- In large structures, you indubitably finishes with 4 teams doing the exact same thing in parallel and ignoring each other because communication did not pass through
- Managers who tend to do that tend to concentrate all communications through them. This is disastrous for multiple reasons:
- It creates communication bottleneck through them and slow down the entire organization
- "Filtered" information tend to have reduced technical quality that lead to wrong technical decision
- Soon or later, a dubious mid manager somewhere will leverage that to make his team follow *his* agenda and not the one of the company.
- On long term, isolated teams indubitably loose touch with the current mission of the organization precisely because they can not see the big picture
Most people I have seen following this ill practice are some maniac micro-managers that finishes burn out after few years when they do not make their entire team burn out.
The initial 'problem' that silos try to solve is the fact many-many communication in large organization does not scale.
And there is absolutely no need to create 'Silos' or similar non-sense to solve that.
Creating a structure where people can peer-to-peer talk freely coupled with some more broad communication nodes (All hands, Retro, etc ...) is way more productive than any silo bullshit and way less toxic as a work environment.
Silos have very concrete negative consequences:
- In large structures, you indubitably finishes with 4 teams doing the exact same thing in parallel and ignoring each other because communication did not pass through
- Managers who tend to do that tend to concentrate all communications through them. This is disastrous for multiple reasons:
- On long term, isolated teams indubitably loose touch with the current mission of the organization precisely because they can not see the big picture Most people I have seen following this ill practice are some maniac micro-managers that finishes burn out after few years when they do not make their entire team burn out.The initial 'problem' that silos try to solve is the fact many-many communication in large organization does not scale.
And there is absolutely no need to create 'Silos' or similar non-sense to solve that.
Creating a structure where people can peer-to-peer talk freely coupled with some more broad communication nodes (All hands, Retro, etc ...) is way more productive than any silo bullshit and way less toxic as a work environment.