Hierarchy and silos are your company worst obstacles for the future. There are two concepts in the current management system that need to be changed. The first one is the separation of Thinkers (managers) from Doers (employees) and the second one is the expertise base structure (departments which are silos).
You can see in almost any organization that a small group of management is deciding while ignoring (most of the time) ideas that are coming from the production floors. Ideas that could save so many companies that disappeared from our business landscape. And I’m not even talking about the bureaucracy involved with hierarchical management and how it impacts customers and business agility. Bureaucracy will affect your operation negatively. Distribution of decision making and new ideas will keep you as a growing business.
Each one of us has the privilege to experience the bitter fruits of silos. We experience it at work, and we experience it when we are interacting with other organizations providing services. In a nutshell, how happy you are when you’re asking for help and the replay is “it’s not me, it’s ‘so and so’ department”? I know the answer; I have to deal with providers 🙂
In today’s complex and unexpected business environment, every employee should be a thinker and a doer. The separation between doers and thinkers need to vanish before your company disappears from the business landscape.
Silos are maybe the worst enemy for any company to be responsive and disruptive (https://galaxiez.com/2018/10/31/disruptive-and-responsive-org/). There is no need to write a pile of words on silos. If you’ll structure your company based on the function needed to reach your business goals and you’ll create hybrid groups with all the expertise required to achieve the goal, you will kill silos. Your customers, vendors, and even stakeholders will be happy with the result!
Yes, this is probably the toughest, complex and exhausting task that you will do, but the advantages and the future potential of such a change is priceless.