaking became more impactful, and the message connected.

One of the best ways to achieve engagement is by using open-ended questions, questions that encourage your colleagues to share ideas and opinions, and by carefully listening to what they say you will kindle mutual respect.

Here are some of my favorite opened-ended questions:

What inspires you?

What is the most meaningful part of your job?

What do you value most in life?

Would you tell me more about ___?

What’s the most important priority for you with this?

Who benefits from your vision?

Try finding opportunities to ask questions and see how quickly you engage people when you listen to what they have to say.

Big ideas, when they stick, can guide an organization to an extraordinary future. It helps you determine when to move and where. It provides a shared vision that creates cohesion within your organization, which can lead to superior execution over time.

To discover or refine your big idea, consider the following questions:

End Picture: What will your business look like when it’s done?

Passion: What does your organization love doing? What are your collective strengths (based on employee passion, past performance, and available resources)?

Leadership: What will your organization be a leader in? What are you committed to being the best in the world at?

Impact: Where can your enterprise have the most significant impact? Who are you committed to best serving?

As with any discovery process, be sure to start with a Beginner’s Mind. Pretend that you don’t know the answers.

Be open-minded.

Be receptive to any idea, even the most outrageous ones.

Stay curious my friends.

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn

The truth is that many of us spend most of our time in the office. Think about how you can transform the lives of those around you by becoming more aware.

This shift toward more humanistic management practices doesn’t merely improve productivity, creativity, collaboration, loyalty, and profitability; it can also help the people around you become better spouses, better parents, and better citizens.

You can invite your employees to grow by finding ways to make the workplace more engaging (less static), more inspiring (less mundane), and more open (less fixed). As Abraham Maslow put it, “We must try to make a particular kind of people, of personality, of character, of soul one might say, rather than try to create directly particular kinds of behavior.”

When we practice mindfulness, we are training our brains to examine internal and external cues rather than react to them, so we can better manage emotions and develop into our full humanity.