3 Strategies to Strengthen Impact by Addressing Silos in Your Organization

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Most nights, I find myself reading a sweet children’s book Strictly No Elephants to my son before he goes to bed. It’s a tale of a little boy and his tiny pet elephant, and it illustrates what it means to be a friend. Toward the beginning of the book, there’s a picture of the little boy walking with an arched back lifting his tiny elephant off the sidewalk. Because, “He doesn’t like the cracks in the sidewalk much.” And then: “That’s what friends do: lift each other over the cracks.”

At any organization, you are bound to encounter cracks. Cracks are the fractures and disconnects that get in the way of achieving maximum positive impact. For example, within a multi-site organization, one team starts developing a new youth advocacy strategy, without realizing a similar strategy was recently launched and deployed elsewhere, resulting in inefficiencies and duplication. A high school lacks timely, reliable data on students from feeder middle schools, leading to delays meeting students learning needs.

In my experience, silos are a common source of cracks for even the most well-intentioned organizations. After all, the (real or perceived) independence and autonomy of operating in isolation can be appealing. You call the shots. You have (more) control. In fact, we need silos — they serve a purpose. Yet, most social change leaders know we must find ways to break down silos to the extent that get in the way of achieving our social impact goals.

So what do organizations do to create unity and alignment across various units? What are effective strategies for opening lines of communication, and sharing and learning collectively so that we can continue to improve and see better results from our efforts?

Three strategies stand out from my experience.

1. Cultivate a shared understanding of what drives impact for your organization. In large, complex organizations staff often operate with different ideas and assumptions about how to achieve impact. Domains of expertise may vary from team to team — one group focuses on health, another environment, another gender rights. One program team deals in direct services and another policy advocacy. Despite having multiple theories of change at play, best in class organizations develop and institutionalize through strategies and action a common thread that links seemingly independent efforts together. One organization I worked with called its unifying elements its 4 pillars, while another used its 3 outcome-oriented campaigns as its mechanism for alignment. At the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula it’s currently our Impact Strategy, which creates a unified vision for our work, while continuing to give programs flexibility in how they approach helping more youth succeed in school.
2. Bring people together consistently across typical silos to discuss issues related to impact. Every organization I know has an “all staff” meeting. Think about your staff meetings. How often are issues of impact discussed? Aligning efforts requires regular (at least quarterly) opportunities to reflect, question, discuss, and share strategies and data on impact in groups that are not your same role or functional unit. Ideally these cross-departmental meetings happen in person, especially if cracks are wide and the negative effects of poor alignment are large. Most often, the groups that emerge are structured around the organizations’ common thread — whether pillars, strategies, or outcomes — since these are naturally cross-cutting. The most effective groups have: a) a committed set of group members, b) a clear purpose tied to a strategic priority of the organization, c) a clear leadership structure in place, often using co-leaders to further reinforce the value of cross-department alignment, d) buy-in and active engagement from executive leaders, to ensure strategic issues and concerns are heard and addressed. At the Boys & Girls Clubs we created an Impact Strategy Taskforce that brings together a cohort of staff and leaders from across our organization — nearly every department and major programmatic unit is represented on the Taskforce. We meet monthly, exchanging ideas and perspectives from across our organization to support the implementation of our Impact Strategy.
3. Invest early in relationships and trust building. Silos exist for a reason — some productive and others not. Investing early in relationships and trust building leads to more productive collaboration and learning that results in action, faster. When I led our first Impact Strategy Taskforce meeting, we spent the first 45 minutes of the meeting conducting appreciative interviews of one another, reflecting on a moment of pride about when we saw, knew, or heard that our work was having a positive impact on the youth and families we serve. The next meeting opened with a Head, Heart, Hands activity, which was designed to get us to open up and share personal stories. These were a great start to building trust, and we also needed to keep a pulse on individual and group dynamics. Recently, I took a page out of the collective impact playbook and used a “Right Now” survey to gather information on perceptions about the greatest opportunities for success, concerns, and where support was needed. Because of this feedback, I can tailor future meetings and individual conversations to address areas of concern and provide better support to staff navigating their new cross-functional role.

These are just some initial ideas for engaging organizations in reducing silos to increase impact. How have you helped people over the cracks in organizations?