Wanting More Collaboration & Employee Growth
Breaking down silos doesn’t require a massive reorganization. It can begin with small, deliberate leadership choices.
Earlier today I had a conversation with an engineering department head about their desire to better support collaboration and growth within the team. This is a big goal, but they wanted something small and immediate that the team would most likely accept.
For context, the department has multiple customers and supports multiple lines of business (LOB), and the team has become siloed. This is not a great situation, because as business ebbs and flows the engineers need to move across LOBs. Prior knowledge of those various customers and their needs facilitates the flexibility the department needs.
Step 1: Share or Rotate Early Career Engineers Across LOBs
My recommendation as a small, first step was to assign a new, early career hire to split time among LOBs. They’re already used to juggling tasks in multiple areas (college courses). This will inherently give them, individually at their level, familiarity with multiple LOBs. Over time, perhaps they could ‘specialize.’
This should spark interaction among the senior engineers they’re working with, and slowly spread LOB familiarity. It may also bring the senior engineers to a discussion with the department head wherein the broader goal of silo softening can be broached.
You could also try rotating middle-career or senior engineers across LOBs, but I’ve found this harder to implement and doesn’t really meet the goal of a small first step.
Anticipate and Manage Tension
This path could certainly create tension that the department head must look out for and address quickly. How? Explain that the broad goal is to enhance department flexibility and resilience to help ensure everyone remains engaged and employed.
At some point this broad thrust has to be brought to full light with the department, but change can start small. This is a path I followed. I made it normal for early career engineers to work in multiple LOBs.
Step 2: Implement Cross-LOB Peer Reviews
At about the same time, a complementary action that can be implemented is cross-silo peer reviews. The idea is that engineers from one silo look over the work done in another silo. There are multiple goals in doing so.
The goal of these actions that engineers most identify with is ensuring similar quality across LOBs, within the context of each LOB’s needs. They also readily understand that the young engineers can’t be getting conflicting advice from different LOBs without sound reasoning.
Long Term Benefits
These peer reviews also force engineers to understand other LOBs. They facilitate knowledge-sharing. They identify best practices that span the department. They might uncover inefficiencies, performance enhancement opportunities, and potential cost-sharing. And they absolutely prepare engineers to support other LOBs as business requirements dictate.
Individual and department-wide growth, agility, and flexibility attained! Collaboration enhanced!