This article is written by Victoria Camp at Local Partnerships.

  • The problem: The public sector is often told that silo mentality is a barrier to progress and change.
  • Why it matters: Focusing on silo mentality distracts from looking at the real barriers and devalues the specialisms within the public sector.
  • The solution: Embrace silo mentality, value the speciality of your teams and staff and look to purposefully bring teams together with an outcome that includes communication and engagement.

You really don’t need to look far to see someone telling you about the need to break down silos within the public sector. Lots of consultants have made lots of money making this recommendation, and in some cases for good reasons. Organisations have become very good at entrenching teams and not rewarding collaboration or communication across teams and departments.

Are silos really public enemy #1?

And yet I do not believe that silos are the enemy of collaboration, innovation, or progress and that in some (limited) cases they might actually help rather than hinder. I believe the organisational issues and barriers to progress are far more to do with communication and engagement and less to do with organisational structure.

Taking people from within their field of speciality and aligning them around a common purpose or goal is a wonderful thing to be able to do.

Consider the times in your working life when a project has gone well. Think about the ingredients you had to make that project work and how it came about, and I suspect you might find that the careful selection of individuals from within their silos focused on a single purpose or outcome made the project successful. In the Corporate Rebels book they share so many examples of small teams coming together to solve a problem and I support that, however I do not think that suggests we should all do this all the time.

I have been thinking about silos as colours, and colours within an organisation. The Red team might be the finance team, Blue might be compliance, Green would be communications and Yellow might be legal. As anyone with small children knows, when you mix lots of colours together without purpose and design you end up with a palette of uninviting brown that’s really no good for anything except washing down the sink.

Below are my top three reasons for embracing silo culture and leaning into communication and engagement across the silos; I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this, too.

  1. Accountability and responsibility – one of the great things about silo or structured organisations is that there is a very clear delineation between one role and another. Finance does finance, legal does legal and so on. The idea that breaking down these barriers and having everyone do a bit of everything would in my view lead to chaos and an inability to assign accountability and responsibility to certain roles. In my experience in the public sector, this is one of the great issues we face when trying to effect change; Red often talks about Blue areas, Yellow wants to talk about Green – translated, this means your Head of Procurement might want to give advice on your communications strategy, or your communications team might want to assist with designing a technical specification. Whilst this type of input can be helpful in a structured way, far too often we see colleagues chasing down ideas or thoughts or concerns which are unfounded and arise from someone who is not an expert trying to provide an opinion. Perhaps if we learnt to communicate roles and responsibilities better this might be avoided.
  2. Safety – having worked in some toxic environments, you may often find a good manager or leader who actually creates intentional silos and this is done to protect teams from the toxicity outside the silo. When organisations or departments merge, from the small grounds & highways to the huge The Bank of New York & Mellon Bank, ultimately culture will win. If that culture isn’t ideal then it might make sense to insulate yourself and your team from the worst impacts of it.
  3. Creating new colours – if a new project is required within an organisation then it is important to think about who you need to fulfil roles within that project. You might want to create a new product, or service and so taking people from within their field of speciality and aligning them around a common purpose or goal is a wonderful thing to be able to do. You can create new organisational colours and then share this learning across the silos to show what can be possible.

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