PDF Summary:Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, by Patrick M. Lencioni

Sometimes, workplaces can feel like political thrillers, full of feuds, infighting, and backstabbing. But in reality, divisions between employees aren’t exciting—they’re stressful, unpleasant, and bad for business. In Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars, management consultant Patrick Lencioni explores the nature of “silos”—closed-off groups of employees that compete and fight with one another.

Using a multifaceted, extensive business fable and management theory, Lencioni describes what silos are, why they form, and how you can fix them through clear planning and communication. Our guide to Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars will outline the key ideas of Lencioni’s theory and illustrate them with a streamlined example of our own. Through our commentary, we’ll provide context for the terms and problems Lencioni discusses as well as alternate perspectives on how to manage silos.

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Mixed Messages From Management

In our example, Mike’s Fitness doesn’t hold inter-departmental meetings on the employee level. Instead, departments only meet among themselves. Meanwhile, different department heads give different instructions to the people under them—some want to focus on cutting costs and improving efficiency, while others want employees to put most of their time and effort into satisfying customer needs and requests.

These mixed messages leave employees butting heads, as different departments pursue different, mutually exclusive goals. They don’t understand the context behind these clashes because there isn’t any interdepartmental communication. This leads to siloing and all of its consequences.

(Shortform note: A lack of clarity around roles can also contribute to the mixed messages of siloing. In The Vision Driven Leader, CEO Michael Hyatt explains that the upper levels of a company should be divided between leaders and managers. Leaders create the plans and goals for the company’s future, while managers handle the day-to-day tasks required to execute the plans. But when the line between these roles becomes unclear, companies can end up with either no long-term vision at all or multiple, competing visions that contribute to siloing.)

Part 2: Fixing Silos—Create a Unified Plan

After discussing the nature of silos, Lencioni turns to how you can fix siloing. Part 2 of our guide will focus on the first step of that process: creating a single plan shared by everyone in your business. We’ll discuss why unified plans solve siloing and Lencioni’s step-by-step process for making your own.

The Importance of One Plan

As we discussed in Part 1, silos form when employees lack context around the overall goal of the business and their role in it. Lencioni explains that for many businesses, employees aren’t the only ones who lack this information—management teams often aren’t on the same page when it comes to the business’s goals, priorities, and how they intend to reach them.

By creating one plan that accounts for the entire business, you make sure your whole management team is on the same page. Having one plan also helps your employees see your business’s big-picture goal, which can motivate them to put aside their differences and collaborate. This will also stop your employees from receiving mixed messages and make interdepartmental communication easier (which we’ll discuss in Part 3).

(Shortform note: In addition to addressing silos, unified plans like those Lencioni describes can also improve efficiency by cutting down on bureaucracy. Business experts explain that when employees lack a clear idea of what they’re supposed to be doing, they tend to spend a lot more time and effort seeking approval or clarification. This adds extra steps to what could otherwise be simple tasks, and it can also become a source of frustration that contributes to employee fatigue and burnout.)

Creating Your Unified Plan

Lencioni provides an outline for a clear, unified plan designed to address siloing. His template has four sections:

1. Your company’s overall objective
2. Goals that support this objective
3. Goals related to the baseline function of the company
4. Ways you can measure progress on your goals

Section #1: Overall Objective

The first section of Lencioni’s unified plan is an overall objective: a single short-term, qualitative goal shared by everyone. This ensures everyone is on the same page and provides a baseline they can always use to help make smaller decisions. Lencioni explains that your overall objective is the most important thing your company needs to address in the present—a pressing goal that’ll motivate everyone. It should also be simple, allowing everyone to contribute regardless of their department or skills.

The overall objective should also be short-term, lasting a year at most, and usually a quarter. This makes the objective more specific and less abstract, so it’s clearer to everyone how they can pursue it. Lastly, Lencioni recommends making your overall objective qualitative as opposed to something you can measure numerically. He explains that numerical objectives often struggle to account for indirect participation—something you’ll want to encourage to make sure everyone contributes.

(Shortform note: While overall objectives are short- or medium-term goals, that doesn’t mean you should skip long-term planning. The authors of Lead From the Future contend that if you focus solely on the present, your company will stagnate. Instead of looking far ahead for new opportunities or future problems to work around, you’ll be stuck doing the same things the way you always have. They argue that every company should have an idea of where its field is heading in the next few years (or even decades) and how it can prepare for and take advantage of that future.)

For example, Michael decides to make his overall objective “Improve the customer experience through increased efficiency,” directly addressing the most pressing issue the business faces. He doesn’t create a numerical goal related to customer satisfaction, because doing so would make employees who don’t interact with customers feel like the goal didn’t apply to them. He sets a duration of three months for the goal, lining up with the quarter.

(Shortform note: Mike Michalowicz (Fix This Next) elaborates on how to prioritize your objectives. He explains that you should identify your vital need: whatever will cause the most damage to your company if you don’t do it, or what’ll help the most to get done. Michalowicz argues that you should always prioritize revenue generation and profit margins, since these are the basic elements necessary for survival. Only after you’ve made a plan for these can you consider pursuing other goals.)

Section #2: Supporting Goals

The second part of Lencioni’s plan is to create a list of supporting goals—the steps your business will take to pursue your overall objective. This helps everyone understand what pursuing your overall objective means in practice. Supporting goals are still qualitative, but they’re more specific.

