The external consequences of silo thinking can be severe as well. This can lead to them feeling belittled by their colleagues or unappreciated by the organization. This creates a toxic work culture that demotivates employees.Ī fallout of a silo mentality in the workplace is that employees and departments stop trusting one another to do their jobs. Departments begin to squabble over allocating responsibilities. The lack of clarity over task distribution often leads to uncertainty and insecurity among team leads and their subordinates.
When employees don’t talk to each other, they end up doing redundant work, wasting time and lowering efficiency. This example illustrates the silo mentality meaning. Two separate departments at Sony once worked on creating the same electrical plug without either department realizing it. The impacts of a silo mentality in the workplace can be both internal and external. So what happens when there’s a silo mentality in business? Still, silo thinking is surprisingly common in organizations, big or small. This bodes ill for any organization that wants to be profitable and scalable. It impedes informed decision-making and hampers productivity, causing a ripple effect throughout the organization. In other words, silo mentality in an organization occurs when people are reluctant to share vital information, tools or processes with their coworkers from other departments.Ī silo mentality in the workplace is the biggest hindrance to collaborative growth and knowledge-sharing. Merriam-Webster defines a silo as “an isolated grouping, department, etc., that functions apart from others especially in a way seen as hindering communication and cooperation”. Let’s look at a silo mentality definition. What Is A Silo Mentality Or Silo Thinking? Put An End To A Silo Mentality In Business.Can There Be A Positive Silo Mentality Meaning?.What Is A Silo Mentality Or Silo Thinking?.In other words, Shireen and Raghav have fallen prey to a silo mentality, commonly known as silo thinking. Furthermore, neither knows much about the projects their colleagues in other departments are working on.
Shireen has often wondered how Raghav’s team functions and she’s equally in the dark. However, even after years of working in the same office, Raghav doesn’t really know what Shireen does or how her department works. They were hired by different departments but met at the induction ceremony. They are part of our vernacular architecture, and I believed the visual reference would make sense to my audience.Raghav and Shireen started working at the regional office of an IT firm around three years ago. Furthermore, Ensor’s use of the term silo “reflects his rural Illinois origins and the many grain silos he would pass on return visits as he contemplated the challenges of the modern organizations with which he worked.” Aha – here’s the source of our food storage container metaphor!īack in Terre Haute, I was on the fence, but finally decided to go with the silo image. “In understanding organizational behaviour, the term silo mentality often refers to a mindset which creates and maintains information silos within an organization.” He noted that the chain of communication in organizational structures seemed to be more top down rather than having people communicating with each other across an organization. On Wikipedia I learned that much more recently, the term functional silo syndrome was coined in 1988 by Phil Ensor, an organizational development consultant for Goodyear, located in Akron, Ohio: I’ll summarize: the Ancient Greeks have a word, “siros” this becomes “sirus” in Latin which becomes “silo” in Spanish – but not all experts agree. The long version is here in the BBC’s The Vocabularist: How did ‘silo’ get to mean something else? and in Grammarphobia‘s The silo syndrome. I kept digging, and here’s where it gets a little murky, as the word silo is a bit of an etymological mystery. So how did the term silo make the transition from Grain Street to Wall Street to Main Street? So I looked up silo, and was surprised that Google’s resulting definition did not even list it as a noun – it was a verb, and I have certainly heard it used this way as well. I mean, I guess the grain in one silo is isolated from grain in another silo? And they can sometimes stand alone out on a farmstead? But it seemed like a farfetched metaphor to me, and not one that necessarily merited a visual to accompany and reinforce it. Photo by /jessrivets of her family’s farm in Martinsville, IndianaĪs I considered drawing a grain silo - but not a missile silo, which leads me to think more of a ‘fortress under seige’ mentality - I realized it did not immediately resonate with me as being a synonym for “place of isolation”, which is the meaning I think the speaker intended.
0 kommentar(er)
