The term “Ministry Silos” is a product of organisational growth and became a by-product of Church Growth. As Churches and other Christian organisations grew, individual ministries required more volunteers and so competition between ministries increased. This led to a high degree of individual and group defensiveness and a new attitude started to emerge in which “protecting the group’s turf” became far more important than ever before. A “silo mentality” is now quite widely regarded as a “mindset” that may exist in certain teams or organisations which do not wish to share resources or information with other teams in the same organisation, and/or which would lead to an advantage for one team over the other. Unfortunately, this type of mentality often significantly reduces efficiency and effectiveness across the organisation and may even have a negative impact on overall morale of people who can start to see the culture as becoming overly “political”. In such circumstances people then withdraw, reduce overall levels of productivity or even leave the organisation.
So how do we make our organisation silo free?
According to the author Patrick Lencioni, who has written extensively about business silos (and specifically in his book: “Silos, Politics and Turf Wars”), silo-free organisations need to have a compelling context for working together in cooperative ways. He says this is created by five components. These are:
- They Create a Single or Unifying Vision for the Entire Organisation.
Lencioni suggests that silo thinking tends to prevent any kind of unified vision of the future across the organisation. This cannot be just the Senior Leader’s view of what the future looks like or even the leaders of ministries, but should be the common view of everyone in the organisation. There should therefore be a high level of “buy-in” and deep understanding of the organisation’s long-term goals, ministry objectives, and key initiatives within the leadership team prior to passing it down to teams and individuals within them. A unified leadership team will consequently encourage trust, empower people and operate in much more collaborative ways.
- They Work Together Towards the Highest Goals.
Once there is a unifying vision or set of strategic future goals for the entire organisation, all ministry objectives can be assessed for inconsistencies or conflicts which may exist (which may be creating something of a silo mentality). In practical terms, this means that all ministry leaders should explain the overall vision and turn it into team goals and objectives that are inline with achieving the overall vision. In this way, leaders and their teams have a collaborative frame of mind which seeks to solve misalignment issues and problems at the outset and not when they have created problems or led to a silo mentality.
- They Seek to Motivate Individuals to Achieve Overall Goals.
Although general motivation efforts are common across many organisations, to remain silo free, these efforts have to be more customised to meet the needs of specific teams and individuals. This is not to say that the key motivators should be necessarily different from one team to another but they should recognise that a particular team and/or individuals need different methods to motivate them to achieve the over-arching goals of the whole organisation. Each leader therefore needs to establish what the best recognition approaches should ideally be and then use the most apt motivation methods which reward collaborative, sharing and enterprise wide goal-achieving behaviour.
- They Focus on Positive Follow-through and Execution.
A vision and its sub-goals/objectives not only have to be widely and consistently communicated but consistently executed. Leaders should therefore work hard to allocate people and resources carefully and establish reasonable time frames for action in order to complete any common goals. These large-scale or enterprise-wide goals often involve complex processes which flow across ministries or teams. Apart from local team meetings, this means that regular coordinating meetings should take place cross-functionally. This allows leaders to talk about progress in a “big-picture” way as well as help each other out when there are setbacks or problems or to move resources around when there is a need to do so – all acting to counter any silo thinking.
- They Innovate and Share Knowledge Widely.
Most teams and ministries will have specialised or functional knowledge which they may want to solidify and maintain. However, this should not be at the expense of the need to achieve the wider organisational goals, which means sharing that knowledge freely. In other words, all teams should be open to sharing knowledge and experience with other teams and be open to accepting new knowledge from these other teams. This creates a climate in which knowledge innovation and sharing becomes the norm and there is then no advantage created by silo thinking – the more you share knowledge the more knowledge is shared in return – a kind of virtuous circle.
Summary
Lessening the impact of silos, where they exist, is not an easy task and may take considerable time (especially when change is happening and teams may feel defensive). However, the effort can pay huge dividends as the impact of silos can be extremely detrimental to individuals, ministries and the organisation as a whole. The steps to overcome silos may have different impacts in different environments but each one of these steps should help to break down some of the barriers and ensure that people are “rowing the organisation boat” in the same broad direction.
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