Growing your business has never been as challenging as in today’s rapid evolving environment. How to differentiate from the competition? The quest for new solutions and methods to stand out of the crowd, is never-ending.
One of those methods resides in the way our organizations are set up. Our experience of working with major global companies, has learnt us that the architure of a company often still is fragmented and siloed. Though the concept of the “boundaryless organization,” the organization where employee involvement and shorter decision cycles define the core mindset, introduced to us more than 25 years ago by Jack Welch, is oftentimes non-existent. We experience that this, in the meanwhile rather old concept, is still a bridge too far for many of today’s global organizations. This leads us to questions on how we can improve the stuctures of today’s organizations? Which initiatives can help closing the gap between departments? In other words breaking down organizational silos. Easier said than done, you might think!
As stated by Forbes Magazine, organizational silos are seen as a “growing pain” for all types of organizations. In order to boost your company’s growth, they suggest 5 tactics supporting closer interdepartmental collaboration.
5 tactics for breaking down organizational silos
1. A Unified Vision
It all starts with a unified vision. To be able to move forward and grow as a company, it is crucial that the leadership is aligned. Struggles there will alow for fragmented views and goals within the company. Hence it is important that strategic goals are supported by the entire management. This way the leadership enables a unified climate of trust and empowerment.
2. Common Goals
A unified vision results in common goals. A first priority of the leadership is to detect and tackle the root cause of the development of silos. When this is done there is room for all members of the management to work towards the common “organizational goals”. Note that to enable a smooth course of your organizational ship, the goals need to be translated to all employees. Make sure everyone within the organization is aware of those common goals.
3. Motivate & Incentivize
A big part of the work is done, if your organization is able to get the first two steps right. Naturally there are more hurdles to overcome: executing and implementing the goals. As a manager this starts with translating the company goals into actionable KPI’s for your team. To do this successfully, motivation and incentives are essential. Motivate and incentivize your team when they reach their targets.
4. Execute & Measure
To be able to evaluate and measure progress and achievement of the common goals, the leadership should have defined timeframes, benchmarks and objectives to the members in the leadership. Regular evaluation of the progress is necessary to increase success rates.
5. Collaborate & Create
Maximizing results is based on the presence of four main traits. According to Forbes, there are a few key factors in creating a thriving and productive team: knowledge, collaboration, creativity, and confidence. Facilitate a climate where these traits can be developed.
These first 5 steps help you to break down organizational silos. However, a key prerequisite is to have a unified vision and common goals. How will you define these common goals?
Common strategic company goals
To define the common strategic company goals, it is key to understand the business, and what drives the business. This can cause some obstructions in the leadership team. Management from the various departments can have different interpretations of what is driving the business, and how the future for the organization may look like. Therefore it is important to exclude power play and human “qualitative” interpretation of the business as much as possible in the strategic decision making process. A good way is to do this via predictive analytics. Here’s why:
- Validating qualitative assumptions
Rule out powerplay by using data to support strategic goals. It’s present in every management room: managers who are able to speak up louder than others. Instead of basing strategic goals on the ones in the room with the louder voices and power, let data talk. Human assumptions are often wrong, and can lead to destructive growth paths. By validating qualitative assumptions with advanced predictive analytics, you will be able to rely strategic decisions on facts and figures.
- Predictive analytics match your company data with external market data
Discovering what is driving your business is often a process which takes up a lot of time and money. Results can be dissapointing as well. Intelligent algorithms to the rescue! Solventure LIFe has built an intuitive tool which automatically connects your data with their global database, consisting of more than 2 million global indicators (ranging from macro-economic data to weather data…). The tool will identify which indicators matter and will provide you with advanced insights on what are the leading forces of your business.
- Build strategic forecasts based on what really drives your business
Using the external data to create forecast models will add tremendous value in your strategic decision making process. By using global data as a base to build forecasting models instead of history, you will be able to outperform competitors and better foresee what the future holds for your company!
Defining strategic goals becomes easier with the right insights, enabling you to break down organizational silos and create growth for your organization.
