Breaking down silos for organizational alignment
By Jeff Herz, Greater Than One
As marketing professionals, we’re always thinking about ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing programs. And there are an almost infinite number of ways to achieve those improvements. At the marketing communications level, we could group most into 3 categories:
- Strategies and tactics
- Technology and infrastructure
- Organizational alignment and management
What typically gets the most attention are strategies & tactics, and technology & infrastructure. This is no accident: these are the areas where big dollars are at stake and the spending is visible both inside and outside the organization. For example, the marketing strategy might include multi-million dollar promotional campaign — print ads, direct marketing, display, social media, PR, Web content, etc. Technology might include a similar investment to build a marketing database, or integrated CRM capabilities — always the kind of project that gets attention inside an organization.
But what is equally important — and in fact, is INTEGRAL to making the other two work — is the third component: organizational alignment.
As a conceptual model, think of these three components as three legs of a stool. Strategies and tactics may be robust, but they need equally strong technology/infrastructure and organizational support to hold up the marketing program.
But here’s the thing — organizational alignment is hard. It does not happen by itself. Organizational alignment and coordination only happens with effort and intent. In fact, with big projects in a big organization, there may be forces working toward mis-alignment.
Case in point: many of us will recognize the “silo mentality” syndrome. This is when certain departments or groups don’t share information with other groups in the organization. This can be caused by company culture or because of other barriers in their company, i.e., because of organizational structure, teams or departments may be unwittingly working at cross-purposes, each with conflicting agendas and priorities.
Greater Than One is often primarily hired to provide technical and strategic products and services. But our ultimate goal is to empower brands — and so we understand the importance of having strength and stability in all three legs of the stool. Our agency itself takes its name from this principle. So when we sense that it is lacking, we have a process to help our clients achieve greater organizational alignment needed to achieve that marketing sweet spot.
GTO Organizational Alignment Process
(aka, “How to break down silo-mentality and create a unified project team”)
1. Understand all the relevant partners and stakeholders within the organization. This is part of the initial immersion process, but here, we work to understand what the roles and responsibilities are for each group. We map out where there are overlaps, gaps, and where there are opportunities for synergy. And its here that we work out where “silo mentality” may be lurking.
Also, in this first stage it’s really important to set the right tone with the stakeholders. At GTO, we find that projects move very smoothly when, at the very beginning teams feel included in the process, and when we steer the early conversations to shared goals and common themes.
2. Set goals and milestones. This is where disciplined project management can enable the success of the project. It’s important to quickly assign ownership for each discreet work unit, with participants from the different teams. Establishing dates for milestones holds people accountable to the rest of the team for delivery.
3. Communicate. Frequent communication from the team lead is important for obvious reasons — the group needs to be informed of the project status, deliverables, due dates, and so on — but it also sustains the pace and momentum of the project. So, communicate on a regularly scheduled basis: weekly, even daily. And be sure that the right people are in the loop (i.e. legal, product, sales, etc.)
