Stay Out of My Sandbox!

For decades, most organizational structures have been designed to encourage specialization and subject-matter expertise. Business units and/or departments employ professionals who share particular skill sets and who are focused on achieving specific functional-area objectives. As a result, it only made sense for these teams to share common workspaces, resources and best practices in order to improve communication, enhance efficiencies, and drive individual and group results.

While successful in many respects, this approach has shown its age and limitations when applied to today's knowledge-based, time-sensitive and rapidly changing global economy. Though certainly not intentional, this mindset has created very inward-focused, isolated, segmented, inefficient and often stagnant corporate cultures. Unfortunately, it has also been branded. This so-called “silo mentality” has come to be defined as an attitude found in many organizations that occurs when several departments or groups do not actively share information or knowledge with others within the same company and have little to no understanding of what the others are doing.