For example, Michael’s supporting goals for improving the customer experience through efficiency include creating a formal system for employees to report broken machines, a discount campaign to encourage customers to exercise during off-hours to reduce crowds, and a mandate for managers to set aside specific equipment for personal training sessions. These all help ensure that when customers go to the business’s gyms, they’ll be able to use the equipment they want right away—increasing customer satisfaction through efficiency.

Lencioni notes that supporting goals will be more department-specific—you’re often listing how each department will contribute—but he suggests that every member of your leadership team should still take responsibility for every goal. This prevents siloing by providing each department with useful outsider perspectives.

(Shortform note: To help departments coordinate on supporting goals as the scope of your unified plan increases, experts recommend creating shared documents or other online platforms. These can list supporting goals, and you can give your employees access to edit them with the work they’ve done so far. Not only does this help everyone stay up-to-date on progress, it also encourages employees to share information. For example, suppose the marketing department is working on writing a blog for the company website to increase traffic. By using a shared document, the IT department can keep tabs on marketing’s progress, and they’ll know when they should have blog functionality ready for the site.)

Section #3: Baseline Goals

The third part of Lencioni’s plan is to list your business’s baseline goals—in other words, goals related to keeping your business running normally. This part of the plan isn’t time-specific. Instead, it’s a broad overview of how your business runs and how you want it to keep running. Baseline goals often include increasing revenue, reducing expenses, gaining market share, and so on. For example, one of Michael’s goals may be to get permits for a new location, since opening another gym would expand his chain’s market presence.

Lencioni notes that standard operations may overlap somewhat with your overall objective, but the two should remain separate. Core elements of running the business won’t inspire or motivate your employees to the same degree, nor will they provide a goal specific to a period of time.

(Shortform note: While Lencioni describes baseline goals as an important but secondary part of your unified plan, business leader Jay Abraham (Getting Everything Out of All You’ve Got) puts the daily function of a company front and center. Abraham argues that businesses need to constantly look for ways to improve every element of “status quo” operations—otherwise, they’ll struggle to outperform their competitors and achieve stand-out success. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have priorities or that you should try to improve everything all at once. Instead, it means you should always have an idea of how your goals will eventually improve the core elements of your company.)

Section #4: Measurements

Once you’ve established the first three sections of your plan, you can turn to how you’re going to quantitatively measure progress toward your goals with things like deadlines, quotas, or expected growth numbers. Lencioni emphasizes that this part should come last, since numbers alone won’t motivate your employees or efficiently explain what your business is trying to accomplish. You also shouldn’t feel pressured to assign numbers to every activity, since this can sometimes be arbitrary and pointless.

For example, Michael tracks customer satisfaction through online reviews and the number of complaints his gym locations receive. He also keeps track of the average time customers spend filling out gym membership forms, hoping to reduce that number through increased efficiency.

The Art of Measurement

In How to Measure Anything, management consultant Douglas W. Hubbard offers more detailed advice on how best to measure progress toward your goals. While some measurements—profit or revenue, for example—are easy to calculate, others are trickier. Hubbard explains that for more difficult measurements, your goal should be to find data that reduces uncertainty until you’re relatively confident in your conclusion.

For example, if you want to measure how a specific initiative impacts customer satisfaction, then generic customer satisfaction surveys won’t be very helpful. Tons of factors go into overall satisfaction that could have nothing to do with the initiative, creating lots of uncertainty. But if you add pointed questions about the target of your initiative or compare surveys between stores with and without the initiative implemented, you’ll start to get more specific data that can tell you how successful you’ve been.

Part 3: Fixing Silos—Communicate Your Plan

Once you’ve developed a unified plan, you need to ensure everyone understands it from the management level down. Lencioni recommends accomplishing this through regular, focused, and purposeful meetings. Regular meetings will ensure everyone stays on the same page, especially when a thematic goal ends and you need to create a new one. However, you don’t want these meetings to become bloated slogs that make everyone tunes out.

(Shortform note: While meetings can be helpful for getting your plan across, having too many causes more harm than good. Business experts explain that every meeting uses up paid time that could be spent on work. Holding too many meetings also prevents your employees from “locking in” and focusing intently on their work, a mental state that boosts productivity. To strike the right balance, try surveying your employees about your current meeting strategy and adjusting as necessary—while still making sure your meetings cover regular milestones.)

Lencioni recommends focusing your meetings around specific, ongoing issues. Instead of having everyone report extensively on what they’ve been up to, give everyone a brief moment to discuss their main priorities and challenges. Then, ask everyone present to rank how each overall objective is going—Lencioni ranks them from best to worst using green, yellow, and red. Once you have a general idea of the rankings, focus the rest of the meeting on the goals that departments are struggling with. This way, you won’t waste time covering areas that are already doing well. Finally, make sure everyone stays engaged in understanding the problems and brainstorming solutions as you discuss how to improve these problem areas.

For example, Michael’s meetings show that the new reporting system for broken machines and the off-hours discount campaign are both going well, but personal trainers still have to compete with each other for equipment. He spends most of the meeting on understanding and brainstorming solutions to this problem, asking his various department heads for ideas on how to address it.

(Shortform note: In his book Death By Meeting, Lencioni elaborates on how to run effective and engaging meetings. He compares meetings to movies—nobody likes a movie where everything is fine and nobody disagrees on anything. Conflicts and challenges are far more engaging, so you should focus your meetings around them. Start your meetings with a challenge your company is facing, and encourage your employees to speak up if they disagree with any of the proposed ideas. Not only will this keep people more engaged, but it’ll also help them bounce ideas off each other and brainstorm more effectively.)