SON Communication – A Process That Eliminates Silo Mentality

Date: 2 August 2016
Category: Core Management Principles
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Every month I get to travel to different parts of the world to talk about a subject I am passionate about: creating value in business.

There are only two things that matter in businesses for creating value – people and cash flow.

Everything else is secondary.

Without a shadow of doubt, the most common mistake that I see in business (that destroys value and compromises so much potential) is silo mentality. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The attitude of not sharing information and building barriers to protect your turf?

Silo mentality destroys value in your business. When your people aren’t communicating effectively, your business is failing at one of the most important drivers of value.

Managers and executives commonly create complexity in their business. It’s natural for many. Yet simplicity is what they should be striving for. I talked about that in my last post.

So how do we remove it?

After working with over 1,000 businesses across the globe, I’ve developed a practical process that can eliminate silo mentality.

It’s called SON communication.

SON communication is a process that costs you nothing, but if you do it effectively, you’re instantly going to increase value in your business.

How SON Communication Eliminates Silo Mentality

SON communication is a process to drive a monthly conversation amongst management teams to get them to raise their horizon and address each business issue in strategic first, operations second and numerical third.

It’s about having each and every member of the leadership team participating, understanding and contributing to all three “circles.”

With SON communication, it is not acceptable for anybody on the leadership teams to err in one of those three values. The CFO can’t only focus on numbers. The creative people can’t delegate the numbers conversation to the CFO. (If you don’t understand your numbers then you don’t understand your business.)

You need to be able to engender that conversation amongst the leadership team. And you need to do it in a manner that contributes to the views, in other words, you need to be able to disagree but without being disagreeable.

The most robust leadership conversations that you could have are the ones where you have a variety of opinions, because quite frankly if you want to agree, there is no point in having more than one person in the room. So I want leaders to take different views, but I want them do it in a manner that they are not going to end up punching each other.

This helps to break down the silos in your business. When everybody is trying to make themselves look intelligent, you’ve got fences and silos.

SON communication pushes the circles together.

Now, it’s important to understand you never want the circles to totally overlap. You need these experts in the leadership team to be experts in the field, that’s why they are there. But you also need them to able to talk to each other, so you need a common ground.

With that said, the most frustrating hybrid is the operations and numerical, because not only are these two different languages, but they are now competing to get the attention of the CEO from very different angles. But I never wanted a bilingual, I wanted all three. I want each and every member of the leadership team to participate, understand and contribute to strategic, operational and numerical. That’s what SON communication is.

Selecting Your SON Communication Team

If you have someone in your leadership team who is saying, “I don’t know, I don’t have a crystal ball,” or “these things changed too quickly, I can’t tell,” then that person doesn’t belong on the leadership team.

That person might be an astonishingly effective “today operator,” so let them go and manage “today.” And if that means that your leadership team shrinks to 2 or 3 people for SON communication, that’s fine! So long as these 2 to 3 people are talking to the others before they come to the table to collect information that they might find interesting about tomorrow.

So take the opportunity to go back and challenge whether your leadership team is actually a leadership team, or whether they are just “today operators.” It might influence how effectively you have these conversations in future.

Your best determinant of whether you have silo mentality in your business if is you hear, “It’s complicated, you won’t understand.”

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein:

If you can’t explain it to me simply, you don’t understand.