More companies are asking employees from different departments to collaborate on projects. But dragging people out of their silos isn’t easy.
How do you get aggressive, fast-talking salespeople to cooperate with reserved, detail-oriented engineers? Or intuitive creative types to sync with budget-minded planners?
Playing well with others is essential to advancing one’s career, but often requires new skills. Collaborators must adapt to others’ ways of working, cede the spotlight to the team rather than hogging it, and speak up when they disagree with colleagues—even when they’re afraid of angering others or looking stupid.
For companies, having employees labor in isolation can be costly. Silos have been blamed for past setbacks at Microsoft, Sony Corp. and Swiss financial giant UBS AG. Research by anthropologist Elizabeth Briody, founder of Cultural Keys, a Troy, Mich., consulting firm, has found silos can prevent companies from providing good service or making products customers say they want.
Employers in most industries are trying to foster employee collaboration across departments to help them react more rapidly to changes in their markets, says Kevin Martin, chief research officer at the Institute for Corporate Productivity, a Seattle human-capital research firm. Teaming employees with diverse backgrounds also tends to produce better ideas and decisions, he says. But a 2017 study of 1,100 employers found only about one in four uses incentives to motivate workers to collaborate well, Mr. Martin says.