Death by silos: How cross-functional teams keep your projects alive

The silo death cycle

You’ve identified a real problem. You’ve been toiling away on a solution for weeks. You’ve bounced the idea off of everyone on your team and have loads of great feedback. That feedback has been seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly, innovative solution. It’s perfect! You’re stoked! It’s slated for dev. A bottle of champagne is in your hands, and you’re shaking it vigorously.

Just as you motion to pop that bottle and shower your team in sweet victory, a shadowy figure appears, and takes the bottle from your confused hands.

It’s John, the Dev Manager.
Or it’s Jane, Head of Customer Service.
Or it’s Malcom, Director of Finance.
Or it’s Valerie, General Counsel.

They got wind of your little initiative, and they’re not happy. Your heart sinks. This isn’t the first time. You know what’s coming.

“We can’t do this because:”
“It’s not technically feasible” or
“Our infrastructure can’t handle it” or
“It’s not profitable” or
“That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen”

The entire project comes to a screeching halt. They bring up something that never crossed your mind, something specific to the business, or a unique insight that their experience has afforded them. Poof! Your project is up in smoke, and you have to return to the drawing board and create a new solution with this insight in mind, hoping another heavy hitter doesn’t swoop in and set your initiative ablaze.

Getting it right

We’ve all been there at some point: dealing with inefficiency of going back to the drawing board because of a failure to account for a key consideration or having a far better idea brought to the table after yours just got slated for dev.

That’s just how things are. Right?
WRONG! Sort of…

That is in fact how things are if no one does anything to change them. Change is hard. It’s hard to accept and multitudes harder to foster. This is partially because of fear of the unknown. More specifically fear of losing something of value or the fear of not being able to adapt to new ways. Fear and uncertainty fuel resistance. Additionally, people will often push back not because they dislike the change, but because they weren’t included. To abate these fears, you need to clearly identify and communicate all the implications, benefits, and potential risks of a change to all parties involved. To do that effectively, you need those parties’ trust.

people will often push back not because they dislike the change, but because they weren’t included

This article is a C-4 stock pile itching to blow work silos out of your company. The explosives contained below include garnering trust, problem defining, brainstorming, and execution.

Garnering trust — The listening tour

Before other departments will be willing to talk about change, you have to first listen to the leaders and members of impacted teams. You need to be able to demonstrate that you are interested in objectively understanding their pain points and genuinely show that you have their best interests at heart. This is called a listening tour.

A listening tour is best conducted through a series of 1-on-1s. This eliminates the risk of groupthink and passive participations. You are there to process, not to present, so approach them with vulnerability. There will be competing priorities and maybe some existing issues between your teams. If you’re defensive at the mention of these things, the person you’re trying to build a relationship with will put up walls. It’s important to approach these discussions as a student with an eagerness to learn, and a desire to help where you can. Lastly, book an hour. Longform discussion is best to understand not just the position the person holds, but the nuance of those positions and how they affect others throughout your organization.

If you’re defensive at the mention of these things, the person you’re trying to build a relationship with will put up walls.

Cross-department problem-defining

Having a basic understanding of other departments helps you avoid trying to fix a problem that can’t be fixed because it fundamentally undermines a department’s core.

The last listening tour I conducted resulted in a spreadsheet of 107 problems to tackle. These problems weren’t clearly defined and came from individual departments. Some of them overlapped, and upon getting all the people in the room that a problem affected, we quickly found that the people across departments were trying to solve for similar issues, but with very different approaches that adversely affected their co-workers in other departments. The conversation was more combative than collaborative.

“I have more employees on my team”
“My team drives more profit”
“That adversely affects my P&L”
“We have more budget for that”

These points of division are not helpful in identifying a problem. However, they are valuable aspects to consider when brainstorming a solution. If your hope is to foster change for the better, you must facilitate this conversation into a place of common ground.

Think along the lines of:

• What underlying thread is connecting all of these disparate points?
• Does everyone share the same user?
• Is this the root problem or merely a symptom of a larger one?
• What pain does it cause?
• What’s wrong with the current solution?
• What causes this problem?

Making ‘What is best for our customer?’ as our True North or a Guiding Star, asking this question whenever we are contemplating a contentious or a hard decision, enables us to cut across silos and view ourselves as our customers do — as Kabbage and not as departments.

Aditya Narula
Head of Customer Experience

People are tribal by nature. They will team up and divide over the most minute differences. It’s been ingrained into our DNA for survival ever since man first walked. It’s imperative to establish mutuality within this group of people from the very beginning. Treat the problem as a cross-functional project and the people working on it as an actual team instead of disparate individuals and smaller groups completing intermingled work. Once everyone is on the same page and has agreed on the premise of the problem, document it with everyone in the room so it can be referenced moving forward.

Treat the problem as a cross-functional project and the people working on it as an actual team, instead of disparate individuals and smaller groups completing intermingled work.

Brainstorming a solution

This is where the real power of having a cross-functional team comes into play. Leverage the diversity of thought and experience to generate insights that otherwise would be impossible to come up with inside of silos. Having people from different backgrounds and different mindsets attacking the same problem is far more effective than trying to figure it out all on your lonesome. Give each person in the room equal time to discuss their views on the problem. What would success look like? What are different ways we can achieve that success.

This is the time to utilize those points of division in forming a solution. Now that everyone is striving towards a common goal, “I have more employees on my team” is no longer used as a why a department should solve their specific version of a problem. Instead, it can now be used as a how it can be a contributing factor to solve the common problem everyone shares. How might we use department A’s budget, Department B’s team size, and Department C’s profit drivers to combine into one certifiably badass solution? Once everyone agrees on a direction to take, document it with everyone in the room. Documentation is a small but critical step in keeping momentum going.

Make an effort to:

• Have a mindset of “Yes and”
• Constantly ask “How might we?”
• Make sure everyone gets fair say
• Refer back to the original problem

Execution

This is the easy part. Assuming you’ve kept all relevant parties roped in, producing the prototype(s) becomes a presentation of what everyone agreed to instead of a sales pitch to try and get them bought into an idea. In the rare event you get push back after doing all of the above, don’t make any changes without your cross functional team in the room. Seriously! No matter how small! Nothing damages trust more than people thinking you went behind their backs. Everyone doesn’t have to necessarily agree with or be thrilled about a change, but they do have to be informed upfront if they’ve been a part of this so far.

Cross Functional Success

Good Job! Through your 1-on-1 listening tours, you’ve established enterprise-wide trust and changed the environment’s mindset from “me vs. you” to “all ships rise with the tide.” By defining problems in cross-departmental context you’ve identified real, practical issues and found commonality in what needs to be solved. In brainstorming while leveraging diversity of thought and experience you’ve come up with the absolute best solution your organization could produce. By ditching silos for collaboration, you’ve shipped it! Now stop reading — that champagne won’t shower itself!