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Use Team Tactics to Overcome Silos

The questioner first wondered if “team tactics” was the best toolset for the job, or if Workshop Tactics or another tool would help. I agreed with the questioner that team tactics is really the right toolset to be for this challenge. As a fellow customer (I’ve purchased all of my Pip Decks, though I’m also an authorized affiliate), I think Team Tactics was designed to tackle entrenched conflict, in addition to helping teams face simpler challenges, like how to get started, what role each person will play and how to work efficiently together.

Use Team Tactics to Build Bridges Across Silos

There are a number of Team Tactics cards that can be helpful in organizing a transition from a culture stuck in silos to a team or cross-functional approach.

Here is an Outline of the process:

1. get the problems on the table
2. discuss conditions that reinforce old habits or that empower new habits
3. work toward consensus on how the new model should look and feel
4. figure out how people will communicate so people know if it’s working or not…

This is as far as one or two initial workshops can go.

followup work:

1. put some feedback loops in to keep people informed and to increase transparency
2. build in recognition, reinforcement, efficiency
3. shift from the team tactics deck to the Workshop Tactics deck because you are shifting from how people work together across teams to what solutions are they creating in cross-functional ways.

Here is how I would use the Team Tactics cards to create workshops to address the key points listed above….

Build commitment for team tactics with collaborative process

Before holding the offsite leadership event, I’d start with some pre-work. First, I’d confirm that the company is committed to teamwork. There’s nothing worse than an edict for HR or some consultant to, “break down the silos and make our people work together for the sake of efficiency, profit, and utter domination of the market.” There’s nothing worse than a “Succession” style, top-down culture demanding collaboration.

In addition to conceptual buy-in, the company needs to budget time for collaboration. At first, it means accepting some productivity shuffle. As Ben Mosior, co-author of Pip Decks Strategy Tactics wrote recently on LinkedIn, “A reminder: When you change the material conditions, time is required before you experience the consequences…. So, chill out. 😅☺️”

Three steps before applying Team Tactics to overcome silos

First, the company needs to commit to using team tactics to overcome silos, second, they need to budget time and ancillary costs for collaboration, and then they need to support, reinforce, and wait! No demanding results the day after the offsite. Change will occur over time. Results will roll in over time.

After gaining conceptual and resourced commitment, then structure the Team Tactics Offsite

Start with “Roles and Responsibilities”

This card is focused on inviting everyone talk about their part in the larger picture. Listeners can be encouraged to think about how each speaker’s role fits in with theirs and to look for synergies, connections, or barriers.

Your choice on which card to start with can depend on whether you want to start in the weeds (roles and responsibilities) or big picture (team charter). If participants are so focused on their jobs, roles, responsibilities and pressures, it may be very difficult for them to work on a team charter right out of the gate.

Conversely, for a team that are big picture thinkers, but really see the world in different ways, starting with the big picture can be helpful. The team can focus on creating a “big picture” map that focuses on what everyone agrees on at the center, and what’s important to each department around the outside.

Once you’ve done one, move to the other. If you start with roles and responsibilities, use that as the basis for creating a charter. If you started with the charter, use the roles and responsibilities for each person to see through the other team-member’s eyes. It can help everyone understand why priorities ended up on the team charter or the departmental priorities areas.

If people are really stuck and can’t work on creating a team charter, it can be helpful to switch to the “Team vision.” What’s the difference between a vision and a charter? Vision is based on where you’d like to be. It’s an imagined future. A charter is a set of working rules and agreements. It’s more about what you are doing, how you are doing it, and what the team commits to.

Your goal in all of this is to start working toward a picture that moves teamwork “from here to there.” Here it’s stuck and siloed. There, it might be open-ended and fluid, structured in small teams, coordinated through project management documents, or built around regular work groups. It can be helpful to look at things like how it would feel – now you feel stressed about contact with the other department. Maybe if not looking forward to talking with the other department the feeling could be one of solving, fixing, smoothing out, resolving.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is collaborative culture.

Another card, “frame the problem,” helps individuals come out of their shell to be honest about the challenges with the silos why they are there, how they behave, what has to change to move away from silos. The goal is to identify what’s not working systemically, not “who is the problem.” That’s not actually a card in the deck, and for good reason!

Another card that helps move from pointing fingers to evaluating systems is the “force field” card. It helps people evaluate what invisible features of the systems or culture make it easier or harder to solve a challenge – in this case, to cross silos.

That might be as much as a group can cover in a one-day work period built around a structured six hours. There are more cards in the deck that can be helpful for this scenario, which I’ll identify below. Some of these cards could be used in place of the ones mentioned above, or they could be used in followup workshops, depending on the current scenario for your team, so choose based on your goals as a workshop coordinator.

Setting and Measuring New Norms

The “Ritual Reset” card can help think through ingrained daily or weekly actions that need to change.

“Health Monitor” could go somewhere in here to help determine people’s comfort levels with communicating, changing, trusting etc.

The “Community of Practice” card can be a part of the transition – you’ve hashed out what hasn’t worked in terms of collaboration, and now the team starts to shape a new culture based on previous work and opportunities they identify to make changes in the present and future.

The “Communication matrix” and “Say What You Mean” cards make sense if the biggest challenge identified is how people talk, inform, message others.

Going through the full set of blue cards (titled ‘Collaborate’) will be important to determine which types of collaboration will be most beneficial among your group. These team recipes might be used within your larger workgroup, or they might be put in play with smaller workgroups that form out of the larger leadership team.

By looking through these cards you will quickly see which ones make most sense around your team’s particular work challenges. As an offsite coordinator you want to trim, trim, trim! Boil it down to the most important conversations, but also, remember that you’ve got any you first excluded or planned to do later. Sometimes individuals have just been waiting to be invited and they’ll surge ahead, allowing you to bring in ideas and topics you had planned to cover in two weeks or a month. At the same time, you want to keep it moving without overwhelming people with too many topics.

Within the team tactics deck, I’d hold off on cards like “Recognition, “Agile Coms,” “Lean Meetings,” and so forth. These are all about making teamwork fast and efficient. When you are trying to develop team tactics to overcome silos and replace them with cross-functional work, focusing on speed, efficiency and winning prizes, you’ll undermine the work of listening, understanding, communicating and coordinating which are at the heart of the change. Speed, recognition, and efficiency come AFTER the teamwork has been adopted.

Want to learn more about the Team Tactics deck? See the overview below and read our “Team Tactics Pip Deck Reviewed.”

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