How I took over a siloed team
In this blog, I will share my experiences and steps to take over siloed team and transform into a non-siloed team.
A siloed team is very difficult to manage. In an siloed team there will be many variation in tools, understanding, different processes. So it will be difficult to manage different variations.
A major issue with siloed team is that you can’t get team members aligned to a single objective as each of them will have different problems and concerns due to variations in their work.
In one of my company, I was asked to take over a deployment team. The main goal that was provided to me is to improve efficiency of the team.
As I started talking to each member in the team, I quickly realised this is a siloed team and there is huge task in front of me to make this team a non-siloed team, so that there will be improvement in efficiency.
In this blog, I will share what steps I took to break the silo culture.
Background
I was taking over a deployment team which was catering to 4 products. Until this time, the whole team was sub divided into logical groups to cater to these 4 products.
So each of the sub groups were working in siloes and had developed their own tool sets, processes, templates and tech stack. These sub groups never shared anything between them.
Due to the above the whole team was detached and had no idea what other sub group was doing and why. There was so many mysteries between each sub group and within sub groups.
After 2weeks continuous discussion with 12 members in the team, I shared the following summary points with the higher management.
- Team is detached from the rest of the organisation vision
- Team is focused on their own work and no cross sharing happens
- Team is has developed comfort in the tools and don’t like to change
- Team feels that there is no other better options available
- Team feels that generalising or common tools approach will not work
- Team feels that there is no visibility on the future work
- Team feels that there is no opportunity of growth or up-skilling
What steps I took?
With the above 7 points, I also proposed the plan to change the situation and higher management support for few items.
Below are the steps that made this team to come out from silo mode and become a high performing team. The whole process took 6–8months.
▸ Step#1 : Making members feel they are part of the same team
The team members didn’t even knew who are their peer team members. In the past there was no weekly team meetings or any such engagement where all the members will participate and get to know each other.
So the first thing that I had to do was to get everybody in the same meeting and introduce themselves with the rest of the team. This helped to bring everyone little closer and the feel of being part of bigger team.
In my attempt to bring this team together, I requested HR team to conduct several team bonding sessions over zoom, where they got to interact with each other and do something together as a whole team.
The team bonding sessions helped to remove majority of the detachment within team members. The weekly meetings and a monthly meet up to share knowledge helped to keep up the bonding.
▸ Step#2 : Educating team members about the benefits of non-silo approach
When you have team members who are comfortable working in silo mode for long time, it is difficult to explain and educate them the advantages of non-silo approach.
During this face, I had lot of difficulty in explaining the advantages. Some of the senior members who were in full control of the development approach, started feeling threatened. I had to loose few senior folks while breaking the silo.
It is hard to retain members who don’t want to align. This was one of the help I had requested from management. The support of not retaining members who are not aligned and want to move out.
Without this support, I would have spent rest of the time just explaining members the advantages and it wouldn’t have gone anywhere and in-turn no improvements.
With several discussions and educating on how the things will change, what opportunities non-silo approach creates and most importantly how some of them can still be in control, slowly I could see alignment and support. Because of this the rest of the phases became easier to implement.
This was one of the tough phase to get through.
▸ Step#3 : Setting team objectives and goals
The next step, once the team sort of understood the advantages of non-siloed approach, is to set the objectives and goals for the whole team.
This is an important step for this whole process to succeed. Without common goals and objectives for the team, it is equivalent to being in silo mode of operations.
So, I made a list of several goals and objectives for the team. And requested the team to select the goals and objectives that they are comfortable. This ensured full commitment from them.
With few meetings, the whole team agreed for the following objectives.
1. Team should build smart solutions
2. Team should build knowledge base
3. Team should build strong product knowledge
And the following goals were agreed.
1. Team should make sure distributed data processing is adopted
2. Team should make sure there is strict process adherence
3. Team should perform data quality inherently for all projects
First time, I could see clarity in the whole team. The above objectives and goals was common across all projects. This removed most of the ambiguity within the team.
▸ Step#4 : Deciding the technical stack
By this time, most of the team members were aligned and most of the silo was removed. The next thing was to align the whole team to a single technical stack.
By having a common stack, cross-training the team members across projects and building redundancy becomes easy. If there are varying technical stack and approach, the knowledge will become limited within few members in the team.
The team was using many tools, and my job was to select those which are absolutely made sense.
I had requested management to help in buying tools if the need arise. The reason is, I wanted to select tools which are aligned for future purpose and are not limited only for fullfilling immediate needs.
This support from management helped me to align the team about the purpose of changing some of the tools. Few of the members did a pilot of the new tools. A demo to the rest of the team assured that the new tools will make their life simpler.
This was big breakthrough in this whole process. A careful selection of tools will definitely helps in long term gains.
▸ Step#5 : Deciding the process
This phase could become complex depending on few things. The team that I was managing was catering to 4 different products. So there was some variation between the delivery approach for each of them.
A high level process definition was defined and all the variations were handled at each project level by customising the plan and tasks at project level. This gave flexibility.
For this phase also, I had to discuss with the team members to arrive at a process that works for them and I can monitor them easily.
Adoption of project management tool like JIRA helped and could monitor the progress of all the projects easily.
▸ Step#6 : Educating peer team about changes
By this time, the team had got used to the non-siloed approach and they were stepping towards becoming high performing team.
The changes in my team had minor impact to the peer teams. So I had to educate the other teams impacted and bring them up-to-speed.
While discussing there were few feedbacks. These feedbacks were taken into consideration and adopted over a time.
Final thoughts
Once the silo was gone and the whole team were aligned to the overall objectives and goals, the team’s efficiency started improving.
This also created opportunities for the members to up-skill themselves. The motivation levels were high as there were very less confusion. And the team always had the feeling of belonging to a larger purpose.
With the objectives guiding the team members to build smart solutions and goals were guiding the team to be aware of what must be achieved as part of the roles and responsibilities, there was always consistency in how this team was operating.
The above, combined with culture of continuous improvement, the team could manage to deliver the project consistently by keeping up with the quality and on-time delivery needs.
This made the team more efficient and a high performing team.
