Many Leaders Strive for a More Collaborative Work Culture
Many organizations are structured around functional silos. If you want a more collaborative work culture, one that depends on achieving company-wide and team goals rather than disconnected goals, you need to break down the barriers that keep your functions and employees in silos.
Departments or teams that work in isolation can decrease efficiencies and innovation and work against common strategic goals.
Overcoming Silos is Important
While silos can foster powerful expertise and focus, executives who want to fuel high levels of company-wide growth complain that silos lack the necessary levels of transparency and permeability between functions to maximize synergies.
Timely Information Flow Matters Across Teams
In fact, your company’s ability to innovate, grow, and stay competitive may depend upon your company’s ability to share what they know, what they can do, and how they can help.
Our Organizational Alignment Research found that “timely information flow across the company” ranked as the fourth biggest differentiator between high and low performing organizations in terms of profitable revenue growth, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. A more collaborative culture is a smart way to unleash your company’s true potential.
Five Ways to Break Barriers for a More Collaborative Work Culture
Here are five ways you can crash through silos and those walls that restrict the power of effective collaboration at work:
Everyone in a supervisory position needs to model the desired behavior – no silos tolerated.
If you allow a top performer to get away with looking only toward individual goals and not cooperating with team members to help achieve team goals, your initiative will quickly lose credibility and the change effort will fail.
The Bottom Line
Organizational culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies. If your strategy depends upon collaboration across functions, be proactive about creating a more collaborative work culture that you know will help your people and your business thrive.
To learn about the steps required to create a more collaborative work culture, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture that You Must Get Right to Beat the Competition
Explore real world results for clients like you striving to create higher performance