“I’m not going to participate in this unless it benefits me, my staff, or my program.”

Hopefully this is more of an unconscious sentiment rather than a spoken statement among your employees, but it exemplifies one of the problems you encounter with siloed information. When departments don’t talk to each other, they all develop independently of each other, and when called to come together it often results in chaos. Fisman and Sullivan talk about this in terms of several failed military actions--it led to dire consequences and contributed to the deaths of enlisted persons on more than one occasion.

The consequences of lack of communication between departments most of the time leads to inefficient processes, frustration, and--surprise!--worker disengagement. Staff are run down when they have the same conversations with different departments over and over and feel like they don’t get anywhere, or develop a product or project and are met with a stone wall when they need input from another department. Many staff feel like giving up, resorting to outputting the bare minimum, because to work cross-functionally seems more trouble than it’s worth.

So what’s the solution? How do you get departments with disparate goals to cooperate with each other, when most of the time, it feels unpleasant to them?


Take the example of the community mental health center (CMHC). Therapists graduate with newly minted degrees, eager to fulfill their mission of helping others, one person at a time. They seek work in a CMHC, thankful for a set schedule, staff that will handle billing, and all the other benefits that don’t come with private practice. They see their goal as helping their caseload, and some never see past those 20-40 people. If you asked, they might be able to tell you what the mission statement of the organization is.

The therapist performs well and is promoted. Even if we’re dealing with the Peter Principle, the staff member is usually an adequate manager and now sees their mission as helping those on the caseloads of their supervisees. They can tell you the mission statement of the organization, and may be able to tell you the specific outcomes that they hope the clients in the programs they supervise achieve.

But, these are both reactive stances. They perform their work well unless there is a disruption: perhaps one that comes in the form of another department (grantwriting? development? training?) seeking to collaborate with them. Staff are most likely to consider the request to collaborate as a disruption, because they view it in the context of a distraction from their regular work. So even if the “disruption” is something that will actually benefit the manager, staff, and his or her program, they may unwittingly make collaboration difficult if they do not understand the purpose of it.

So, how do we address these systemic issues?

1. Each department should have a thorough understanding of how their work relates to the goal of the overall organization.  
If your staff is only focused on those “customers” whom they impact directly, they will not be able to adjust if their customer base changes (as it often does). They should understand that they have both internal and external customers, and that their work impacts both. Again, the therapist example:
1. I help my clients. (This is the most basic understanding of one’s mission).
2. I work in a program that helps a specific group of people.
3. My program lives in an agency that helps a community of people.
4. (...And if you want to take it further--and these are your future leaders--) My agency changes lives, impacts the community, and advocates for improved quality of life for those who need it.

This systemic thinking should be baseline. Cross-functional workgroups should be the norm, and they should include both production staff as well as support staff. That way, when an opportunity for collaboration emerges, this stance will have paved the way, instead of quashing the project before it gets off the ground.

2. Each department should understand how other departments’ work relate to the goal of the overall organization.
I’m referring to empathy here, which therapists (to continue our example) should use daily when working with their clients. They should use these skills to also understand what other aspects of the organization keep it functioning. If program staff do not understand what development staff does, they may ignore them when they come knocking. However, if Grant Reporting staff present a data collection protocol that requires the program staff to implement, staff who are organizationally focused instead of individually focused will more readily cooperate.

Balanced scorecard is an incredibly helpful resource that can help align staff goals and performance with organizational goals and performance. It’s more of a performance oriented tool, but we all know that performance expectations can also be compelling (particularly if they make sense to the worker--as balanced scorecard does, since it places the worker’s goals in line with agency goals).

If departments are encouraged to adopt a “We’re all in this together” attitude, collaboration will happen more efficiently. Understanding and empathy will go a long way toward breaking down the tiring, burnout-inducing processes that often weigh us down.