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Is it time you threw a spanner in the works? How to maximize cross-silo collaboration
The most resilient and innovative organizations work fluidly across internal boundaries, but many managers are resistant to their reports connecting with people outside their team. Answer the questions below to check whether you are enabling collaboration to flourish, and read on for tips on getting the most out of your “boundary spanners.”
Checklist
- Do our criteria for strong leadership include enabling innovation?
- Do we explicitly recognize the underlying actions that foster this?
- What do we do to make collaboration visible and valued within the organization?
- Do employees feel able to seek advice from colleagues outside their team – “informational boundary spanning” – without fear of being reproached?
- Are cross-functional efforts typically met with skepticism or resistance by managers?
Strategies to realize the potential of collaboration
At the heart of cross-silo collaboration are “boundary spanners”: employees who connect across departments, bridge expertise, and facilitate knowledge exchange – but such entrepreneurial talent often runs into trouble with their managers by working with other teams. Here’s how to make the most of their abilities.
- Clarify the role of managers
- Provide clear frameworks for when and how boundary spanning should occur and explicitly position managers as enablers, not gatekeepers. When expectations are clear, managers are less likely to interpret employee initiative as a threat.
- Increase visibility without micromanagement
- Use shared dashboards, team check-ins, or collaboration tools that keep supervisors in the loop without requiring constant oversight. When managers feel informed, they are less likely to feel excluded or blindsided.
- Redefine leadership success
- Shift the criteria for strong leadership to include enabling innovation and facilitating cross-team work. When these qualities are rewarded, you signal that power-sharing is a skill, not a weakness.
- Invest in leadership development
- Focus on relational leadership, emotional intelligence, and adaptive power sharing.
- Reward collaborative behaviors
- In performance evaluations, recognize the underlying actions that enable innovation, and not just the outcomes: boundary spanning, knowledge sharing, and mentorship.
- Reward collaborative behaviors
- Create forums for open dialogue
- Establish cross-functional communities of practice or shared digital platforms where collaboration is visible and valued.
- Foster psychological safety
- Support employees in taking interpersonal risks, including reaching across team lines, by reinforcing that initiative is valued, not penalized.
Key takeaway
Cross-silo collaboration offers clear benefits for organizations, from unlocking innovation to building adaptability, but it’s not enough just to tell teams to collaborate. You must be prepared to support it, not just in principle, but in practice.
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