Departmental silos are the bane of every company. They create further disengagement, mistrust, and destroy collaboration, culture, revenue goals and productivity. The root cause? People are focused on what’s important to them, not others.

The Cost of Departmental Disconnection

More than 82% of companies work in silos, with each function making its own decisions on which capabilities matter most.

Departmental silos, where information is isolated within specific teams or departments, in addition to departments having conflicting priorities and goals, can have a significant financial, cultural and operational impact on organizations. Key statistics highlighting these costs include:​

• Financial Impact: Poor data quality, often stemming from data silos, costs organizations an average of $12.9 million annually. ​
• Productivity Loss: a reduction in overall work efficiency by approximately 30%. ​
• Revenue Loss: Companies can lose between 20-30% of their annual revenue due to inefficiencies, toxic environments, and no trust. ​
• Time Loss: Studies show a lack of efficient and effective cross team collaboration can cost employees an additional 20 hours a week focusing on non revenue producing tasks.
• Toxic Culture: Instead of creating a collaborative, like minded, growth culture, silos breed mistrust and disengagement, which also leads to a higher percentage of turnover.

When different departments and teams focus solely on their team-specific goals, the goals of one team often clash with the objectives of another.

This creates siloed, stressful, unproductive environments resistant to information-sharing and helping coworkers with their workload and projects, including being responsive to their requests.

Addressing these silos by promoting cross-departmental collaboration and implementing integrated data management systems can help mitigate these substantial costs.

What if you can initiate just one conversation that will begin to break down these costly company silos?

Here’s the coaching talk track to set positive intent and initiate this conversation, in a respectful and constructive manner to begin the process of creating a new relationship based on trust, authenticity, collaboration and care, not conflict and confrontation.

“What I want for you is to feel I am a resource who supports you to achieve your goals. Since we’re in different departments (roles) and are evaluated by different metrics, I know we haven’t always collaborated and worked together in a way that would help us get our jobs done more efficiently with greater results.

We have different priorities and points of view, and priorities, and I may not have always given yours the time and respect it deserves. So, I’m asking for your forgiveness. That’s why I can use your help. I’d like to hit the reset button on our relationship and redesign how we work together so we can support each other to achieve all our goals. Are you open to discussing?”

Once you have buy-in around this conversation, here are questions to facilitate an honest collaborative conversation and create positive departmental relationships.

1. I’d love to learn more about your role. Can you share more about what your role and responsibilities entail?
2. How is your performance measured? By what criteria?
3. What part of the work we collaborate on is most difficult/stressful/frustrating for you?
4. What do we need to do to work together in the most productive way?
5. If I need you, what’s your response time to avoid me putting more pressure on you?
6. How do you typically like to communicate?
7. How can I best support you in your role?
8. What can we do to maintain our positive relationship?
9. If we notice an issue or we’re reverting to toxic behavior, knowing our positive intent, can we come up with a way to communicate this without offending each other?
10. What are your expectations of me around our relationship and how I can be a resource?

Seven Trigger Phrases that Demonstrate Care and Build Trust

Truly inspirational leaders are able to demonstrate authenticity, vulnerability, and care in every conversation, simply by taking ownership of the situation, challenge, results, and relationship.

Here’s some additional language leaders use to re-initiate and reset any conversation, or relationship, and the trigger phrases that immediately breakdown barriers by demonstrating care to create the healthier outcome you both want.

To demonstrate the importance of the relationship and conversation, and the commitment to other people’s success, these phrases reinforce that you put time and attention in reviewing the conversation, rather than dismissing it. Start with:

“After thinking about and reflecting on and our last conversation/interaction,”

1. I apologize for.
2. I’m sorry.
3. I can really use your help.
4. It’s my fault we had that argument. I own that and want to make it right. Can we hit the reset button on that conversation so I can better support you?
5. I feel I’ve said a few things that weren’t fair to you and did you a disservice.
6. I said some things that…
7. I take full responsibility.

When you change the conversation, you change the outcome. The good news is, it’s all in your power.