#02 Silos: Why do Silos exist in Large Organizations and How to Break them Down

Thoughts about Misaligned Goals and Objectives - You are in Control!

Does that sound familiar?

🙄 You are leading a team and have seen pretty slides with managers buzz words about the company goals for next year. You wonder how to break this down so it makes sense for your team.

🙄 You are a team member and have the feeling that managers cannot give clear guidance on what to focus on next year. You know the standard answer: “Just do it all.”

Unclear goals and objectives in organizations are very common. Therefore, it is a topic worth exploring. I publish a series about the reasons and the cure.

Different Goals and Objectives

You know what the problem is: When goals and objectives within a company are not aligned, it can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and decreased overall performance.

What do Do about it

It is all about effective and efficient communication. Unfortunatelly. 🙂

1 Ensure everybody Understands

… the companies mission, vision and values. You need to communicate them regularily to employees and show the connection to their daily work life. If you don´t like the words mission & vision, find other ones that provide direction on the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ for business success.

2 Review Goals and Objectives

… with your entire leadership team, not just part of it. Keep it short, well structured, engaging (!) and relevant so that people don´t open their laptop to use the meeting time otherwise. Purpose of the session is to develop a common language of the goals and identify any misalignment or discrepancies in priorities.

3 Foster Cross-functional Communication

If you don´t achieve this in your leadership meeting it will most likely also not happen on working level. When staff from different departments talk to each other, they should have the same language for company goals and think about the company (not their department or team).

4 Give clear Guidance

… how the leadership team shall communicate goals and objectives to their teams. They create their own version if you don´t.

5 Ask for Feedback

… in follow-up leadership meetings how the teams perceived the communication about goal and objectives:

1. What questions were asked?

2. What kind of frustration exists?

6 Talk to Staff Directly

… to feel the pulse about goals and objectives.

1. What are the concerns?

2. What works well?

3. What suggestions do they have?

How to achieve all this?

Level up your facilitation skills. They will serve you well in any job you will ever have.

Hire someone like me to teach you how to do all this (better). It is no rocket science but you can probably still improve much more than you think:

Make your meetings:

• more engaging

• more human

• more efficient

• more effective

• more inclusive

• better documented without more effort on your side.

Personal Note

I skipped the newsletter last week. Somehow the flow of thought wouldn´t start. Today it did and I finally saw the structure it needed. Thanks for waiting. 😉

I have seen and suffered from each point listed above. You can fix it!

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You can read about other reasons for the existence of silos and what to do about it in the upcoming newsletters.

It covers things that I have seen myself and heard from other corporate employees.

The topics that you have control over will (most likely) be:

🍏 Lack of Collaboration, #01 here

🍏 Different Goals and Objectives, #02 (this newsletter)

🍏 Leadership Style, #03

🍏 Company Culture, #04

The topics that require involvement from top level management:

🍏 Organizational Structure, #05

🍏 Competition for Resources, #06

Stay tuned!

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Let me know what interests you the most and I will write about how to facilitate this step.